Localisation, Nationalisation and Globalisation
In
today’s world, every learner plays a part, which influences in his or her role in
the local contexts, which has a ripple effect into the national and global
contexts too.
My
own practice has evolved and been through a myriad of adaptions over the years.
During the course of my twenty years of teaching, ranging from two diverse
countries, communities and cultures. All of which has significantly influenced
and opened up avenues to broaden, deepen values in my classrooms. Each school
caters to its community needs and thrives on the local resources.
At
the local level students get to learn by facing real world contextual problems
in their lives and within their communities. This knowledge of their environment,
where they can learn and feed of each other proves to be the best practice for
learning. Effective sharing of resources within the community, accessibity of best practice, experts etc and
more opportunities for integration within the local surroundings paves way for
better use of resources, understanding, knowledge, skills and inter school
competitions.
At
the national level the standards govern the curriculum. The students especially
in primary are tested and reported to parents. This may vary according to the
region, decile of the school and their respective funding. The ministry
oversees the financial support of infrastructure and resources for the schools
based on their socio-economic structure. I have found that achievement of
students varies depending on socio- economic status. The lower often include
Pasifika and Maori-which are found to have difficulties to meet national
standards. Preventive measures and interventions are in place, where more work
needs to be done for equity to prevail. There is a huge variance between the
achievement of the haves and the have-nots, which in fact is fast widening.
With the change in the policies of the governments, that affects the education
sector. Of recent funding has been changed for various programmes especially
the Special education and Gifted education. Curtailment of running programmes
and finding other avenues to cater to these students is a huge mission for the
schools.
These
have created widened gap between the high and low socio economic communities.
The number of students wanting to go to universities over the last few years
has dropped. (J Gerritsen.2016)
At the
international level according to BBC, the tests, run by the OECD are taken every three years, have become
increasingly influential on politicians who see their countries and their policies
being measured against these global school league tables where new Zealand
stands 17th in the world.
However,
we as a nation need to make changes and flexible opportunities through our
current policies and practice to be on par with other countries in the world.
We teachers have to upfront and improve our practice and upskill our practice
through regular Professional Development (PD) and implementation of best
practice. With the digital, collaborative practices, we should improve our
global citizenships, net workings, where students can interact with children of
other countries to be able to understand and learn better of their culture,
geographic locations, weather, climate etc.
In
summary, I personally think that the education portfolio should be the role of
the policy makers who can offer scope and opportunities to deliver innovative
programmes to be on par with the world at large. This will also enable us to
fulfil our responsibility as a digital global citizen. Children in the 21st
century have opportunities to go on various student exchange programmes seeking
higher education various classroom experiences. School improvement and equity
across student achievement NZ fares 17th in 2015 in the world
scenario which is a vivid indication that though we are doing well we could do
better by implementing few changes and enhancing our wealth of teacher
potential.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/295697/tertiary-institutions-face-big-enrolment-drop (Gerritsen, 2016)
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