Similar thoughts?

     As I mentioned in Blog 1 of this spring semester, I have ultimately changed my focus from doing a research design for my Plan B, to creating a curriculum design.  Therefore, in my research on Google Scholar, I was not particularly looking to see who out there has a similar research question as my own but instead I was looking at literature where people were approaching teaching in a similar way and design. 

     Scholars who were looking at the benefit and need of indigenous methods in teaching indigenous students were the type of articles I was searching.  Furthermore, I was also reading articles that covered topics on counter-storytelling as a tool for raising awareness amongst students about actual stories from their people versus a narrative from someone about a people that they do not live amongst nor come from the same cultural background.  This concept of a majoritarian story was how those stories told from an outside perspective could be defined.  They are also characterized as the story often told but not necessarily line up with the actual past or present situations of that place or its people.  Therefore, the use of counter storytelling will most often than not challenge that narrative majoritarian story. In my past readings, I haven't come across the term majoritarian story so I was happy to find it for use in my Plan B.  A particular portion of one article I found very useful was the view of how counter story telling can serve various functions.  

    The author Chillisa states in her book, Indigenous Research Methodologies, "[Counter stories] can serve at least four theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical functions: (1) they can build community among those at the margins of society by putting a human and familiar face to educational theory and practice; (2) they can challenge the perceived wisdom of those at society's center by providing a context to understand and transform established belief systems; (3) they can open new windows into the reality of those at the margins of society by showing the possibilities beyond the ones they live and demonstrating that they are not alone in their position; and (4) they can teach others that by combining elements from both the story and the current reality, one can construct another world that is richer than either the story or the reality alone."

    I feel like Chillisa sums up my feelings about why I’m focusing on counter storytelling for my curriculum design and why I feel my community knowing our real stories throughout Ko'olauloa is so important. I also felt like looking back into strength and deficit based model approaches because the perspective and utilization of it for individual and community enhancement and engagement ties in well with counter storytelling. I’m glad that there are a collective of scholars that I can learn from through their articles that are truly interested in seeing that the value of indigenous knowledge and methods is brought to the forefront as a powerful tool in education. 

     In closing, one line from one of the articles I read stood out to me.  I think this can be categorized within critical race theory, but it discussed how for a black man their writing would be considered folklore but yet a white man's writing could be considered literature.  The former being expressed as almost fairytale and the latter is being taken in as fact. I feel like stories within Hawaiian culture are very often portrayed as legends and superstitions rather than actual facts, even when the evidence of the story's ending is clear as day in a particular landscape etc. I hope that in sharing stories of areas within Ko'olauloa there is this sense of tying in natural phenomena with the story, proving its validity and place in factual information amongst our community and others. If our people can view stories as a way of what happened in the past to our land, people etc., we'll know how to navigate effectively going forward because of the lessons learned from the mo'olelo (stories).