Carrying Culture: Micronesia Teacher Workshop June · PDF fileCarrying Culture: Micronesia Teacher Workshop June 16, 2016 Honolulu Museum of Art Lecture Hall Mary Therese Perez Hattori

Carrying Culture: Micronesia Teacher Workshop June 16, 2016Honolulu Museum of Art Lecture Hall

1Mary Therese Perez Hattori 2016

I am of the island of GuamSouthernmost island in the chain of islands known as the Marianas islandsIslands to the north of Guam are known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands (CNMI)

Distance between HI and Guam: 3957.12 milesAbout three‐quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines


I am of the clan Familian Titangborn to Fermina Leon Guerrero Perez Of the village of Chalan Pago and Paul Mitsuo Hattori who moved from O’‘ahu to Guam when he was a child


I am one of nine children and an identical twin.I moved to Hawai‘i in 1983 to attend the University of Hawai‘i‐Mānoa and completed a B.Ed. in Secondary Social Studies (Pacific Islands History), a P.D. in Secondary Social Studies and an M.Ed. In Educational Technology and a doctoral degree in Professional Educational Practice in 2014.Teaching experience:‐1983 Damien Memorial Computer Programming‐ Student teaching at Highlands Intermediate‐ 1997 to present UHM ETEC department‐ 2000 Chaminade‐ 2003 to 2015 KCC, Information technology and computer science and educational

technology for our pre‐service education program‐ 2015 Affiliate faculty for the Doctorate in Professional Educational Practice in the College

of Education and the Indigenous Politics Program, Political Science Department, UHM.


From 2005‐May 2015, I was Technology Director at Kapi‘olani Community College.The largest of the 7 community colleges in the 10‐campus system, it was at the time, the only with completely centralized technology management.We were responsible for technology infrastructure and other administrative uses as well as academic instruction and student support technology services.

I served as head of the Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching and TechnologyOversee a staff of 20 full time employees, a dozen or so student employees and interns,Serves a population of about 9,000 students258 faculty and 197 staff.


Since May 2015, I’ve been working at the University of Hawai’i‐Mānoa’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies as the Outreach Director. As I mentioned earlier, I am also a lecturer for the Learning Design and Technology department, teaching an online course in how to develop online courses and mentoring students executing research projects in the Doctorate in Professional Educational Practice.


Culture is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. Everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware.

Hammond, Zaretta L. (Lynn) (2014‐11‐25). Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (p. 22). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition


In their work on Hawaiian Culture Based Education, Kanaʻiaupuni and Kawaiʻaeʻa (2008) provide a succinct definition: “Perhaps most simply, culture may be defined as shared ways of being, knowing, and doing” (p.71). Bruner (1996) states, “culture shapes mind, that it provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but our very conceptions of our selves and our powers (p. x).

….teaching and learning that are grounded in a cultural worldview, from whose lens are taught the skills, knowledge, content, and values that students need in our modern, global society (Kanai’aupuni and Kawai’ae’a p. 71).


Geneva Gay, one of the progenitors of culturally responsive teaching, defines it as"using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate andeffective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students.“


Hawaiian educators Shawn Malia Kana'iaupuni and Keiki K. C. Kawai'ae'a (2008) :Culturally responsive education is the grounding of instruction and student learning in the values, norms, knowledge, beliefs, practices, experiences, places, and language that are the foundation of a culture, in this case Hawaiian indigenous culture.


Django Paris is an associate professor of language and literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. He is also a core faculty member in the African American and African Studies Program and affiliated faculty in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures.


The term culturally sustaining requires that our pedagogies be more than responsive of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence.


The cultures of schools and different ethnic groups are not always completely synchronized. These discontinuities can interfere with students' academicAchievement. Culturally responsive and culturally sustaining educational practices can stop these discontinuities and the dissonance they create.

Hammond says culturally responsive teaching isn’t just a set of engagement strategies you use on students. Instead, think of it as a mindset, a way of looking at the world.

Too often, we focus on only doing something to culturally and linguistically diverse students without changing ourselves, especially when our students are dependent learners who are not able to access their full academic potential on their own.

Instead, culturally responsive teaching is about being a different type of teacher who is in relationship with students in a different way.

BRIDGING CULTURES PROJECT:Educators created bridges between school/mainstream culture and the culture of their Latino students by using frameworks from understanding Latino culture.


This framework was used in the Bridging Cultures program in California, to help teachers understand the contrast between American culture and that of Latino students. Most of the world’s cultures are collectivist, communal cultures – this includes Pacific islands cultures. The individualistic culture of the US is what dominates our schools. This framework is also cited in work by President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Dr. Hilda Heine, in the article in your packet.

Remember that there is always diversity within cultures and the cultures of islands in the region of Micronesia are very diverse. So these are generalizations meant to help create bridges between American and Pacific islands cultures but not meant to limit our appreciation for individual differences and diversity.


In addition to the Individualist vs. Collectivist framework, I share this paradigm for understanding indigenous cultures.Cultures are holistic and these three categories are presented as separate but overlapping domains for the purposes of discussion. In the indigenous view, there is no separation.

I will highlight some key aspects of ontology, epistemology, and axiology from the cultures of Micronesia. This is not a complete list, but a highlighting of some common aspects to help construct conceptual bridges for understanding and helping our students succeed.



Relationship Between Ontology and Epistemology:Moya (2006) cites this connection between knowledge and identity: “What we ‘know’ is intimately tied up with how we conceptualize the world and who we understand ourselves to be in it (p. 102).”Knowledge creation and worldview are thus inseparable in the indigenous mindset (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2008).


We have divergent worldviews and this affects Micronesians in part because of the prefix “Micro” in the problematic word “Micronesian.” While many see us as coming from tiny resource‐poor and isolated rocks, we do not ourselves operate with such a limited worldview.We do not limit our understanding of the world and our identities to the boundaries of the lands from which we come.We embrace Epeli Hau’ofa’s Oceanic Peoples’ perspective that we occupy ‘an ocean of islands’ rather than the outsiders’ view of the Pacific island nations as ‘islands in a far sea.’


Temporal intelligence is an awareness of time and an understanding that time is a socially constructed phenomenon, experienced differently by different people. No two people living AT the same time live IN the same time. Teachers should be aware of the temporal orientation of your students and appreciate that different cultures have different concepts of time.

What are my indigenous concepts around time?

Time is not quantifiable, not something one can possess, not a commodity. We have no sense of wasting or killing time. No notion of using time or forcing/rushing time. Time is not linear, nor is it finite.


The key to understanding the Chamoru temporal intelligence is found in the wordmo’nā and in its multiple meanings.

The word we use is mo'na ‐ as in taotaomo'na who are the people from before. This is used as a temporal term. Ancestral taotaomona are from a past time.

However, the word can also mean be a positional term meaning in front of. The phrase "para mo'na" translates to from this time on or from this physical point on, thus is can indicate time or space.


While mo'na in taotaomo'na generally means those who came before me in time, when mo'na is used with a verb, it implies something that will occur in the future.Just like the word 'before' can mean predecessor but it can also mean the future as in 'what lies before me‘ or something that has to be done 'before' other events can occur.

This multiple meaning reveals a unique aspect of the our epistemology. In this definition ofmo’na as both the front and the past, we see the cultural perspective that history is not what is behind us, but rather, history is in front of us.

Life is not a linear progression, but a circle, where those who passed on return to us and those who came before are still with us.

This circle of time and history requires that constant respect be shown to one’s living and deceased relatives. Ancestral veneration or core societal respect for your ancestors is central to how we understand ourselves as a people.

*leaders perceive possible futures through the lens of the past to make intelligent decisions in the present, Gilmore, Shea, Journal of Management and Development



Learning must be connected to life.

The Hawaiian ‘ōlelo no‘eau, “Makahana ka ‘ike” comes to mind ‐‐ In doing, one learns.

One Chuukese educator said, “The whole process of life in one day is an education. By following our aunties and watching them do all the things around the house and then gathering with the women when it is time to gather in the fale or the utu, the mats, we don’t think about it as schooling or learning process because it is also part of the lifestyle. the whole process of life in one day is also an educational thing for many of us growing up. “

I was part of the process of pounding the taro because it is a need that we all work together to accomplish something. Every hand is needed in the cooking house.

Learning was directly relevant to communal needs and goals.


Place affects one’s identity:

Place affects who you are, your personality traits.

I am called ‘hagan Guahan’ daughter of Guam, the literal translation is blood of Guam. My identity is connected to the island and seas around it.


Learning theorist, Leo Vygotsky (1978) said language is the medium by which children acquire their information. Through informal and formal conversations with other community members, students also acquire the “mental tools” for processing information. Bandura (2001) points out that learning is a sociocultural act governed by language. We learn best when we are able to talk through our cognitive routine. Talking to learn, also called dialogic talk, is deeply rooted in oral cultural tradition. This kind of talk gives us the opportunity to organize our thinking into coherent utterances, hear how our thinking sounds out loud, listen to how others respond, and, often, hear others add to or expand on our thinking. Tharp and Gallimore (1991) call this instructional conversation, the kind of talk that acts like a mental blender, mixing together new material with existing knowledge in a student’s schema. Hammond, Zaretta L.

Sharing stories of life experiences is an expression of what Bruner (1996) termed narrative thinking, one of the key “ways human beings organize and manage their knowledge of the world, indeed structure even their immediate experience” (p. 39). He asserts that narratives are an essential element for cultural cohesion and a tool for meaning‐making: We frame the accounts of our cultural origins and our most cherished beliefs in story form, and it is not just the “content” of these stories that grip us, but their narrative artifice. Our immediate experience, what happened yesterday or the day before, is framed in the same storied way. Even more striking, we represent our lives (to ourselves as well as to others) in the form of narrative (p. 40).

It turns out the brain is wired for stories. Why? When we are being told a story or are telling it, the brain’s neurons light up not only in the language processing parts of the brain but in other regions just as if we were performing the action ourselves.



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The phrase “ways with words” is from Heath’s (1983) book of the same name based on her ethnographic study of several speech communities in the Piedmont Carolinas. The term incorporates not only the actual vocabulary and syntax used by a particular group, but also the purposes (intellectual, social, religious, and other) language is used for; how conversation, stories, and formal talk are structured; how topics are chosen, maintained, and changed; and more.

In addition to the turn‐taking aspect of discourse, the matters of how topics are selected, introduced, and developed in conversation have a cultural foundation and need to be examined. Teachers generally have particular expectations for how students should participate in discussions about science or social studies, mathematics or literature.


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Carrying Culture: Micronesia Teacher Workshop June · PDF fileCarrying Culture: Micronesia Teacher Workshop June 16, 2016 Honolulu Museum of Art Lecture Hall Mary Therese Perez Hattori