Abstract:
Against the failure of Australian education policy to recognise student superdiversity, this paper reports on an ARC funded study that examined how schools become culturally responsive. Specifically, we explore what constitutes the culturally responsive school (CRS) in Australia and how the affective environments of schools attend to the diverse cultural, academic and emotional needs of their communities. The study draws on research across these subfields: culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP), affect studies, and critical leadership studies, and follows on from the previous ARC project ‘Towards an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy’. For this paper we read across 3 years of research that draws on action research data sets, school ethnographies and policy studies. The culturally responsive school has high intellectual challenge for staff and student learning; strongly connects with the lifeworlds of teachers; encourages teachers to share their cultural diversity as a resource for learning; promotes teachers sharing their learning with other teachers in their school and beyond using multimodal literacies; and takes up an activist orientation, hence working on how learning at school is often about producing knowledge both about classroom practice and the local community. The CRS through its leadership establishes and sustains the conducive conditions for: rethinking the curriculum, teaching and student learning, nurturing dialogic modes of teaching; and supports teachers being affectively available to their students.