KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Ka'imipono Kaiwi
Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Aloha Kakiahaka!

Mahalo to Ke Akua for this beautiful day...

Mahalo to our Kupuna who have brought us here…

Mahalo to Uncle David Sing, the founder of NHEA for his vision…We have come a long way.

Mahalo to the current, NHEA President, Aaron Mersberg, and to the planning committee for the invitation to speak.

And Mahalo to all of you, my colleagues, fellow Hawaiian educators and educators of native Hawaiians, you are ones that practice “Hawaiian education.”

I am humbled by the expertise before me. Many of you have been about the task of educating our Hawaiian children far longer than I. In comparison, I am still learning.

However, within the context of a conference celebrating Native Hawaiian education, hopefully, my words this morning will add a bit more to the knowledge that has come before and the knowledge that continues to be generated.

As I share with my graduating seniors at Kamehameha, this is a great time to be a Hawaiian educator. The concept of Hawaiian education is quite exciting, and the momentum continues to build each year. And what a great privilege it is to be an educator of our Hawaiian students.

Although exciting…as many of us know…Hawaiian education is not an easy road. We are often met with resistance from without—when we also have to meet national initiatives like No Child Left Behind, new SAT Exams, and more competitive college entrance requirements as well as standardized test—all to be accomplished with dwindling budgets…Do more with less…is the expectation and frustration…

We also experience resistance from within our own Hawaiian communities—when our parents worry that their child will be short changed or no longer competitive if we change our approach to education….and we can’t blame them when more than 40% of our Native Hawaiian community can no longer afford to live at home. A good education becomes even more valuable.

In fact, some of the most common questions we field are:

“So…what is Hawaiian education, anyway? And does that mean that Hawaiians learn differently from the rest of us?”—The most common question asked NHEA representatives by Leslie Wilcox at KHON.

 AND “Aren’t you compromising strong academic rigor when you incorporate Hawaiian culture/literature and pedagogy?”

OR “How can Hawaiian education help your students, especially when most have enough Hawaiian blood to only fit in their little toe?…Do you really want to cram their Hawaiian ethnicity down their throats?”

In the few minutes we have this morning, I would like to answer these questions the best I can. And as educators we know that we take bits and pieces from speakers to make them our own and the rest…we dismiss all together. Please feel free to do this with what I have to share.

In my opinion, Hawaiian education is a Philosophy of Education. In many ways, it is like the many philosophies that we have been taught or incorporated in one way or another within our teaching career. When I first began teaching in 1984 in Newport Beach, California, Madeline Hunter and her five step lesson plan was the philosophical craze. Today the concepts of multiple intelligences and differentiated instruction have become catch words for educators. As the English Department Head at Kamehameha, I receive fliers on a weekly basis for diverse learning seminars. Call it is the latest craze…but many of these ideas were introduced by the Hunters, Goodlads, Deweys and other educator philosophers.  Great ideas! Good philosophies! And within our classroom, we use bits and pieces…and discard the rest.

Yet, Hawaiian education differs from these others because, I believe, it is a philosophy that is rooted in a sense of indigenous being. And it is a philosophy of education that many of us know works best with our students here in Hawai’i. When we shift the focal point away from a Western centered approach, to a Hawaiian/Kanaka Maoli centered focus…our students make relevant connections to what’s being taught…especially our haumana of Hawaiian ancestry because so much of what is taught and how it is taught is rooted in our sense of Hawaiian ness. Ironically, many of the Hawaiian teaching strategies we employ in the classroom are consistent with what is considered “Best Practice.”…Yes, another philosophy of education.

So how do we describe or even explain a Hawaiian philosophy of education? Hopefully, I can answer that question by telling you a story of how I came to my own Hawaiian philosophy of teaching.

First of all, I am a California born Hawaiian—I’ll share more about my upbringing later—and I came home in 1989. I was assigned four sections of ninth grade English at Kamehameha and I began teaching my students the same way I had taught in San Diego, where I had taught the previous year. Initially, my students were very polite and very patient, but it became very clear very quickly that they didn’t have a clue about what I was saying.

Besides the fact that I was talking a hundred miles an hour—I talked as fast as I drove in Southern California. I was dangerous—and the literature that we were discussing was written by authors—mainly dead haole males—who lived between 2500-9000 miles away from Hawai’i, and the majority of the literature came from the East Coast of America or from England herself.

I was teaching the best and the brightest from the Hawaiian community, yet they did not relate to the literature, to me nor to my philosophy of teaching—which was that I…as their teacher…was the imparter of all English kine ‘ike. I had the ALL answers…because I went college…so these students bettah listen to me…because I controlled their grade…

What a naïve philosophy I had back then.

In my desire to figure out how to better connect with my students, I began to envision them as individual trees, upside down with their roots in the air, trying desperately to connect with my expectations because as good students, they did try very hard. It took me awhile, but I soon realized that I had two choices: 1) I could continue teaching as I was, dragging one hundred plus students through my curriculum, pass them on, and continue the pain and torture.

OR  2) I could change the way that I approached teaching, basically changing my philosophy. I soon realized it would take less effort for me to change than it would to continue dragging my grade conscious students through my ego-centric, Haole-centered curriculum.

This shift in philosophy was spooky. No longer could I be the imparter of all knowledge because I needed to root my students in literature that THEY could relate to before I could introduce literature that I knew best, and as a California born Hawaiian, that meant I needed to learn about my own identity as a Hawaiian as well as learn new Hawaiian literature. My students became my teachers as we worked through literature unfamiliar to me. And instead of my voice being the loudest in the classroom, my students’ voices came to the forefront as they became empowered. My perspective became just one of twenty-five.

The best part about it was that IT WORKED! When my students were able to connect with our own cultural literature, they were able to gain the necessary literary analysis skills while examining their Hawaiian mo’olelo first…then using these same skills on other, more western—canonical—literary pieces.

My new philosophy worked especially well when teaching American literature. I began each unit with relevant works from home—for example we examined the persuasive techniques found in journals and protest letters written by Walter Ritte and Walter Sawyer in Na Mana’o Aloha o Kaho’olawe as well as other pieces generated by the PKO during their efforts to stop the bombing on Kaho’olawe BEFORE we ever discussed Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson who staged a similar “David and Goliath” struggle with a super power. By placing American literature into a sharper Hawaiian-honed focus, the passion and motivation of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers’ of America, became familiar to my students because as Native Hawaiians, they held similar passionate opinions regarding the bombing of Kaho’olawe. The connections were made, the bridges were built and my students finally began to see relevance in literature generated far away from our island home.

However, as expected, my new approach to teaching English was met with the question: “Aren’t you compromising a strong academic rigor when you incorporate Hawaiian culture/literature and pedagogy?” Unfortunately, yet not surprisingly, my department head and a lot of others questioned me at that time about this new approach of mine.

Fair question…but my answer then and now is—NO! To assume that an incorporation of Hawaiian culture or a Hawaiian world view will cause the academic rigor to be “less than” assumes that our kupuna weren’t very bright and had no standards of their own…

Was it not our kupuna who told us Kulia I ka nu’u? It was our kupuna who told us, even scolded us to believe that perfection and rigor were to be celebrated. Therefore, if we expect that same rigor from our students, then their performance should be their very best…at all times. Rather high expectations, but I am certain many of you can also share stories of how it works and how our students truly rise to the challenge…

Reality is our students must function in multiple worlds—as Native Hawaiians—they are the next generation and the hope for our people, and the western society they live in includes—their economic, socio-political, cultural realities—and with our current generation, they are also must function in a third world of pop culture and technology. Navigating between multiple worlds takes talent and sometimes we need to guide them through the maze. I believed that giving my students a solid grounding in their Hawaiian ness, then transporting them to other cultures through our study of literature, were ways to help them navigate between these worlds. So, I embarked on a second mission—

It became my job to build the bridge for my colleagues to understand why rigor was not lost—I needed to make the justification, and show that the same skills could better be taught to my students when they were rooted first in a Hawaiian perspective. While I am preaching to the choir here, when I was making my philosophical justification, my department head was not buying it. It was one of my colleagues and mentors, Richard Hamasaki, who taught me that the secret to changing the status quo was to “answer questions before they were asked.”   I began including my justifications in unit plans and yearly overviews as well as project instructions. I also identifyed the required skills and assessment for the both the study of Hawaiian and American literature.

As I introduced earlier, my unit on Kaho’olawe compared the Hawaiian generated protest literature to the protest writings of the American Revolution. I required my students to analyze the SAME persuasive techniques and strategies employed in the writings of the PKO (Protect Kaho’olawe ‘Ohana) in comparison to American Revolutionary writers like Patrick Henry and his “Speech to the Virginia Convention.” And, “no shock to you” but when these were taught in this manner, my students got it!—Even thought they still thought Patrick Henry was far too long winded.

By rooting our students first in their own Hawaiian cultural perspective, we provide the lens through which they can view the rest of the world. In the disciple of English, starting first with Hawaiian literature then moving to traditional and global literature expresses a Hawaiian philosophy of education.

In order to silence the nay sayers, my goal was to overwhelm my department head with information—to answer the questions before being asked—so I showed her everything I developed, and in turn, she supported my efforts as a Hawaiian educator. It took many more years before, I began to truly “win” her over, but she allowed me the space to explore and develop new curriculum.

Even as a kumu at Kamehameha where I am privileged to teach only Hawaiian students, I have had those students in class who initially think they are getting short changed because I was not teaching them “real English”—what ever “real English” is—

In fact, on more than one occasion, a parent or one of my colleagues have asked:

“How can Hawaiian education help your students, especially when most have enough Hawaiian blood to only fit in their little toe?…And do you really want to cram their Hawaiian ethnicity down their throats?”

This, a two part question, deserves a two part answer. My first answer is one that I learned from Aunty Pua Kanahele in her article documenting the Makahiki on Kaho’olawe. She calls it “ancestral memory.” Our Hawaiian ness—per se—stay in our DNA! It doesn’t matter how much or how little Hawaiian blood our students have—it only takes one ancestor to connect them to the many who came before. And I have personally seen this played out in my own life—here is where I tell you more about being a California born Hawaiian.

I was born in raised in a small town on the Russian River in Northern California called Forestville, and for most of my childhood, we were the only Hawaiians in the pre-dominantly white town. My Hawaiian father was the baby of a family of eight who were also born and raised in California. My grandparents are from Hawai’i island—Grandpa was a Kaiwi from Kona and Grandma was a Kumalae from Hilo. Both left home at the beginning of the twentieth century, making me, their granddaughter, a second generation California born Hawaiian.

I grew up in a typical American family that denied our cultural background. Although my mother is one hundred percent Moscow Russian, early on in my childhood, she stopped practicing Russian traditions. My father was intent on capturing the American dream. He talked very little about being Hawaiian besides fighting the racism that accompanied his dark skin and a last name only identifiable was on the map of Hawai’i—a channel between O’ahu and Moloka’i—Oh! And Ka’iwi meant “the bone,” which seemed very strange to me at the time. I really didn’t have a clue.

For the most part, everyone in my small town thought that I was a rather white washed American child with a difficult last name that no one could pronounce; however, I was also very aware of the fact that I saw the world differently. I saw ho’ailona in the environment around me and connected with my surrounds in ways that my friends never understood. I remember I prayed to be like everyone else—to be “normal.” I didn’t know what normal really was, except that I knew that this brown girl wasn’t it.

In fact, the first time I began to feel “normal” was when I was came home at twenty-seven years old and I sat in Kekuhaupi’o gym on campus with 3000 other Hawaiian that looked just like me. It was then I knew I wasn’t so weird after all…but I had yet to understand what being Hawaiian meant.

My hana’i parents, Dani and Philip Hanohano were the ones who took the time to remind me about who I was as a Hawaiian and to guide me in understanding what I knew in my na’au. It was seventeen and a half years ago that I began my journey of remembering which brings me to where I am today. It took my kupuna seventy years before the first of their ‘ohana returned home, but they made certain that even though I was two generations born away from the ‘aina, I would not forget that I am Hawaiian.

So how does my story relate to the Hawaiian student in my classroom whose Hawaiian koko can fit in his/her little toe?

Simply put, it is not ONLY about him/her. It certainly was not only about me when I came home. My kupuna had a plan—and in many ways, while I came kicking and screaming—I have no doubt now that they wanted me home. So, when a Hawaiian keiki walks into my classroom, I realize that he or she does not come alone—she comes with her ‘ohana—those living and those who have passed. In fact, on the second day of my class, my students introduce themselves with their mo’oku’auhau—not necessarily for their classmates’ benefit but to remind them of who stands with them and to help me to understand who has been entrusted to my care.

My hana’i dad always says that as Kumu in the classroom, I am merely the conduit, the guide, creating the environment/opportunity for the journey to begin. I may not see the fruits right away or ever, but I just need to trust that I am part of the process. My educational philosophy dictates that I teach to the whole student—represented by those who have come before and the adult each keiki will become.

So what about the here and now? Do I really want to cram their Hawaiian ethnicity down their throats?”  No, but I also don’t want to ignore their Hawaiian heritage. A multicultural curriculum taught in Hawai’i that is devoid of Hawaiian anything, by omission, obliteration or obstruction, marginalizes our Hawaiian culture. And because we are in our homeland this type of omission is immoral. If we don’t teach our Hawaiian students who they are as Hawaiians, we devalue them AND their kupuna. There has been enough of that for too long.

 

Most importantly, out of the chop suey mix of ethnicities that I could possibly root my students in, there is only ONE ethnicity that can truly claim Hawai’i as its ancestral homeland. We are not in the Philippines… or Portugal…or China or Japan…this is Hawai’i, and for that reason alone, I am obligated to employ a Hawaiian Philosophy of Education when teaching my students, especially those of Hawaiian ancestry.

Well, I have done my best to answer only three questions that many of us face in regards to Hawaiian education, and hopefully, somewhere in all that I have shared, you can find something that can work for you. It is truly an exciting time to be a Hawaiian educator…we are all in this together.

Mahalo nui loa for your time.

Mahalo again to Uncle David and Aaron for allowing me to share.

And Mahalo to our kupuna and Ke Akua who continue to guide us each day.

Aloha.