Week 9

LEADERSHIP - Multicultural and International Perspectives on Education

Nationality Versus Culture

Nationality is not a very meaningful concept. Culture is much more significant. “It is remarkable how fast and how effectively you can construct a nationality with a flag, a few speeches, and a national anthem.” (Taleb, 2008). Nick Taleb, who might be described in these terms as a Lebanese American, is dismissive of nationality, he sees it as a largely meaningless way of defining someone.

Taiye talks about:

• Rituals
• Relationships
• Restrictions

School Culture

According to the Ministry of Education (2016), a school's culture consists of the customs, rituals, and stories that are evident and valued throughout the whole school. An effective school culture is one in which the customs and values foster success for all; and where clear boundaries are set, known, and agreed to by everyone. In developing a positive culture, effective principals ensure that educational practices are inclusive. They make certain that students and their families do not feel alienated either from their own culture or from the culture of the school.

Hauora - Well-being

Hauora is a Māori philosophy of health unique to New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 1999). Could Hauora be one of the key concepts on defining a positive school culture? The concept is recognised by the World Health Organisation and comprises the following types of well-being:

• Taha tinana - Physical well-being - the physical body, its growth, development, and ability to move, and ways of caring for it
• Taha hinengaro - Mental and emotional well-being - coherent thinking processes, acknowledging and expressing thoughts and feelings and responding constructively
• Taha whanau - Social well-being - family relationships, friendships, and other interpersonal relationships; feelings of belonging, compassion, and caring; and social support
• Taha wairua - Spiritual well-being - the values and beliefs that determine the way people live, the search for meaning and purpose in life, and personal identity and self-awareness (For some individuals and communities, spiritual well- being is linked to a particular religion; for others, it is not.)
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• Cultural Literacy and Awareness as 21st Century Skills
• Cultural awareness can also be considered part of the 21st century skill set. The following image from the World Economic Forum (2016) includes cultural literacy and awareness as 21st century skills.
  
  International Capabilities
  The Ministry of Education (2014) defines international capabilities as the knowledge, skills, attitudes, dispositions, and values that make up the key competencies that enable people to live, work, and learn across national and cultural boundaries. Being internationally capable includes not only the awareness of other cultures, about also the awareness of one’s own culture as particular and specific. It involves the understanding that we all experience our lives through a number of cultural and personal "lenses", and that comprehending and accepting others’ needs and behaviours rests as much on understanding ourselves as it does on understanding them.

PISA - Measuring student success around the world

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in member and non-member nations of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance in mathematics, science, and reading. 

Better policies= Better lives..

Surveys are designed to find out if what students learn at school, they are able to

• solve real-life situations and problems
• repeat like parrots what they have been taught in class
• use reading skills to make sense of information

Do one of the PISA 2015 Science or Financial Literacy tasks (You might need to zoom out in your browser - Ctrl+-) 

Science from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/ (main page)

• Bird Migration
• Running in Hot Weather
• Slope-Face Investigation
• Meteoroids and Craters
• Sustainable Fish Farming
• Wellbeing

Three indicators are chosen to make up the educational well-being dimension.

1. PISA 2006 country score for education performance, averaged across reading,mathematics and science literacy test scores.
2. inequality in achievement around these scores using the ratio of the score at the 90th percentile to the 10th percentileaveraged across the three PISA literacy measures.
3. The proportions of 15-19 year-olds not in education and not in employment or training (NEET).

the PISA assessment placed New Zealand 13th out of 30 countries in terms of educational well-being. In particular, it found high levels of bullying in New Zealand schools (OECD, 2017).

Global Competence

The assessment would include various tasks that draw on different types of knowledge and thinking processes (OECD, 2016). The final framework could include a classification of tasks according to their content area (e.g. identity and culture, environmental sustainability, etc.), context (e.g. relationships at school, etc.), and the main cognitive process required (e.g. analytical and critical reasoning).

The case studies should privilege contexts and stimulus material that are familiar to 15-year-olds, in order to facilitate students’ engagement with the task. For example, a real case study featuring a fourteen-year-old indigenous Peruvian who became a YouTube celebrity by singing famous songs in Kuetchua, an ancient dialect that has long-suffered a social stigma in Peru, could be used as a stimulus (http://renatafloresperu.com/). One open-response item would then ask the students to reflect about the teenager’s motivations to become an activist in order to preserve her native language and culture. Multiple-choice items in the unit would test whether the students understand the role of language as a verbal expression of culture and the competition between majority and minority languages.

Here is an example of some of the global competence multiple choice questions (OECD, 2016).

Tower of PISA - 2015

Where does NZ sit compared other countries? How much do leaderboard results really tell us? You can compare countries at:

www.compareyourcountry.org/pisa

The PISA discussion

Even if there are many positive affects in this sort of skills comparison it also provokes strong debate from educators the world over. When it was developed, it was created as a diagnostic tool to bring together education policymakers together to discuss and track education and education improvement. However, in recent years, it has become widely criticised as a league table that is used as a indicator of a country's education health. Sir Ken Robinson criticised PISA for “squeezing out” other more creative subjects and creating an anxiety around education that was “grotesque”. Academics from around the world expressed deep concern in the 'PISA letter' (The Guardian, 2014) about the impact of Pisa tests and call for a halt to the next round of testing.

However,  PISA tests are developed further all the time and they do assess an unprecedented range of learning outcomes and their contexts, including student performance measures, measures of social and emotional dimensions, student attitudes and motivations, equity issues, and parental support. The OECD has announced that Pearson has been chosen to develop the PISA 2018 Student Assessment 21st Century Framework (Pearson, 2014).

DIGITAL - Engagement and Agency
KahootKahoot.it
A great game to play with the children. Multichoice questions, you get to view the results and placings after each question. Results are shown in tables where you can see which answers each participant got right and wrong.

Agency can allow for freedom in learning but it could also create opportunities for children to pass the buck, become lazy.

How do you measure engagement?