Teaching for Social Justice in Superdiverse Classrooms in Aotearoa New Zealand

• In Event: Barrier-Free Access in a (Super)Diverse World: Lessons for Policy and Practice From Refugee-Background Students and Teachers of Diverse Classrooms

Abstract

Objectives and theoretical framework

As classrooms in Aotearoa New Zealand become increasingly culturally diverse, teachers need to be well equipped to respond to the growing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic complexities of diversity that have profoundly changed student populations in recent years. In recent years, many authors have offered ideas toward culturally sustaining pedagogies which seek to not only affirm students from diverse cultural backgrounds, but to also to critique and transform systemic differences linked to race, class and power (Alim & Paris, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 1995). One useful theoretical framing for multicultural education describes a continuum from conservative multiculturalism (assimilationist) to liberal multiculturalism (celebrating diversity, affirming difference), and critical multiculturalism (striving for equity and social justice) (Gorski, 2009; Gorski & Dalton, 2020; Jenks, Lee, & Kanpol, 2001). This provides to useful framing for evaluating teachers’ responses but does not adequately speak to the unique context of a settler colonial nation like Aotearoa NZ, which required the addition of specific relational framings to include indigenous learners (Averill & McRae, 2019; Berryman, Lawrence, & Lamont, 2018).

Methodology and analysis

In this paper I use this typology to examine the responses of 23 teachers from four of Aotearoa NZ’s most culturally diverse schools. All schools exhibited affirming liberal multiculturalism practices which sought to celebrate diversity and difference and learn from their students to teach with greater cultural competence, and included teaching well beyond ‘food, flags and festivals’. Two of the schools with longer and deeper experience in multicultural education also demonstrated forms of critical multiculturalism, showing examples of directly teaching against racism and privilege and enriching learning through less dominant forms of knowledge. Teachers in these two schools were also working out how to enrich indigenous contexts of learning and enhance aspects of social justice by addressing aspects of stigmatism and exclusion in their communities. .

Significance
The paper concludes by discussing the effect of these transformative strategies on both the students and teachers and the extent to which they created a sense of belonging, social justice and barrier-free access for all students in these multicultural classrooms.

Author

• Bronwyn Wood, Victoria University of Wellington
  Presenting Author