Welcome to Paradise?

Imagine sitting on a tropical beach sipping a Mai Tai while grading papers.  This is the image that most often comes to mind when I tell people that I am an English teacher in Hawaii.  The reality is that education on the islands is riddled with contradictions to freedom and a long history of cultural genocide. Although I was aware of some of this history before deciding to move to Hawaii, it was not until I moved into a remote community that I discovered just how devastating were the effects of colonization and the subsequent imposition of Western schooling models upon the indigenous community.

I have worked on culture-based English Language Arts learning units for the past two years and this project highlights one example of using indigenous literature to explore literary elements and themes in a critical and culturally responsive way.  This project inquiry takes place in a 9th grade ELA class at Henry J. Kaiser High School on the island of O'ahu, Hawaii.  
 

Included here are two documentary videos and a presentation I created to supplement the written research found on these pages (see right). The first video is entitled Concentric: Ku Kahakalau's Pedagogy of Aloha and it describes the often overlooked history of how the Hawaiian islands were colonized and subsequently became part of the United States. The film also introduces one of the key players in culturally relevant and sustaining education, Dr. Ku Kahakalau.  The second film, Da Kine: Hawaiian Creole Language, describes how "pidgin" emerged in the islands and how language ideology reflects the issues of power in Hawaiian society and schooling. The last video is from the 2019 National Council of Teachers of English Convention where I was a panelist on the topic Indigenizing English Education.

We begin our journey to the center of the Pacific with a brief tour of the context of schooling in Hawaii and how one teacher from the mainland became interested in culture-based literacy as a vehicle of emancipatory education.