Meeting the Needs of Native Hawaiian Students at Wai‘anae High School

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2017-08

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University of Hawaii at Manoa

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Waiʻanae High School has been considered a low performing school since 2002 (State of Hawaii Department of Education, 2012). Despite having a majority of Hawaiian, or other indigenous ethnicity, students (Waiʻanae High School, 2015), cultural perspectives about learning and education are not considered a factor in conversations about curriculum and instruction. Students all across campus are not excited about learning and traditional instructional practices do not seem to be effective. Our current approach to supporting students focuses on how to help them be more successful in a western system rather than how we can shift our practices to be more culturally responsive to students and allow them to succeed based on their own strengths. The prevailing narrative that exists with regard to Native Hawaiians especially in the realm of education is deficits-based and focuses on the disparities in academic achievement between Native Hawaiian students and other ethnicities. Part of my responsibility as a Native Hawaiian educator, and now researcher, is to add to that narrative an alternative perspective. The purpose of this study was to better understand student experiences in order to identify ways that teachers can better support the needs of Native Hawaiian students at Waiʻanae High School. My goal was to illuminate the student voice and offer a perspective that is often absent from discussions about how to improve teaching and learning. I sought to describe the “lived experiences” of students based on the commonalities that surfaced in the stories of alumni.

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Students, Waiʻanae, Hawaiians, culturally relevant

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Hawaii

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