Cultural uniformity for balance and better achievement
Indigenous knowledge and
cultural responsiveness to promote universality in values and a common platform
of learning.
Indigenous people are the
primitive people or natives of the land. Preserving their thoughts, values, culture
and traditions is crucial to the communities they live in. This brings in
ownership, pride and upkeep of the mana.
Culture creates uniqueness and builds the individual’s identity.
New Zealand is a multicultural
society, where all cultures are treated with respect and valued. Diversity is
appreciated and encouraged to enhance deeper understanding and build
relationships amongst students and the wider community they live in. Maori are
the indigenous people, we embrace their language, cultural values imbibe their
customs and practices like Powhiri, Haka into our regular teaching learning
contexts.
The Ministry has
identified the need to prevent the deficiencies of achievement based on
cultural identification mainly the Maori and Pacifica learners who were not performing
well in schools. Preventive measures have been developed to enable these
struggling learners to achieve and taste success. The communities are involved
in decision-making through Hui and protocols followed, which is a fantastic
tradition we can assure our learners and their cultural communities. It is
fabulous that we acknowledge all cultures within our schools and celebrate
various days/weeks. Learners represent their culture and participate in cultural
programmes, organise socials and community involved productions.
While all this celebration,
acknowledgment and participations are all great, we need to find a common
ground to unify our learners, capture their thinking, and help them broaden their
vision with common values, which are across all cultures- the human values- respect,
care, kindness, peace, loyalty, justice and honesty. Whilst it lovely to learn
few greetings, share food and sing songs, we are still viewing the surface features
of cultural integration. Some students tend to live in their own cultural
groups, which results pockets of cultural segments within the wider school. This
at times stifles up disagreements, which could get violent and physical. I as a
teacher think that we must enhance our understanding, now begin to connect,
communicate at a deeper level of human values bring all cultures to the common
core platform to feel, connect, relate, impact and change our thinking and achieve
better results for our students to feel the uniformity and rational all along
to abide by one and all.
Therefore as teachers, we
need to build in a common ground of values that are valued and acceptable by us
as human society. A uniform goal setting is crucial to help our learners see
and perceive that unity is strength, rather than be divisive about guarding their
own cultural values and live in isolation and stereotypical environments. Then learners
will see purpose, reason that is standard across all human norms, and will not
lead to drop out and finding other avenues. They would rather be serious about
their future and build in desired goals and they would reap more with everyone
being on the same understanding of human values, the need for universal
acceptance of values is crucial to sustain our learning for future. We as
teachers need to evoke this conscious effort to unify children from all cultures
on a common platform where justice and loyalty prevails and help provided not labelled.
Then we can build a sustainable future for learning for all of our learners
irrespective of their cultures.
In a classroom situation,
I believe that teachers should help collate and create common cultural values
to embed unification and build in on the strength of the diversity, a united
front of common values and needs of all cultures. This will build and develop a universal
values based army of learners who will lead the world to a better tomorrow.
Hence, it is vital for us
as teachers in the community ensure democracy prevails with respect and
adherence of universal human values across various cultures to guide and enable
our youngsters to a poised well-built world of tomorrow through trust and
strength. This is likely to be achieved by building knowledge through integration,
inclusion and assimilation cultural awareness on a universal values platform.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal
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