Back to Culture and Values

So here's this thing I've been thinking on, followed possibly by a personal update on all my activities while I've been MIA these last weeks.

Between work and thesis research, I've had an opportunity to talk to a bunch of locals (Native Hawaiian, Part Hawaiian, and other locals) about Hawaiian values. Even when not talking specifically about what the values are, I've been observing the way people talk, the way they connect or don't connect information or stories, the way that pieces of information and meaning come together to create a whole concept. I've been watching the way strangers interact when they run into each other. I've gotten to interview teachers about teaching styles and strategies-- the way they purposefully impart their knowledge to others. And I've come up with this theory, and I feel very strongly about the rightness of this theory. The problem is that every time I try to put it into words, in return I get the blank stare of 'whatthehellareyoutalkingabout?'

So I'm going to try and suss it out here, so that next time I say it aloud, I can manage to phrase it in a meaningful and comprehensible way.

Native Hawaiians and other locals tend to place a high value on connections between people. When you run into someone you haven't seen in a long time, or if you are meeting someone for the first time, you begin to talk story. You establish:

1) place. Where are you from?, or, Do you still live there? A common line of questions here regards which high school you went to. Hawaii is very place-based in that where you are from says a lot about who you are and what you do. This goes back to the Kingdom in which people typically stayed in their community of birth throughout their lifetime, goes back to the plantation days which furthered that insular idea of 'this place is ours, we belong to this place', but also has relevance in a modern society that is divided by class among other things. Mainland people tend to ignore the relevance of place, but we all know that it's different if you come from Manhattan or the Bronx.

2) family and 3) friends. Who are you related to?, or, How are your relatives? Who do you know? and How are they doing? These questions come from place, or from last name -- if you're from this place or this family, maybe you know these people. These questions go into specifics of a long line of individual family members and friends, or even vague acquaintances. Have you ever met or seen or heard of this person? I've heard newly met strangers go over twenty or thirty names looking for people they both know, and then swap stories about those people they know, even before getting into any sort of personal conversation that has to do with the two people who are talking, or sometimes if there's a purpose for the meeting, before they get to that purpose. One lady I talked to joked that "We use that long introduction to figure out if we even want to bother giving our time to talk to you."

In these ways, Hawaiians make a connection between themselves and a stranger, and that opens doors between them. I personally get left out of this, because I didn't go to any of the high schools here, because I know very few people here. So I talk story about growing up in Memphis, about working in Chicago, or even about my ideas behind my thesis research with the Superferry-- a lot of people have some very strong notions about the Superferry. But even this, a stranger coming in with no previous connection, I can establish that connection by giving of myself and my stories. This is not an entirely appropriate behavior in a lot of mainland cultures. You don't typically tell childhood stories to strangers in your first 10 minutes of conversation. But I do that here sometimes, especially outside of the 'university' and 'city' contexts. And it seems to put people at ease, because then they know who they're dealing with.

Another thing I've noticed, in terms of connection, is that when I talk to locals about anything, I usually wind up having conversations in metaphor. For example, "The Superferry is just like [insert any one of a dozen events or stories about how people have interacted in some way in the past]." Also, I've heard, "When you rub this plant it closes off, the leaves snap shut together for about five minutes before it reopens. So I tell the men that come out here that it's just like them. If they get angry, if somebody is rubbing them wrong, they should close and step away. Then after a few minutes when they feel calm, they can open back up to the world and deal with the problem." People are compared to the land, and the land to people. Hawaiians are kama`aina, people of the land. The `aina is their ancestor. The connection of people to land is ubiquitous, and often comes up in metaphor. Other metaphors-- any new information or idea or person is compared to what is already known. The connection is everything.

The next question, for me, becomes, How does this relate to education?

This is my next question because with my job we're trying to figure out the best way to infuse Native Hawaiian culture into a Western classroom setting, particularly into math and reading classes because those are the Standards by which all school kids are tested and judged. Like most minorities in this country, Native Hawaiians and Part Hawaiians are severely overrepresented in SpEd referral and school failure.

I read a great article recently that debunked the myth that poverty or FAS or whatever other social ill actually causes various minorities to be overrepresented in SpEd and school failure because a much larger percentage of them have some sort of mental or cognitive issue that hinders schooling. That's the myth. The reality is that in Special Education classes nation-wide, minorities are overrepresented in referrals that deal with judgmental diagnoses, but not for nonjudgmental diagnoses. In other words, SpEd for mental retardation? Same numbers/levels of minority and non-minority kids. SpEd for emotional, behavioral, psychological issues? That's where the overrepresentation lies. Why? Because a lot of times minority kids think, behave, value, expect, and strive for different things than their white middle class counterparts. And if a majority of teachers and counselors who are making referrals and diagnoses are white middle class, then maybe they're expecting the kids to have different ways of thinking, behaving, valuing, and different expectations and goals to strive for. So when these things don't match up, the teacher/counselor/other person in charge thinks there's something wrong with the kid OR decide that they, the teacher, are unequipped to deal with [whatever differences] within their classroom with their resources and knowledge, and so the kid gets referred out.

This is not necessarily indicative of ill intent by those in charge. I think a lot of it has to do with a misunderstanding of the way cultural norms influence EVERYTHING. Another article I recently read discussed taking some childhood developmental level tests to Mayan children. These are the conservation of mass tests and puzzles that Piaget and other developmental Psychologists have used to determine when it is that kids reach the age of reason. Not surprisingly, when you give Mayan children puzzles that are made from American items they've never seen before, they had trouble figuring out what to do even at a much older age than their American counterparts. But when you made similar tests with Mayan items (weaving looms, for example), the kids had no problem, though their American counterparts who had never seen a weaving loom had more issues figuring it out.

The kicker to me, and the point of me mentioning that story, is that the unschooled Mayan kids were still confused as to Why in the World would you sit down and figure out these puzzles for no reason? You don't just sit down and problem solve when you don't actually have a problem. American kids are used to this, because that's a big part of our education. The teacher asks us to add these numbers. The teacher asks us to answer these questions about this story. The teacher asks us to arrange these things in alphabetical order. We learn from an early age to problem solve for the sake of problem solving. The unschooled Mayan children on the other hand had only ever learned to problem solve for the sake of solving a problem that was real and present in their lives. Presenting these puzzles to assess their developmental level was... doable. They had the cognitive ability to solve the puzzles. But it was still a weird thing to ask them to do. (The Mayan children who had been schooled in the Western-style schools nearby did not experience this same confusion.)

Going back to Hawaiian children in Western public school classrooms. It occurs to me that in my own education, I spent a great deal of time learning independent, unrelated pieces of information. Even information that was related-- the math that built on last year's math, the science that required previous knowledge, the reading that got more complex as time went on -- SEEMED unrelated to me, because I wasn't blessed with the Big Picture Overview of Education and Life that the teachers all had (and probably took for granted, much like I do now that I'm a grown up).

But again, Western schooling reflects Western values. We value intelligence (and I won't discuss here, but believe me when I tell you not everyone on Earth thinks of intelligence in the same way we do), and we value knowledge for knowledge's sake. Unrelated information? No problem. We know all sorts of useless things -- "useless" because they don't actually apply to our lives in any way. But that's okay for us, and it's okay for our schooling to demand that of us. It fits into our value system and cultural norms.

I think that even the most culturally-steeped traditional Hawaiian children are perfectly capable of learning a long series of unrelated facts as they wind their way through American public school. But ask them to do this for 12 years, and then ask yourself if you're really surprised that they find this whole process to be bizarre and foreign and irrelevant to their lives. If connection is everything, then maybe one thing we ought to focus on as we try to make Western education more culturally relevant is how to connect information to other information, how to connect information to these kids.

One way is through actual projects regarding Hawaiian culture or values or practices. Another way is to introduce chants or an ohana (family) atmosphere to the classroom. But the grant I'm working on is focused on math and reading, is focused on imparting core curriculum knowledge to students. And I think the lesson here is to find a way to explicitly connect new information to past information, or new information to the kids lives, or both. The connection of information in Western schooling is oftentimes implicit, or missed entirely. I think one of the keys we'll find with my grant is to make the connections explicit, just like Hawaiians make their connections explicit. I think adding this into the *process* of imparting information will be an important infusion of culture into the Western classroom.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking on. And I don't guess I'll update on my life right here, but I'll try to do that soon. Maybe even later today. Maybe not. But I'll try to get it in this weekend, since I have four days of it this time. Peace.