Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 10 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: It's a struggle for [continental U.S.] students, because they have to work harder at the idea of growing aloha ʻāina. [One such student, responding to a cartographic problem, said] 'a lot of the moʻolelo we study in class are faith-based. They're religious, based on a belief system that I cannot ascribe to... so I've been struggling up until this point to understand how to maintain my own belief system, which is I don't believe in religion, and how to reconcile that with these moʻolelo because I want to support Hawaiians. But I don't feel like I can fully support them until I find a way to reconcile this kind of disjuncture between my belief that religion is problematic and the ways that Hawaiian independence is based on these moʻolelo.' [Students] come up with very insightful kinds of questions. She was looking for that spirituality, but felt embarrassed about writing about it. She was saying 'I don't understand how people can say they're born from land,' so that was [her] bottom line. So we had a lot of discussion about that. [A native Hawaiian practitioner explained:] 'How do we learn the formula for pi? How do we learn geometry? We learn it by looking at nature... Nature is our first teacher.' You can have different levels of belief, but in this class, I want us to accept all of them as being true. All of them. Even if they don't agree with your own personal beliefs, we can say these are all true, and we find the composite of all of these stories and where they intersect and where they don't. You have to expand your mind to accept paradoxes.