Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 8 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: A lot of times when people talk about being local... they'll name stores and restaurants, shopping malls and theaters, schools, but they don't talk about land. I really asked [students] to pay close attention to land... I think they gained a kind of deeper understanding of a history that is much longer than these kinds of man-made structures on the land... For Hawaiian students it was more of this genealogical connectedness to places and for students who are not Hawaiian, a greater sense of their own kuleana or responsibility... I think engagement goes hand in hand with kuleana. If you feel like you have some kind of commitment or responsibility, the writing comes through in a much more engaged way. I work in Waiʻanae and there's a place where Maui was born in Lualualei... There are these mountains, and they say if you really look at the mountains, they look like thighs. And if you think about the river, it's like a birth canal. In different tours we've done, the land comes alive like that, where you see the moʻolelo being enacted and performed through the landscape. You see the moʻolelo taking place and unfolding as you're traveling geographically. Some of [these moʻolelo] can be read on a metaphorical level, but many of them are very literally about the stories that are unfolding along the landscape, and you have to pay attention to the land to understand those stories and for it to have that kind of special relevance for you. Passion comes into [one student's] writing in the way that she explores the moʻolelo from so many different angles, not just its textual relevance, but its geographical relevance. The land has its own ontology. Its writing its own story.