Teaching Hawaiian Cultural Values and Social Emotional Learning Through Children’s Books

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Strengthening HĀ (BREATH) in Hawaiian Education: From Pre Service to System Level Leadership

Abstract

Background and Purpose
This paper examines how teachers and teacher candidates identify and use books that they perceive as teaching Hawaiian values expressed in Nā Hopena A‘o (HĀ), reflecting the uniqueness of Hawai‘i and is intended to guide educational partners in developing the social emotional wellbeing of students.
Theoretical Framework
Building culturally responsive practices (Gay, 2000) requires teachers to construct a broad base of knowledge that shifts as students, contexts, and subject matters change. Teacher tensions between concrete applications of theoretical ideas about culturally responsive practices and everyday activities are commonplace. These differences between articulated and actual practices serve as struggles for teachers in the field. This research supports teacher practices that support concrete applications for culturally responsive practices.
Participants, Data Collection, and Analysis
After participating in a professional development, a group of 20 teachers and teacher candidates completed workshop handouts and an online questionnaire about books as it relates to culturally responsive teaching. Teachers were provided with books by local authors that the researchers had determined had clear connections to HĀ. Data sources consisted of online open-question questionnaire on that assessed their perceived comfort and competence with the HÅ framework, and a responses to a prompt that asked them to examine how to connect HĀ to a children’s book of their choice, and focus group interviews on the connections they made. Within and across-case qualitative analysis was conducted began with open coding, followed by a second round , where the codes were merged and categorized to develop themes.
Findings
Findings from the study were mixed. Although teachers generally conisdered HĀ as important for their students and saw the potential of matching books to teach HĀ, most of the teachers did not feel confident in their ability to implementing HĀ within their classrooms. Although they read books to their students and could see how themes in the books related to individual facets of HĀ, these connections were not consistently based on Hawaiian cultural values. Thus, they did not consistently use books to support the teaching of Hawaiian cultural values.
Conclusion/Recommendations
These findings suggest that teachers need more explicit experiences with Nā Hopena A‘o as an indigenous culturally sustaining practice to gain a greater understanding for themselves and further support the extent to which they can make these connections to the children’s books they may read in the classroom.

Author

• Michele Ebersole, University of Hawaii - Hilo