AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

The Hawaiian kingdom, prior to the illegal overthrow of its monarchy (1893) and the subsequent English-only compulsory education (1896), had boasted a 91‒95 percent literacy rate. Since the U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i (1898), however, the settler colonial school system has maintained inequitable student outcomes for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders that have become an intergenerational “achievement gap” across multiple academic and disciplinary student indicators (i.e., proficiency, suspension rates). The Office of Hawaiian Education (OHE) uses a theory of change that engages activist research to identify specific historical contexts to contemporary circumstances and issues, to inform futurities for Hawaiian education. These initiatives seek to rethread Hawaiian education into the tapestry of traditional sources of knowledge production that improve cultural, intellectual, and political sustainability for all learners. Today, OHE uses a SWOT and GAP analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on Hawai‘i Department of Education stakeholders (students, their families, schools, and communities) to inform its educational P4 (practices, projects, programs, and policies) that will move Hawaiian education for all learners forward, beyond the current pandemic toward a sustainable model of education that engages learners as knowledge producers with strength-, place-, and culture-based pedagogies that reconnect them to traditional sources of knowledge production.