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

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: Where you grow up, the stories of that place, you can relate to the stories of other places. There's this whole issue about kamaʻāina to a place and having the kuleana to write about that place. So why am I, someone from Hokulani, writing about Waiʻanae? My connection I explain this way in my chapter, and that is: I grew up on the slopes of Haleakalā where we grew up with the Maui stories thinking that they were our island stories... When I went to a play about Maui and I found out there was a struggle in Waiʻanae to protect the birthplace of Maui in Lualualei where there's a puʻu called Puʻuheleakalā, I could see the connection. I felt that kind of connectedness through the moʻolelo and that makes sense because Maui is a navigator, and he connects the different places in the Pacific... What I'm also trying to do in my story is foreground the kūpuna story... the work they did to protect this place... to honor their work... not about my research, but what I learned from what they did. Through these stories, through these moʻolelo, we can gain an insight into what's happening in other places. People who live in mountains connect through those experiences... I've heard people from Korea talking about Diamond Mountain and comparing the Diamond mountains to the mountains in Hawaiʻi and feeling that there is a kind of connectedness, not one that's appropriating place for their own purposes, but they can understand what it's like to live on a mountain or to live on an island. At English 100 they do beautiful work. It's really kind of astonishing... I've seen them really kind of engaging in more creative kind of critiques of writing and different kinds of places. [Writing about a childhood experience of place] became the kernel for a different kind of writing for [one pre-med student], one that he was able to explore different dimensions to writing about [place].