STEM Education Transformation Through Native Hawaiian Fishing Practices

• In Event: 25.044 - Achieving the Promise for Indigenous Peoples: Research on Ways of Knowing and Doing

Abstract

Amongst Hawai’i’s Hawaiian-serving Institutions, Native Hawaiian students remain underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) compared to non-STEM fields (Kaui, 2013). While these institutions are situated in the place that is Hawai’i, the Indigenous homeland of Native Hawaiians, Indigenous place-based education and Hawaiian cultural knowledge are rarely valued or utilized in STEM courses. Rather, STEM fields are dominated by western knowledge, pedagogies, and epistemologies (Morgan, 2003) even in the culturally abundant Hawai’i. Furthermore, across the State of Hawai’i, public and private foundations (e.g. HIDOE, Kamehameha Schools, Hawaii Community Foundation, UH System), are allocating funding and resources throughout the K-20 education system to increase Native Hawaiian student interest and enrollment in STEM fields. Therefore, while there is a demand for more Native Hawaiian student presence, it is problematic that higher education STEM fields do not welcome Native Hawaiian Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies but rather continue to reproduce western forms of knowledge. However, through an Indigenous lens, Native Hawaiians have always been researchers in our communities through our cultural practices. To gain a better understanding of how STEM fields in Hawai’i’s Hawaiian-serving institutions could transform current practices to be inclusive of Native Hawaiian knowledge, I – a Native Hawaiian researcher and fisherwoman – turn to the Hawaiian cultural practice of fishing. I examine the Native Hawaiian cultural practices of fishing to (re)transform the current ways we think of the science field and the lessons we can glean from such practices. Fishing highlights the practice of observation, a practice that is often accompanied with storytelling, a strategy that focuses on the animals, plants, and weather patterns. Fishing techniques are vast and vary by the type of fish and location, a practice synonymous with hypothesizing and experimentation. Thus, this presentation will examine multiple facets of the cultural knowledge of fishing, the direct applications within science education, and the correlations with place-based scholarships as an example of transforming STEM fields to be inclusive of Native Hawaiian pedagogies, epistemologies, and ontologies.

Author

• Kapua Chandler, University of California - Los Angeles