Abstract:
Regardless of the cultures that may be present in a teacher’s classroom, education policy and initiatives in New Zealand require teachers to include Māori cultural content in their teaching practice. Furthermore, current education initiatives encourage teachers to enact a culturally responsive pedagogy in order to address the educational underachievement of some Māori students. The purpose of this study was to investigate influences on non-Māori teachers’ selection of Māori cultural content in New Zealand primary schools as they deliver the curriculum. The research focused on how four non-Māori primary school teachers from Oak View School responded to the national policy requirements, as well as their own school policies and aims, to select Māori cultural content for use in their classrooms. The research findings were theorised using Bernstein’s concepts of symbolic control, fields of recontextualisation, relative autonomy, pedagogic identities, and regulative and instructional discourse, to track the transformation of the symbolic discourse of culturally responsive pedagogy from theory into practice. This research examines how processes of recontextualisation may alter the way that the symbolic discourse of culturally responsive pedagogy is represented in classrooms. This may limit the effectiveness of what culturally responsive approaches may, in reality, be able to achieve. Three key findings emerged from this study; first that teachers understood Māori cultural content to mean providing Māori cultural contexts for learning, with an emphasis on socio-cultural knowledge. Second, that teachers’ moral discourses are highly influential in the development of their instructional discourses and an imagined identity for their students. These imagined identities influenced the teachers’ selection and framing of knowledge for use in their teaching practice. And third, non-Māori teachers may not have sufficient access to Māori cultural knowledge, which may result in superficial understandings of this type of knowledge, as illustrated by the cultural content they select.
