Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in English, clip 1 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: The entire course is a place-based approach. We are situated in Hawaiʻi and as a Kanaka Maoli, a person in the university, as a poet, as someone who cares very much for this ʻāina, it is important for me to teach any way I can to center it here, in Hawaiʻi. Although we do draw on works [by poets] who are more interested in the continent, particularly the West Coast, their place poetics, their poetics of place, are so fierce and interrogate these ideas of belonging and histories and these layers of histories, that I think go really beautifully with our ideas of aloha ʻāina and belonging and home. In Hawaiʻi we have such fraught tensions between belonging, especially between indigeneity, local, settler... At that level, students come with that creative frame… and we can enter these more political conversations through creative writing… That relationship makes the discussion more positive.