As a way to develop a more somatic response to race and the legacy of injury and violence towards the first peoples of the Hawaiian nation, this paper's aim is to draw a connection between the early writings of American women to Hawai'i and my own positionality as a feminist scholar in present day Hawai'i. Using a feminist, postcolonial lens, I…

In this article, I map a new theoretical space for Kanaka Maoli, the autochthonous people of Hawai?i, within the landscape of critical race theory (CRT). To engage the ways that Kanaka Maoli have been identified as people of color, Asian Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous people, I review literature on CRT, Asian critical race theory, and Tribal…

Teaching within institutions that prototypically privilege the social order of language is often problematic for both genders, especially because we tend to occupy masculine lines of rhetoric. The "standards" that women adhere to are not always associated in the feminine construction, and when we question "standards," the…

Today the Kamehameha Schools are widely known for excellent education. In part this is due to the almost $9 billion dollar value of the Bishop Estate that funds and controls the schools. Unfortunately, its success has led to non-Hawaiians challenging its admissions policy, which has since its inception been based upon admitting Native Hawaiian…

This article examines how "Nisei," the second generation of Japanese immigrants, in Hilo on the island of Hawai'i have maintained their Japanese cultural and linguistic skills. In this article, the author first provides a history of these Japanese immigrant communities in Hilo. This article describes the author's research findings. The…

This paper examines a burgeoning network of organizations that is inventing new forms of community renewal and citizenship education. Their names vary--some call themselves public policy institutes, others centers for civic life--yet they share a common methodology, one aimed at tackling tough public issues, strengthening communities, and…

In participatory evaluations of K-12 programs, evaluators develop school faculty's and administrators' evaluation capacity by training them to conduct evaluation tasks and providing consultation while the tasks are conducted. A strong case can be made that the capacity building in these evaluations can be examined using a Vygotskian approach. We…

Given the challenges of the workplace and the historic exclusion of women and people of color from positional leadership, this dual case study explores women's experiences in two graduate programs designed to support transformational learning of educational leaders. Data included participants' structured reflections on learning about leadership,…

In keeping with the theme of the International Language Testing Association/Language Testing Research Colloquium Conference in 2008, "Focusing on the Core: Justifying the Use of Language Assessments to Stakeholders," I define "stakeholder-friendly tests," "defensible testing," and "testing-context analysis."…

This paper discusses the use of two theories of item analysis and test construction, their strengths and weaknesses, and applications to the design of the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC). Traditional analyses of the data collected from the HSTEC field test were viewed from the perspectives of item difficulty levels and item…