Pure Manaʻo

We are living in new realities. I am caged on a dining room table where Zoom classes and meetings take up so much of my time that I have difficulty being present, sitting down, staying focused. Still, my job is to take this new normal, create a hybrid of synchronous and asynchronous content to engage students in learning through relevant grappling, deep dive discussions and minds on - hands on practice. The article Open Pedagogy by DeRosa & Jhangiani guides me to the intentional transformation of content to distance education (our new normal). "Open Pedagogy," as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. A site of praxis! When the public schools shut down in Hawaiʻi, thus shutting out our over 100 teacher candidates out of their practicums, what we missed most was our site of praxis. Th...

Source:  Atalay, S. (2006). No sense of the struggle: Creating a context for survivance at the NMAI. The American India Quarterly, 30 (3,4), 597-618. What is Sacred: NMAI is the National Museum of the American Indian, one of our nation's free Smithsonian museums and my favorite place to grab lunch when in DC. It is a beautiful building at the end of the mall but I just flit in and out and don't read too closely. It feels like I am walking on graves sometimes. This article is a loving critique of the NMAI from an Indigenous archeologist and focuses on the gaps in the story, specifically around survivance, versus just colonization and survival. Survivance is defined by Gerald Vizenor as "more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence. . .The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates; survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry" (15). Read his stor...

Passion I have. What I need is to practice my elevator speeches, those short informative program synopses that can be done in the time it takes to ride the elevator.  Of course it will take me 4 posts. Post 1: The honua: building on solid ground The Alana culture-based education course is graphically depicted by the above logic model. The honua (green box), the earth, represents the mo'ok ūauhau, the geneology of this program that informs and guides the building of this course. Dr. Shawn Kanaʻiaupuni and her team lay the foundation for culture-based education (CBE) modeling and immersion within the course. Dr. Walter Kahumoku and Keiki Kawaiʻaeʻa, in consultation with Dr. Bernice McCarthy (4Mat) bring to the geneology the work of moenahā, a curriculum planning concept based on the way kupuna taught. Makawalu, literally eight eyes, is a concept practiced by Kaʻimipono Kaiwi and her teachers at Kamehameha Kapālama to encourage multiple perspectives in the standards-b...