What does the research say?

Dr Cathy Buntting discusses emerging pedagogical initiatives alongside pedagogical traditions to support teachers become more inclusive in their practices, referring to a whakataukī about birds of the forest where every bird has its own voice, highlighting the rich diversity learners bring to the classroom.

Dr Carrie Vander Zwagg expands on the use of differentiation learning in the gifted learning space and her research of differentiated learning in a bicultural context. She shares how manageable approaches to differentiation, guided by student voice and interests, can make inclusive practice more achievable for teachers.

Transcript

Dr Cathy Bunting

Ko wai au? Who am I? He uri ahau nō Pākehā, ko Tangata Tiriti te iwi, ko Kirikiriroa te kāinga ināianei, ko Cathy Bunting ahau. Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

I come from a family of scientists and educators. On the left, you can see my parents and maternal grandparents. My grandfather was a physics lecturer, my dad was a chemical engineer, my mum was a teacher, my sister is a head of science at a school in Melbourne. And having married my husband Keith, we raised three gorgeous children who are 17, 15 and 7. 

When I think about exclusive education, I think about his whakataukī: E koekoe te tūī, e ketekete te kākā, e kūkū te kererū – literally, the tūī sings, the kākā cackles and the kererū coos – but metaphorically, it’s about all contributing to the song of the forest. 

One of the things that I’ve noticed is – I’ve gone through the platform and, and read some of your comments – is the huge diversity that is represented by your interests and by your commitment to inclusive education. And so these are, these are some of the, the range of diversity that I’ve been thinking about. We’ve got ethnic and cultural and religious diversity in our schools. There’s a growing language diversity. 

I want to point out the concept of funds of knowledge on the right-hand side, because funds of knowledge is a concept that’s emerged through the research literature to recognise and showcase the enormous amount of out-of-school knowledge and expertise that children bring into our classrooms from their families, from their hobbies, from their cultures etcetera. We’ve got children with different interests, different socio-economic experiences, different prior experiences of learning and of being in the world. We’ve got the students who are gifted and talented, the students with some disability, students who are not neurodiverse, students who represent in different ways in relation to gender and sexuality.  

And all of that makes up an enormous, enormously rich mix of people. It’s paralleled by some of the words that you have contributed to our forum so far, and this is the word cloud that Andrea added into the forum earlier today. 

And so I’ve been thinking about the range of diversity which is reflected in the various, your various interests and reasons for joining this group. And I just want to pause around this particular statement. If we believe in the right to education – if we believe in the right to education, we need to believe in inclusion. But when we think about the range of diversity that is represented, it can start to feel quite overwhelming. 

So I want to quickly go through some of the different pedagogical interventions and pedagogical traditions that have been emerging to support teachers to become more inclusive in our practices. 

I’m sure that some of these will be – all of these will be familiar, but I hope that, in just unpacking some of the history and some of the, the key points, there will be something new for everyone. So emerging out of a need to, to support gifted and talented students, we had the intervention of differentiation. 

And then alongside differentiation was Universal Design for Learning, which emerged out of groups working to support students with disabilities to engage fully in education. 

Up on the right-hand side, the multiple different cultural experiences and funds of knowledge that students bring to our class are being recognised through things like culturally responsive and relational pedagogies, and those come in a name of, in a range of names now. More recently, there’s been a move to culturally sustaining pedagogies. There’s the Niho Taniwha, which was developed by Melanie Riwai-Couch, and Russell Bishop’s Teaching to the North-East. 

 If you are not familiar with some of these, there is heaps of reading that is available to you. I just want to spend a bit of time going through some of the key points, hoping that it’s useful. So differentiation – rooted in the belief that variability exists in any group of students. Now we know that that is true, that our, our students are diverse. 

 The principle of differentiation is that educators should expect student diversity and adjust their pedagogy accordingly. And the three areas that are a focus within the differentiation literature are differentiating content, so what students learn, differentiating the process, so how students learn, and differentiating in respect to the product, which is how students demonstrate what they’ve learned.  

And just like the other interventions, there is a sense of ongoing assessment, ongoing formative assessment and adapting your practice as teachers. In parallel but emerging not from gifted and talented but from the need to support students with disabilities to fully engage in education, we’ve got Universal Design for Learning, and there are a lot of parallels and overlaps. I think it’s really useful to know that UDL arose from an Act in the US – the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – and it was inspired by the architectural concept of Universal Design, which is that you design for everybody to have access rather than designing for some and then adapting afterwards. So you’re building your ramps in from the beginning, for example. Three core principles – multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation and multiple means of action and expression for sharing what students know or understand or can do.  

Some parallels there with the differentiation principles of content. The content here – multiple means of engagement, stimulating interest in fostering motivation. The differentiation literature talks about process – here we’ve got multiple means of representation – and the differentiation literature talks about product, yeah, different means of expressing learning. 

Now we come to the culturally responsive suite of pedagogical interventions. And one of the key points with these is to position cultural diversity as strength rather than deficit, high expectations of every learner and creating learning context where power is shared, where culture counts, where learning as interactive and dialogic and spirals and where participants are connected to one another through establishing a common vision of what constitutes excellence. 
 
So slightly different focus for these, but I think across each of those three pedagogical interventions, there is absolutely the sense of seeing the learner for what the learner brings to the learning. I just wanted to put up briefly – we don’t have time to go through it in detail – but there is the reference down at the bottom end, and we’ll update that when the slides get shared – but I want to pull out the ideas from Mere Berryman and Dawn Lawrence and Robbie Lamont.

In, in an article that they wrote in Set – so it’s an article for teachers – they’ve presented a table which talks about what cultural relationships look like and what they don’t look like or what effective cultural relationships look like and what they don’t look like. And I just want to draw your attention to the bits in bold, please. So in relation to the concept of whakapapa, a culturally responsive approach is working to know the student and their whānau, who they are and what their experiences are. And I, I think that that relates really well to all other dimensions of diversity. Thinking about kaupapa or shared purpose, teachers are called to ensure that what they want, what you want as teachers for your students’ schooling, is also what whānau want. And then just moving on in relation to pedagogy, using a wide range of information about what you know and are still learning about the cultural context or other wider whānau context of your students. 

Skipping down, finding ways to take advice from and learn from and with whānau and then asking students for their ideas and – should have highlighted this – but two, being prepared to act accordingly. 
 
And Carrie Vander Zwagg has done some really lovely work in this area, and so I’m excited to hand over to her now as a friend and colleague to give us a sense of what this has looked like for her. Thanks, Carrie. 

Dr Carrie Vander Zwagg

Thank you, Cathy. I always love your introductions cause they’re full of depth and meaning, but also lots of aroha and heart as we look at students. And thanks everybody for letting me share a little bit of what we’ve done in our own communities. Like you, just a regular teacher on the ground, but challenges arise. This particular research stemmed from a fact that we had six principals in the course of 18 months, and I was running the gifted programme, and we are told to differentiate.  

The gifted programme was cancelled, and teachers were told to differentiate in their classrooms. And there’s lots of good evidence for differentiation and why it’s important. But the teachers and the students were both going what does this mean? How does this work? So let’s share a little bit of what we did and then hopefully you can find things that are practical and what you’re doing well and maybe some areas that you want to actually extend in the future. 
 
So just a little bit about me. Tēnā koutou katoa, I’m first a wife and mom like Cathy. I also have three children. My youngest is 1 and my oldest is 10. So there’s some diversity in our family right now. You can probably tell by my accent that I grew up in North America, up in the land of Alaska, so I have a love for diversity. We have many, what we, you would call iwi in New Zealand, many different tribes. 

I grew up in a village where there were natives on one side and Pākehā on the other. And we were so jealous of our native mates because, if it was foggy, their airplane wouldn’t fly over, and they’d get the day off school. And so right from the start had lots of diversity in the classroom like we all do. I like doing research, but I like research that I can apply straight to my classroom. So it usually stems out of questions or problems that the kids or I or colleagues have raised. And I like research that makes our teaching easier rather than harder. Like there’s lots of awesome theory out there. But when it comes down to it, and we’re time crunched and we’ve got kids at home and kids at school, how do we make it a reality? So you can see some of the images of, yeah, the kids getting out and doing some of this inclusive learning as well as learning within our family as well. 

Like all of us, we have different motivations. And you can see in this picture it’s really the students, the teachers and the families. My own family motivates me because I want to see teachers that are including our kids and our family interests. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to do the science leadership programme some of you were talking about last week. So you can see up in the left-hand corner one of the local scientists that was willing to take me around with his expertise to all our geothermal.  

I’m not a new teacher any more, you can consider me an experienced teacher, so those students that were little ones in my classroom are now the police officers I see on the street and the university graduates, and they’re putting up pictures of their own babies and ultrasounds. Yeah, and I think there’s a legacy of former board chairmen and people who have gone and passed on. So we have new lives and old lives and how do we honour all of that and the, the input they’ve put into me and to our students. So I’m just motivated by the people who have played a part in my life and to continue to whether they’re old or young. 

Our research focus as teachers was how do we better meet the needs of the students in our classroom. My gifted kids were coming back to me saying we miss the GATE programme, can we start it up again? And the answer was no from leadership. But we didn’t think that was good enough for our science team. We couldn’t help them for all the different areas, but in our science team, we wanted to know what does differentiation look like, what are good examples and what weight? So that’s what we put in and we did it as a TeachNZ so that we were able to get a sabbatical and have some time outside of the classroom looking at this. So that was a huge bonus for having the time to actually talk and communicate with families. We chose differentiated learning partly because I was in the gifted space but also because that’s what the, the principal was telling us we needed to do and we wanted to get better at it. 
 
In our research into it, we found that, at the time, and this is pre-COVID, it was defensible differentiation. Tomlinson is a big advocate for this. When we differentiate, we need to do it in response to student readiness. And someone had posted on the chat how does this work with autism UDL versus differentiation? There’s some research I can point you to at the end and that they’re actually starting to merge together and that maybe in the future there won’t be such a different definition between the two.  

But UDL, you’d usually plan ahead of time. What would be the barriers to an autistic student doing this project? How can I break down the barriers? And differentiation tends to be more in response to after students say what they’re interested in, then they plan a unit based on their readiness, their interest, and that’s when you would incorporate what, what does this mean for an autistic student? Both of them require that you know your students well.  

We combined the literature from 2D. 
 
You thought that 2D differentiation was valid. But as Cathy talked about, we also knew that we had a bicultural setting. So in our rural community – and it was rural, mostly timber and agriculture for the income for families, it was 50% Pākehā, 50% Māori – and so, we looked at, hey, we need to have this culture – this is a time when Berryman was publishing a lot of that cultural responsivity, and also Melinda Webber had been doing some really neat stuff in the gifted area. So we said, hey, why don’t we make this 2D more 3D and actually look at what the whānau want too. It was a small community, so our numbers are not high, so it would be awesome if another one of you in a bigger school would want to replicate this and see what happens, but we went out and we surveyed the students. We also interviewed the students, did the same thing with teachers, and then we also had focus groups with the whānau. And we looked at those components of differentiation that Cathy said, like what about the content? What are we talking about? How are we producing our knowledge and sharing what we know and then how are we actually teaching it? So that content, process, product, we explored multiple aspects of that. And what we did was we had the teachers, students and whānau say this is what we value and this is what is happening and isn’t happening. This is what we don’t value and this is what’s happening and not happening. And from that, we took the ones that everybody that work across the board valued high but not happening in the classroom. And I said, hey, let’s follow up these themes and let’s see what happens. We don’t have time tonight to go into the whole research method, but you can see, throughout the whole process, the teachers, the students and the whānau were involved. The unit we decided to focus on was our body systems unit. And we made it more hands on and relevant. The kids, especially the gifted kids, were saying, oh, we know so much of this already, but we’re not asked to share what we already know. We’re sick of learning the same thing every year. So lots of looking into their readiness and then we created a unit that was more of a first aid survival unit and then they gave feedback on that unit.  

So that was done over the course of 2 years and, won’t go into all of us, the purple are the main themes that came out. But they really wanted more hands-on relevant, diverse learning experiences in the classroom. And you can see that it impacted their attitude as well as their perceived, their perceptions of what they were learning and how much they were learning. So there was still room – there’s, like always, there’s room for improvement – and but both teachers and students reported that their relationships are stronger, that whanaungatanga that Cathy was talking about, the engagement from teachers, students and parents. They said that they actually saw more of that going on. Support in some classes increased for those at the, the learning disability as well as the gifted end.  

And the kids – if you’re a science teacher – you know, they would like to do hands on all the time. So they said yes, the hands on improved and I just love these quotes because it’s real and you know what it’s like in the classroom. “I’m not as naughty because I actually know what I’m meant to be doing now”, “I get to learn new stuff that I haven’t done before”, “Finally, yay, I’m more excited. I don’t exactly no why”.  

And I love this year 10 girl who says, “Ohh we’re not just taught the same thing over and again. So we don’t know what we don’t want to learn it anymore. It just pops in our brain. She starts, teaches it for a short amount of time, and we move on to new things”. 
 
Whānau were very positive overall. They really emphasised the need for more and more communication if possible so that they could support learning that we were doing in the class outside of the classroom. And they were excited about the discussions that came home from the new unit and how their students were interested. 

Yeah, and I just think that it’s neat because they, they’re starting to see even kids that don’t normally talk about school weren’t moaning about school. So they thought that was an improvement overall. And teachers acknowledged that differentiation is hard, but because students gave clear direction of where they wanted to go, we didn’t have the whole gamut of differentiated possibilities. We just focused on a couple and that made it more doable. And they really talked about some of the strategies that they employed and why they liked it. 

And the stuff that we learned from there, there’s so much. But to make it simple for a conversation tonight, the biggest learning I had were the conversations with parents where they didn’t expect us to daily individualise because that’s sort of in the gifted realm that every kid needs their own IEP and we need to always be extending and challenging. And I love that the literature and the family said, hey, that’s impossible. But if you just know my kid and at some point to the year incorporate their interests, we’re happy with that. And there’s a lot of cultural diversity literature now saying especially kids of the dominant, dominant culture need to be able to be patient and wait and acknowledge that their strengths that might not be part of their dominant culture or part of their personality or their interests. So really having time to individualise for all throughout the year, not in a single day.  

And for me, that was a relief because I’m one of those teachers that’s up till midnight and still not happy with how it’s going. But there’s only so much time to eat and sleep, and you just have to go with what’s the best in the time you’ve got. It was really, it was validating to see that whanaungatanga was valued by all groups. Sometimes when you take a step back from our curriculum and just have time to be and to check in with students and, and, and to see where they’re at. And then that idea that community input does appear to have a positive impact. And that was across the spectrum of gender and culture and neurodiversity and gifted. All different kids from different backgrounds said hey, it’s really neat to be able to give input on what we’re doing.  

And another thing that came up is that differentiation should be planned, but it needs to be spontaneous. So some of the teachers found that they had planned so much differentiation, they didn’t want to go off their course. And we know what that’s like. And then some teachers felt like they were more spontaneous and didn’t have enough extension for the gifted kids. 
 
And this is another thing that was really cool, that time and communication are precious and can be mutually beneficial. And the parents mentioned several times we don’t know what’s going on. And teachers mentioned it’s busy, it’s hard to actually communicate with parents. But parents said, hey, if we knew more about this, we could bring in our hearts from our homekill. We could help you with the dissection, give us a heads up, even it’s just the start of the term. We really want to be there to support you. And so I think it’s just a reminder for us as we get busy, what are our priorities?  
 
Maybe making that connection with whānau and students might actually make our lives easier in the long run. 

Something we did last year, as a follow-up, I’m now at a different school and we had a – like Kids Greening Taupō here locally is awesome at doing sustainability stuff and they challenge all schools to do something linked with like Earth Day and Arbour Day. And so we put out to the teachers like, what are your passions in the area of sustainability? And so we got a whole diversity of responses from teachers. What would you like to do if you could have an afternoon with kids of all ages from year 1 up to year 13, what would you like to do? So we had teachers talk about how they wanted to do something with dance and choreography and other person wanted to do wētā hotels.  

Our DP is really big into hunting so I thought he could look at deer hunting and guns and ammunition from a pest control species. And that was like a big hit, big waiting list for that. And then we had like sustainability board games and sustainably art. Or one of my good mates is Donovan Bixley – if you know science education and picture books at all, he’s just terrific. So he came in and kind of worked with the kids on how to draw. So pulling in that expertise from teachers but also local community members. We had some of our older students in year 13 and year 7 that were into photography and trapping tell the stories of what they do and get the kids working with traps and photography.  

So pulling in the experts within our community and then giving the kids choices to see where they wanted to spend their afternoon, and the feedback was phenomenal. We also pulled the parents and got the parents to come in if they had areas of expertise that they wanted to help out. And sometimes it’s just getting parents to see that they do have the expertise.  

And I don’t have heaps of time to go into this but this is another project I was involved in that was beautiful, getting experts actually from France into classrooms here through a Massey and TLRI project. And they actually got beehives in the classroom and Avalon and Newlands down in Wellington. And then the kids, based on their interests, differentiated and did learning through music videos and books. So one school went the publishing route and actually got their books published for little kids and the other one went on music video, did amazing stuff with photography. Lots of cool links featured on RNZ. So yeah, if you’re interested in this type of stuff and if you live locally, you might be able to connect up with some of those schools. I won’t put on a video that’s trying to have me play. Lots of neat research still happening, but it is an under-researched field. So if you are into exclusive ed – and I’m sorry, inclusive not exclusive ed – and want to do some more research in this space, we need you.  

So here are some of the recent developments, some stuff happening in chemistry classrooms, but you’ll notice a lot of these are international and it’d be great to see some more New Zealand ones. 

And then these are some of the ones that I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with other people in our areas and hopefully more in this space. I just want to acknowledge that none of us do this alone, like that there is a whole support network for us to do this. And so that TeachNZ scholarship was awesome to have time out to actually talk and enjoy being in my colleagues’ classrooms.  

I want to acknowledge the vulnerability it is to work together and to show like when things don’t work in the class and when they do work well and to have honest, frank conversations about that. And the supervisors, and Cathy’s been great all the way along, the board chair and the principal that support this type of research. It was terrific. That was as part of the differentiation commands to do in our classrooms. They supported us to figure out what we wanted to do.  

I’ve got an incredible whānau and village of friends and educators internationally, and I don’t think many of us would be in education if it weren’t for family and teachers that inspired us and were inclusive for us. And I can think of so many from year 1 all the way through university and beyond that, that made sacrifices and connected in with what I wanted to do and what I was excited about and also grew me in areas where I needed to grow. 

Dr Cathy Buntting

Just wanted to say, gosh, it is amazing to be with educators who are interested in and committed to and passionate about inclusive education and science. And as Carrie said, it is not easy. We know that there is an increasing range of diversity to nurture and to educate in our classrooms, that there is insufficient support funding and that we’re in a climate of ongoing educational change. And so, in our last, last opportunity to share with you, I guess we just want to remind you to remember your why, to find your flock and to be kind to yourself as you are kind to others. Ngā mihi. 

Acknowledgements 

Dr Cathy Buntting 

Dr Carrie Vander Zwaag 

Family images courtesy of the speakers 

Bird graphics from the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ, released under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0