What happens when Hawaiian students explore literary elements using indigenous authors?
Prior to the school being shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic, my 9th grade ELA class had begun a unit called “Ho'ike Na Ka Pu'uwai (Revelations of the Heart): Using stories and critical lenses to explore point of view, conflict, and issues of power.” I designed this unit in accordance with the objectives of critical literacy: to provide cultural and linguistic agency to adolescent learners by providing opportunities for “critical navigation of hegemonic discourses” (Morrell, 2008). By centering the indigenous lens and selecting a Hawaiian anchor text, this work aims to make progress toward empowerment in indigenous identity.
The unit began with a few short stories with which students were given guided critical questions to examine literary elements (setting, point of view, types of conflict, characterization) and issues of power. After modeling how to apply these critical inquiries to the first two short stories, students started reading the anchor text written by a Native Hawaiian author. Additional choice readings were assigned after the school was shut down and we transitioned to online learning. Given the uncertain circumstances, I decided to modify the original assessment, a reader-response essay on the novel. Instead, I set up “response journals” in which students could select which readings they wanted to respond to (in addition to the anchor text).
Students were instructed to address the unit's essential question in all of their writing: In what do stories shape our lives?
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Additional inquiry questions were assigned to guide students in their response journals. These include:
Over the course of three weeks, students met online for live discussions and group activities. In the next part of this section, we will take a look at brief descriptions of the choice readings and videos. Each of the selections featured Hawaiian authors and local content. I wanted my students to be able to demonstrate how to use critical questions in a personal way. At the same time, I wanted to strike a balance for both Native Hawaiian and local residents of Hawaii in drawing upon indigenous wisdom to explore issues of power, decolonization, and positioning. I agree with Caryn Lesuma that local novels, such as Matthew Kapio’s Written in the Sky, “challenge stereotypes about race, class, and adolescence in Hawai‘i by offering teen readers a counternarrative to American popular constructs of adolescence that is rooted in Kanaka Maoli epistemologies and ontologies” (Lesuma, 2017). This novel, along with several other local media used here are commensurate with Morrell’s argument that “we need to articulate a vision of adolescent literacies that incorporates local, indigenous, popular cultural, and new media texts” (Morrell, 2008, p. 220).
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I believe that this assignment draws upon the learners’ experience and “allows students to make connections with their literate lives outside of the classroom and the work allows them to access all of their intelligence, wit, and spirit in the process” (Morrell, 2008). Written in the Sky provides a local and contemporary urban setting of which my students are very familiar. However, these same learners also live in an environment where ancestral cultural practices have been marginalized. They are required to read with and against the word and the world. “For the indigenous child, both native and Western language structure, usage, and word choice are important, particularly when that child is accustomed to thinking, acting, and reacting with feet planted in their native as well as the modern, English-driven worlds” (Kaiwi & Kahahumoki, 2006, p.188).