Changemakers aiming to bring quality education to underserved communities must prioritize understanding how culture and education intersect. Culture shapes how learners absorb knowledge, influencing both teaching and learning.
By exploring this connection, social impact groups can identify learning gaps and design strategies tailored to a community’s unique needs. This approach also fosters trust, ensuring people feel valued and respected, even when methods differ from their usual experiences.
In an episode of the RYTHM Connect Podcast series hosted by Datin Sri Umayal Eswaran, the Chairperson of RYTHM Foundation, educationalist Dr Suria Selasih Angit explores how education can be more inclusive and culturally responsive for indigenous and marginalised students. Dr Suria is a proud member of Malaysia’s Indigenous Orang Asli Temiar community.
Bridging Culture & Education
In the podcast, Dr Suria discusses the unique challenges Orang Asli students face, highlighting the struggles of those from low-income families in areas with limited infrastructure, no internet, and few resources.
“If you don’t have enough resources to go to school or get certain help or support, then you will not be able to flourish as well as other people with certain resources,” she notes.
This raises the question of whether mainstream education should be adapted to a community’s context.
Mainstream approaches aim for standardized learning, but for many indigenous communities, they often misalign and lack cultural relevance.
Community workers must understand this cultural context to bridge the gap between culture and education and shift focus from traditional metrics to a more holistic, culturally relevant approach.
Integrating Culture in Education: Some Useful Concepts
Dr Suria notes that co-creation and capacity building are critical concepts that help integrate culture into education.
- Co-creation. She advocates for a lateral approach over traditional bottom-up or top-down models in program design, emphasizing the essence of co-creation: working together.
Co-creation involves engaging the community at every stage—from planning to execution to evaluation—making it particularly effective for shaping indigenous education while respecting traditions.
“We feel that we have the expertise and the resources, so we know better than the communities. But the communities also have their traditional resources and knowledge, so we want to capture that as well.”
- Capacity building. Dr Suria highlights capacity building as necessary for sustainability in her work with the Orang Asli.
By training communities to sustain work, the programme’s impact exceeds the facilitators’ involvement, fostering long-term change and empowering future generations to thrive independently.
Datin Sri Umayal reflects on similar efforts in RYTHM’s work with its establishment of the Bateq School for the Orang Asli Bateq community in Pahang, Malaysia: “When we went into the Bateq community, we realized we couldn’t just focus on the children alone; we had to look at the community holistically.”
When programs are designed to reflect people’s values, knowledge, and needs, they create a meaningful relationship between culture and education.
To explore their insights on how culture and education intersect, listen to the episode “Dr Suria Angit – Advancing Indigenous and Culturally Responsive Education” on Spotify, YouTube Music, and Apple Podcasts!
