Graham Nuthall Research Symposium

The evolving passage of culturally responsive pedagogies: Restlessness, resoluteness, and reason

Presenter: Professor Angus Macfarlane, University of Canterbury

Abstract:

The transcendental pathway of cultural responsiveness in education emerges out of deliberations from early thinkers’ restlessness. These early thinkers pushed back on the cultural dominance of some and championed the assertion that education should be a liberating force, and empower the oppressed as central actors in their autonomy. Later, almost like a second wave, other scholars followed with a focus on culturally relevant and culturally responsive teaching, and more recently developed a vision for culturally sustaining pedagogy, an approach that takes into account the many ways learners’ identity and culture evolve. Around the same time as this second wave, Māori and bicultural educators in Aotearoa had forsaken restlessness for resoluteness. They sought to initiate both processes and outcomes in which researchers, service users, and educational practitioners collectively engage in a negotiated process of making culture count in early childhood centres, kura, and schools. This presentation will revisit the terrain marked out by these early and recent icons, but will not dwell there. The presentation will reposition the emphasis, like Graham Nuthall did, toward reason – that is, that teachers have to transform transfers of knowledge into a real act of knowing. To do this, teachers must reason that connecting to the culture of the learners, is paramount. The thrust of the presentation will turn to the culturally-grounded research which have contributed to the creation of compelling frameworks and models that offer teachers confidence and confidence in their everyday professional practice alongside Māori learners.

About Professor Macfarlane:

Angus Hikairo Macfarlane (Ngāti Whakāue) is a Professor of Māori Research at the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch. He is also the Director of the UC Māori Research Laboratory (Te Rū Rangahau) and Co-Director of the UC Child Wellbeing Institute. His research focuses on exploring Indigenous and sociocultural imperatives that influence education and psychology, his most proximal disciplines. Avid about Indigenous advancement, he has pioneered several theoretical frameworks associated with culturally-responsive approaches for professionals working across the research communities. Professor Macfarlane’s prolific publication portfolio and exemplary teaching abilities have earned him national and international standing in his field of scholarship including the recent 2019 election to the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi.

• 2019 Graham Nuthall Lecture presentation slides (PDF, 2.8MB)
• Macfarlane and Macfarlane: Toitū te mātauranga position paper
• Gillon and Macfarlane: Speech Language and Hearing article (PDF, 713KB)

Cultivating a Growth Mindset: How ‘talk’ grows intelligence

Presenter: Professor Robyn M. Gillies, University of Queensland

Did you know “intelligence can grow”. We have traditionally thought of intelligence as a fixed body of knowledge but a number of research strands emanating from studies on Exploratory Talk (Mercer & Littleton, 2007), Accountable Talk (Resnick et al., 2010), and Philosophy for Children (Topping & Trickey, 2014) demonstrate that intelligence is more fluid than we thought – it is learnable.

Intelligence grows when students have opportunities to work in learning spaces where teachers actively teach students how to engage critically and constructively with others’ ideas, challenge perspectives, and discuss alternative propositions.

Robyn M. Gillies’s research focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of learning through social interaction. She has spent over twenty years researching how students can be encouraged to engage in class and learn. Her research spans both primary and secondary schools and has focused on inquiry learning in science and mathematics, teacher and peermediated learning, student-centred learning, including cooperative learning, and classroom discourses and processes related to learning outcomes. Her recommendations on how teachers can translate research into practice have been widely profiled in the international literature and on the website of the Smithsonian Science Education Center in Washington, DC.

• See Professor Robyn Gillies notes

Moving beyond 'covering' the curriculum: Using sTc to engage all learners in science/STEM education

Professor Alberto Rodriguez is the Mary Endres Chair in Elementary Education and Professor of Cross-Cultural Science Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Purdue University. His research focuses on how teachers can make their pedagogy and curriculum more culturally and socially relevant to all students, as well as how teachers can better integrate science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) across the curriculum.

• Professor Alberto Rodriguez's notes

The dance of agency: student engagement in assessment for learning

Bronwen Cowie is the director of the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research, University of Waikato. She has just completed the Curriculum Exploratory Studies projects which were joint WMIER/NZCER projects. She is a co-director of the Science Learning Hub, which is a MSI initiative to make New Zealand science accessible to New Zealand teachers via a multimedia web-based resource. Bronwen’s research interests are in assessment for learning, classroom interaction, student voice, the role of ICTs in teachers’ professional lives, and curriculum development and implementation.

• See Professor Bronwen Cowie's notes‌.

Literacy, place and pedagogies of possibility: Teach young people in a changing world

Barbara Comber is a research professor in the Faculty of Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She has undertaken a number of research projects concerned with literacy development, educational policy, teachers' work, socioeconomic disadvantage and culturally diverse communities. She has co-edited eight books and published numerous articles and chapters for teachers and teacher educators in critical literacy, place-based pedagogies, teacher research and social justice.

National Standards and the Damage Done

• Professor Martin Thrupp's notes

Sharpening the Focus

Professor Carr is an advisor on education to many governments and her work has been translated into Danish, Italian and Japanese. Most importantly, her research, done in collaboration with teachers, aims the lens on children's learning. She says "in this lecture I plan to weave together cross-country running, pottery and stories as I talk about sharpening our educational focus to include learners' perspectives - as Graham Nuthall has always invited us to do".

Can schools prepare you for anything?

Professor Claxton is Co-Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning, and Professor of the Learning Sciences, at the University of Winchester. He is best known for his Learning Power work, a programme that helps young people become better real-life learners. Professor Claxton has published extensively, he regularly presents internationally and has advised the Ministry of Education here in New Zealand.

• see the video lecture here

• 2010 - Professor Judith Green
  Professor Green is Professor of Education and Director of the Center of Literacy & Inquiry in Networking Communities, at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She proposed a language for, and an approach to, exploring learning in the context of teaching endorsing Rorty’s claim that you cannot say the new in the language of the old.

• 2009 - Mary Chamberlain
  As Group Manager, Curriculum Teaching and Learning-Design, for the Ministry of Education, Chamberlain has been involved in the development of new national curricula and related assessment policies at both primary and secondary levels. Chamberlain’s lecture focused on the current challenge for teachers to design learning experiences that not only engage but empower learners. Energized by the ‘new’ New Zealand Curriculum, Chamberlain acknowledges its potential to free teachers and allow them to create meaningful learning experiences that are contextual and relevant to the learner.

• 2008 - John Hattie
  Visible Teaching - Visible Learning: The Ingredients of Successful Learning in our Classrooms
  John Hattie is Professor of Education & Director of the Visible Learning Laboratory, University of Auckland. This session used the results of 800+ meta-analyses and then build arguments as to the central role of making learning visible to the teacher and the student. It related to Graham Nuthall's research about the power of the peers in the classroom and helping teachers understand the world of learning through the child's eyes.
  View a copy of John Hattie Presentation

• 2007 - Dr Adrienne Alton-Lee
  Teaching for Learning: Creating Powerful Learning Cultures
  View a copy of Dr Adrienne Dr Adrienne Alton-Lee Presentation

• 2006 - Dr Jean McPhailhadow and Substance: What can we see in the classroom as classroom researchers?
  View a copy of Dr Jean McPhail Presentation

• 2004 - Emeritus Professor Graham Nuthall
  Discovering the hidden realities of teaching and learning in the classroom
  "I would like to give a brief overview of the some of the things I have discovered about teaching and learning over nearly 45 years of research, carried out, on and off, as other duties permitted. One of the most important things about school classrooms is that they are both very familiar and at the same time very mysterious. There seems to be nothing mysterious about teaching. We can all do it, maybe not well, but we know what to do."
  View a copy of Emeritus Professor Graham Nuthall Presentation