Student: Tammy Ting-Beach

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Writing Assignment Used for This Interview


Throughout the course you will be collecting material and writing for a 15-page research paper that either visually or narratively maps a particular place of significance to you and that will in some way help you with the future work you envision for yourself. You will be designing a map that helps you to tell the multiple stories of this place. This means that when you design your map, you need to find ways to show these different layers of stories that are connected to particular sites on your map. You can hand draw or paint your map (murals as maps or art as maps), you can include little booklets that are numbered according to the sites you discuss, or you can try to design other innovate ways to communicate to your audience the significance of the place you are describing. You can also make a map video where you include interviews with people or oral recordings of the mo‘olelo.

For your three-page project proposal, I would like to see an initial bibliography of at least five entries and a description of how you will map your place. You can provide a mock-up of a map if possible, or a description of what you would like to do.

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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 10 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: I think just doing research and finding out about the place you grew up in and lived in will always stay with you... It's really interesting to look back at your work... so I feel like it's hard to put so much research and so much thought and energy into a paper when you have four other classes to balance, so I'd like to probably go back and do more research about the stream. Figure out what I can do to help, maybe figure out what I can do to fight the Kahuku fight. I don't remember [my other Writing Intensive courses]. I really don't... I remember everything about Candace's class, because they're so personal to me. The papers in the other Writing Intensives, you're writing just to write it... Some professors just want you to write what they want to hear. But Candace - she really is invested in what you have to say, and I think that's why the writing I've done for her class is so memorable, because I'm so personally invested in it. [It is inspiring to be a writer] when you're connected to the things you're writing about. At least for me. There's so much research that goes into writing a novel... but I just don't see it. Maybe that's just a testament to the good writing they do. I think that's why Professor Fujikane makes us write a moʻolelo and makes us write a connection part to our paper, so that our readers can better understand such a boring subject like stream preservation.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 9 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: I'll obviously be going back to Florida, but I've talked to my husband and we do really want to come back to Hawaiʻi. I, of course, grew up here. Love it here. Price, though. Weʻd eventually like to come back [to Hawaiʻi], but it's all about cost of living... How is it that my milk comes from the Big Island and doesn't travel as far, and it costs $6? Not sure.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 8 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: My goal is to teach English... I'd like to be teaching English one day. I myself had a really hard time with English when I was growing up. Thus, I don't even know how I became an English major. It's kinda hard being in the military. You don't really know what your life is going to be like in a year. So it's hard to make goals when you're [unsure where you'll be moved next]. Even though I want to be a teacher, my ultimate dream goal if I could attain anything in life would be write children's books. In high school, I wrote one about a girl who was afraid of sharks... My grandma says [sharks are] my ʻaumakua, but I am not testing that theory out. Because I had such a hard time in English, I wanna write books for children that would make learning fun... Eventually I'd like to teach, but I'd also like to write books. I'm not gonna be a scholarly writer... but maybe I can write a children's book and teach them about caring for the stream.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 7 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: Definitely one of the struggles I had in this class is I am a [U.S.] military wife. I am a military spouse, and it's sometimes hard to go on huakaʻi that are sponsored by people who are against the military because it reflects upon my husband, you know? How can I rely upon the military for support and yet be against them at the same time? Growing up in Hawaiʻi, when I had to bring my husband who is a military person home to my family I was like 'Oh my God, my parents are gonna kill me.' You know, in Hawaiʻi, you always grow up [learning] the military is bad... I learned so much about my classmates just personally because this class shares a lot of moʻolelo from where they personally come from. So when you're sharing about a place you come from you kind of get that bond with each other. You bond with someone when you're fighting against wind farms. I learned education can be fun. It was definitely fun in my last semester to have this class... Just to learn so much about a place you come from. I had British Literature. I had Shakespeare. I had 19th Century Literature that dealt with colonialism... When you read Shakespeare, it's not really personally connected to you... [A place-based class like Candace's] just bonds you closer to the place you come from, and it's so much easier to learn when you understand what's being presented in the class.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 6 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: Research is my weakest point, because who wants to sit there and read a bunch of numbers? I am not a scientific person... It doesn't interest me, but I know that in order to get your point across, you have to show that part in your writing. I'd rather just sit there and write about stories about growing up in Makiki Stream and Makiki area, and I'd rather just research moʻolelo from the olden days. I kinda just plow through [scientific research]... Google it and see where Google takes me. I think that's part of being an English writer, or a writer period. You have to decipher what is good information and what is bad. It's not even only Google. As Candace showed us in our class, developers can twist statistics to fit what they want it to fit. To have you think what they think about the land, but in actuality it's not like they represent [the statistics fairly]. This course really makes you look at maps. Candace showed us a map about Mauna Kea and you just look at a map like... you're just looking at the place. You're not really looking closely at the details. [Candace] would point out to us 'Oh why did they label this a wasteland?' If you closely at those things... misspellings of things on the map, and you wouldn't necessarily [notice]... [Candace] would ask you 'Why do you think it's misspelled? Does that show that this person is not from the [Native] Hawaiian community and therefore they don't understand the spelling of language and thus this map may not reflect the [Native] Hawaiian community?' Because... if they were from that community, they'd know how to spell things.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 5 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: Probably [my strongest skill in writing] would be I'm a very passionate writer about things I know about. My moʻolelo and my personal connection to the place were my two most successful writing pieces, I feel, because I knew so much about it. I'm someone who likes to pull their writing from personal experience. Candace likes to do a lot of peer editing and I feel that also makes you more successful, because being so close to a subject you tend to overlook things, so people ask you 'What is channelization? Define this. Define that,' so when I wrote my final product... I think it helped better my writing. [Writing is successful] if it moves someone to do something. If it moves someone to learn about, not even Makiki Stream, but maybe a controversy in their own area, that's what motivates me to write. So that somebody will take action. When you take Candace's class, I never considered myself an activist, but you always leave every class thinking 'I am gonna do something about this! I never knew it happened, but now I am gonna go fight. I'm gonna call my legislation.' Her students are motivated to take action. They're inspired through her teaching to find out more about place and even if you don't go and wave and hold signs and fight for a place, just by having that knowledge and passing it on to others like she's passed it on to you is success for her.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 4 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: [The course assignments] motivated me... I would have to pace myself and not do Candace's assignments until the very last minute because you can just see how one could get carried away in doing all the research... and by the time you know it, you've spent ten hours doing this research and have done no other homework for any other classes. Even in the huakaʻi, it was at the end of the semester. I did my huakaʻi, and as we were doing it, we found some areas of the stream that people were illegally dumping water in. And that even spurred me on cause I was like 'Oh! I wanna call Keoki Kerr and I wanna find out and I wanna ask someone if it's legal...' [A huakaʻi] is kind of like a field trip. It's taking a field trip, but you're following a specific path... For my huakaʻi, I followed the path of the stream... just following a specific path and investigating the place. Exploring it.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 3 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: A challenge I faced was finding a controversy in my area. [My place] didn't have development as a controversy. I picked Makiki Stream because I grew up in Maunalaha (Roundtop Drive)... I picked Maunalaha, but as you don't know where it is, you can see how much of an issue it would be to find specific things on that area. It's right at the first hairpin turn when you're taking the Round Top part, Maunalaha Road is right there. The stream would be on your left. So it was kind of difficult to figure out a controversy, so I went to Candace and we sat down and we talked about what could be the controversies. We figured out that channelization could be one of the controversies that I could focus on in my paper, but it was really hard to find statistics on streams in Hawaiʻi and channelization. A lot of my research is about streams in other states because there is no real stream [data]... My grandma and I used to walk up the Makiki Stream and she used to tell me stories about how her and her sister would go down to the stream and wash their clothes. We live currently on the same land that my great grandma lived on... They would pick fish out of the stream... They would pick taro out of the loʻi patches and she would point out the loʻi patches to me and now they're all dried up. And she would tell me about how the stream was so much higher than it currently was and that made me start to think where did the water go? Why is there no water in the Makiki Stream anymore? Why are all the loʻi patches dry? When I started to do my moʻolelo for my place, I found out that it was Kamehameha I's loʻi patch and he loved the sweet potato from Maunalaha from Roundtop. And he used to have his own sweet potato farm there. Clearly it was a place that would produce a lot of sweet potato, so what happened? Diversion of water, the Board of Water Supply [is what happened]. When I was doing my research, even though they said they had returned all of the water they diverted back to the stream... when I went to do my own huakaʻi... right on the nature conservancy board, which is in the back of Maunalaha Valley, [it] tells that they're still diverting water for the population of Honolulu, which totally goes against the ahupuaʻa system... [Native Hawaiians] believe in making that system so that water would be available to the general public and for the general public's use.
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 2 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: We do the readings that she requires and then we come to class and we discuss it. But, if you've ever taken Candace's class you know that discussions go off in different areas and we all discuss and we try to help each other out, especially with mapping. Candace will take time to explain to us [various resources]. She talks about all kinds of different ways to map and shows us ways, so that by the end of the semester we're able to build our own community maps of the places we [chose]. It was a pretty small class... It was such a big classroom that we were spread out, but we all talked amongst each other. We all helped each other out. Candace likes to do a lot of class discussion. She doesn't like to stand there and lecture us all the time, so we did a lot of breaking down into groups of three and discussing the readings. Reading [Candace's course selections] shows you how different styles of mapping [are incorporated]. Hiʻiaka is more a Hawaiian-based style of mapping where you're reading it and you're doing moʻolelo and that's the Hawaiian based way of learning is through storytelling. And Candace did a really cool huaka'i with us in addition to that book where we actually went to these places. When you stand actually at that site and you're like 'This is the part Hiʻiaka was talking about?' It taught you a lot about the way people map things and how your perspective can change just by moving around the island. It all seems like it's very different, but the readings made you think about things like what map issues the reading brought up. You kind of thought about it and you're like 'Okay. Let me fix my map so I wouldn't have these issues.' Or 'How would I build a map to better this current map that we were presented in class?'
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    Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 1 of 10
    ( 2015) Place-based WAC/WID Hui ; Ting-Beach, Tammy ; Henry, Jim
    Brief excerpt from interview: [I decided to take this course while] searching for my final semester of courses and what would fit into categories of what I was required to take. We were working on a place-based paper for [Candace's 370] class final, and I had a really hard time narrowing it down to the eight pages she required. So I thought it would be a great course to take because then I could elaborate into fifteen pages and even then it was difficult to narrow it down to fifteen! I have nine [Writing Intensive credits]. So yes, I didn't need [this course] as a Writing Intensive, but it's really easy to take a course that you're really passionate about and write and not even think about the Writing Intensive part.