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Hello everybody.

My name's Dr Peter Keegan.

I'm a lecturer at the University of Auckland and the Faculty of Education.

I am a member of the Maori ethnic group of New Zealand

and this session I'm talking about minority perspectives on education.

One of the interesting things about many classrooms and many schools in modern contexts

is that our classrooms have now become very diverse in terms

of the number of cultures and the number of languages that

students speak, and this has happened because of a number of reasons.

The main reason is because of migration,

in the sense that in many of our major cities,

there has been a migration of people from rural communities,

and those people are often minority or indigenous people that

have moved to the cities in order to look for work,

in order to look for educational

opportunities and sometimes just for change.

And it's likely that this increasing diversity is going to be a

feature of classrooms in the near future, and the fact that we've got changes in

our schools, changes in our classrooms, certainly

has implications for assessments, and what we'll

be doing in the rest of the session, is thinking about and talking about,

what sort of perspectives minorities might have on assessment,

and how might they be different from the majority populations.

When we think about the minorities that are now present in many of our classrooms

we are often encountered with some very, very different groups of people.

I've mentioned before that minorities might have migrated

from within a country, they may have come from somewhere outside of our country,

they may be an indigenous group or they may be

a group that comes from countries that are very much nearby.

For example, in New Zealand we now have a large,

significant population of people from our nearby Pacific countries.

Some of our migrants living in New Zealand

have been in New Zealand for many generations,

in other cases, they've only recently arrived.

In many cases, migrants to places like New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere,

have voluntarily decided to shift there.

In other cases, migrants have arrived due to having

to leave their normal country of residence.

In addition to having minority groups based on different cultures,

different languages, sometimes, different religious beliefs,

minorities may also be stigmatized in terms of individual differences based

on things like disability, sexual orientation, or other factors.

So, minorities can vary in a number of different ways.

They may speak the language of the majority of

the population - in a place like New Zealand, it's English.

Or they may speak a language or other languages other than English.

They may write those languages that they know or it may be just a spoken language.

They may belong to different religions,

despite speaking the same language and

seemingly having very similar cultural practice.

Within a particular group their might be a variety of different cultural practices.

Some of our ethnic communities also maybe multi-ethnic, maybe multi-cultural,

they may come from a place where there's a

variety of different cultures and variety of different languages spoken.

Also, ethnic groups may be distinguished

in terms of social class or social hierarchies,

and that may restrict the association of members within that group.

And it's not always often apparent to outsiders how in

fact minority groups actually constituted or how they affect a structure.

And the other thing we need to be conscious of when it comes to minority

groups is often very different perspectives of how well or to what

extent the community wishes to integrate or become a part of the majority culture.

In some cases, we may have a community,

we may have groups or even individuals that identify with the majority culture

in a very positive way, want to speak the majority language,

want to be involved in the majority culture as much as possible -

often to the detriment of their own language and their own culture.

In other cases, we have minority groups,

they want to participate in the majority culture,

they want to learn the majority language -

in a case like New Zealand, that's English -

yet, they still want to retain their own culture,

and in some cases, their own languages within the existing school system.

In other cases, we have

ethnic groups that wish to engage with the majority culture,

but wish to limit their own cultural practices

to home, and within their own community settings.

And in those cases, those particular individuals or groups

may not wish to be distinguished in our school and classroom settings.

In other circumstances, we may have minority groups,

or indigenous groups, that wish to retain their

own languages and their own cultural practices within

the mainstream or the government funded educational system.

For example, for Maori in New Zealand, it is possible

for Maori to be educated in the medium of Maori,

learn to a curriculum that is only written in the Maori language,

pretty much have Maori teachers that are

very much conversant with Maori community and practices.

And because those students are English speaking, New Zealand is an English

speaking place, there is also a time and a place for use of a language like English.

So, there's a wide variety of perspectives on how minorities

may wish to integrate into a mainstream or a majority culture.

When it comes to perspectives on assessment,

we often may encounter some different perspectives

on how minorities wish to be assessed

Do they wish to be assessed

along with majority students, considered a

majority student, no particular difference being made?

Do they wish assessment practice to acknowledge

that they come from a particular cultural group,

they may not use English as their first language?

Or a minority group may wish to have greater control

over assessment practices, right to the extent that minority

group may wish to have assessment tools

in their own language that have been developed by their own teachers,

standardised within their own students and trialed amongst

their own populations.

The development of assessment tools for a particular group assumes that

we have reasonable numbers of those minority students,

and also the expertise in order to undertake those practices.

For example, an example of one particular minority group

wishing to have greater control over assessment tools and practices is

the group of the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori community.

The majority of Maori students are in English medium classrooms,

learning in the medium of English

and that's around about 85% of Maori students.

There is, however, a small percentage of students

that are learning in the medium of Maori.

In New Zealand there is no restriction on who enters Maori medium education.

It's up to parents to choose on which form of education they enroll their students.

You don't have to be of Maori descent or belong

to the Maori ethnic group to enroll in Maori medium education.

And in all Maori medium schools and

classrooms you will find students of non-Maori descent.

But, what the New Zealand government has done

is it has sponsored

the development of assessment tools that are in the medium of Maori, that have been

developed by Maori teachers, Maori curriculum experts, trialed amongst the

Maori student population, national norms created that look at how we

can compare individual students, groups of

students compared to the national Maori norms.

And those tools are greatly used by Maori teachers.

It's important to note that these tools

aren't simply a translation of the English equivalent.

They have been developed, trialled by Maori teachers, and okayed and checked by

Maori teachers as being suitable for Maori

students learning through the medium of Maori.

There are other issues that we need to consider

when it comes to the assessment of minority students.

When we are assessing minority students in mainstream cultures, in the case

of New Zealand, those learning through the medium of English, we need to take into

account issues such as bias, fairness, and

sensitivity when it comes to minority populations.

In the case of New Zealand, we have three major minority groups.

We have the Maori community, which is around about 14% of the total population.

The Pacifica community from islands throughout the Pacific -

in particular Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Niue, the Cook Islands, Rarotonga, and

other countries. And also, we have in recent times a sizeable number of Asian students.

And one of the things the New Zealand government does provide some

assessment tools that provide norms for each of these major ethnic groups.

And also, it provides norms for those whose English isn't a first language.

For those of us that belong to a minority community,

it's worthwhile thinking about our own experiences of school system.

Were there appropriate assessment tools and

procedures provided for when we were students?

Did the assessment practices take into account the wishes of our own communities?

For those of us that are currently teaching

minority students, do we have appropriate assessment tools?

Do we have appropriate assessment procedures

that are suitable for our minority students?

And do those procedures meet the wishes of minority students?

Thank you.

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Cultural Concern: Perspectives of minorities on educational assessment

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction to Student Assessment

Meet the Instructors