 Good afternoon, I'm Ethan Allen, host of a brand new show here on Think Tech Hawaii. This show is called Pacific Partnerships for Education. And it's all about how education issues are critical to the Pacific. There are a lot of different kinds of education issues. They vary from place to place. We're going to talk about this. My co-host here, Paul Hattuck. Ethan, how are you? Good to have you here, Paul. So we wanted to start out this series in this first episode, really talking about PREL, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, for those of you who may not know PREL. It's always interesting to me that PREL, where we both work, is better known far away, thousands of miles away than it is here in the state. I often get an impression you can talk to anyone in the app, and I don't know who PREL is, but there's a whole bunch of people here who don't know about PREL, who couldn't tell you a thing about PREL, right? Yeah, we've done most of our work down in the region. But we do some work here, and I guess we see this in other organizations. I saw this back at the University of Washington, the physics education group, an internationally renowned group of physics educators, was not well respected there among their colleagues at the university, but was well regarded internationally. So sometimes I guess it just goes with the territory. So you've been on the board for PREL for a long time now. You're currently a CEO. When did you join the board? I got on the board about 10 years ago. I think it was 2007 when I was director of education for Kostrai State down in Micronesia. Oh, OK. OK. Now, PREL has, but PREL's history actually goes back considerably further than that, right? About 30 years, I believe. Yeah, yeah. And it really formed out of really a real regional education laboratory for those who may not be in on education speak, right? This is a group of centers set up by the Department of Education many years ago when they set up originally nine regional education labs all around different parts of the U.S., sort of slicing the U.S. into smaller sections, and then realized that there was the state of Hawaii and the U.S. affiliated territories faced really different issues that almost didn't place else, right? And so they created a 10th region and created a regional education lab to serve that region. And that was a REL and PREL sort of grew out of that, right? So you've lived in the region, right? So this region compasses... Compasses state of Hawaii. Right. And then the Marshall Islands, which is the next area to the west of us. Then the Federated States of Micronesia, all four states. So that's Kostrai, Pompeii, Chuk and then Yap. And then go north a little bit. You've got Guam and Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, which would just say CNMI. Then head down south, you've got Palau. And then below the equator, you've got American Samoa. And those 10 regions make up the area that was served by the original REL, which has now changed a little bit to become what PREL serves. Right. And that was something that was sometimes called the U.S. AAPI, the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands. And it's a state of Hawaii, the three territories that you named and the three freely associated states, right? OK. So that's quite a bit. I mean, it's basically 11 different jurisdictions here. If you count FSM, and it's four states. And how many languages are spoken across there? Wild guess, two dozen. Yeah, OK. Really completely different, mutually incomprehensible languages. They're all completely different languages. There's a lot of cultural differences, customary differences, time differences, date line differences. So it's quite a region. Yeah. We've got an area that's probably a little bigger than the contiguous 48 states, with probably a land area of roughly the size of Connecticut. Yes, it's over 3 million square miles of the Pacific that's covered. And if you squished all the land together, we'd fit in Connecticut. And a few million people basically in that space, really. 80% probably live here and in Guam. Right, yeah. So there's really interesting challenges to do this work, then, right? I mean, these vast distances makes it very expensive to do the work if you need to get out and send a staff person out to do work. There, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of money. There are these cultural differences. It's very hard to know all the nuances of all the different cultures, right? Language is the main thing, to be able to communicate with everybody. So for example, in my house, my wife is Cotrine Pontein. My children also speak Chookies. So we have three of the island languages, plus English. And that's still maybe 10%, 15% of all the languages spoken down there. So just trying to have a meeting with everybody together, we normally speak English. But to be respectful to the region, we're trying to develop our language skills here so that we can better communicate down there. We're doing a lot of work with the communities and the villages. All right. And the issues of language are one of the things that Pearl works on, right? Because, well, there's good evidence now that teaching children to be multilingual from an early age is actually a very powerful and good thing to do for their brains, right? It's one of the easiest things, too. When we're children, if you want to learn a separate language, you learn it before you're three, four years old. My children all grew up. I only spoke English to them. My wife spoke Cotrine to them. They were bilingual by the time they were speaking. The biggest issue down on a lot of these Pacific islands is just nothing to read outside of old translations of the Bible, which everybody has in the house. But children, stories, the sort of things we grew up reading, everything from Dr. Seuss to the Hardy Boys, those don't exist very often in these languages. So the children get a good oral command of the language. But when it comes to writing and reading, it's much weaker than what we get here in the mainland than in the US. Right. And there's also the issue that a lot of the jurisdictions, sort of as they hold over from the colonialism, try to conduct a lot of their education in English, right? Yes. In fact, so places like the Marshalls, the FSM in Palau, where all their education money comes from the US Compact or US tax dollars, the US government requires that they do all their testing in English. So all the teaching may be in Pompeian. Then all the yearly testing is in English and scores. I mean, imagine if we told every student here in Hawaii one year, all testing will be in German. And see what happens to their test scores. I wouldn't bet they'd go up. No, they wouldn't. And it's one of the issues we have down there. Students tend to score 5%, 10%, 15% on these scores. And the question is, their failure of teaching? Those are just a failure of students when they take the test? They don't understand what the question is saying. And there is an issue, too, that many of the teachers have not particularly learned good English writing skills from their own education. Now we're supposed to teach these skills to the students. And the English is typically used only in schools. A lot of times, relatively strict, the only in schools. Very often only in the schools. And so many of these island settings, you'll have one main island, which can be a bit more cosmopolitan where English is spoken. But when you get 150, 200 miles away to a small local island with maybe 300 people living on it, English is never spoken. It's not spoken in school, it's not spoken in the community. But then their yearly test is all in English. And the school, we have schools out there that score to zeros on these tests not because they're not guessing at all. They're just not answering any of the questions or turning in blank tests. So it makes for some interesting issues on how do you address education? How do you try to improve education? What's the definition of education? Yeah, and the issue of language really does tie into that. And if we could set up a good system where all kids learn English and their local language, be it on pay-in, appies, whatever, we had the impression the situation would improve a good deal. Test scores would improve. Whether it's a situation, but that's a situation Hawaii itself faced back in the day, when suddenly the Hawaiian language was not being used at all in the schools. And did that help the culture? Did that help Hawaii become a better place? I think a lot of people would say no. Same thing, a lot of these smaller islands are facing in the Pacific. Why do we have to test in a language we never use? Is it really benefiting us? Or is it just making easier for US funders to determine what's a good education system? And it comes back to, you're going to live on a small island your whole life, what's an education to begin with? Right, exactly. Why are you studying calculus, geometry, Spanish? And we were asking those questions ourselves. And we were in high school years ago. Why do we take half the classes we take? What is really an education? That's where I think Pearl is trying to help down in those islands. Right, because it's perfectly reasonable, particularly in island situations like that, for someone to become a young adult and basically make a choice. I wish to continue and pursue the traditional livelihoods, the traditional culture of my people, of my island here. And is a US style education much helped that? There's no evidence that it is. And is a US based test system going to show that I've learned to take care of my family, to be able to raise a family, to be able to farm and fish. How do you test those things? How do you test storytelling? How do you test being a respectful elder in a community? We've never been able to figure that out. And sadly, US education is all based on testing right now. And it just doesn't work. Right, yeah. It doesn't take into account the cultural values to a larger extent, right? It doesn't. And those cultural values, again, sort of get in the way because of these differences, right? You have amusing stories of years. Some of your early teaching experiences with Coach Ryan and students. And the misinterpretations. It's not understanding basic gestures, not understanding how students may act in a classroom setting where they've got relatives in the classroom. And sadly, the argument that we hear in response is, well, if they're going to move here, before they come, they need to know our customs, our language. I just don't know any other country that we require. We don't require American children to know Japanese or to know other countries' languages in the hopes or the thought that maybe someday down the road they may go live there. Right, yeah, yeah. And the issues of just how the adult-child interaction plays out with the children in the islands, typically showing much more respect to adults, typically not questioning adults, typically deferring to any older relatives. All of these, again, when these kids show up in classrooms particularly here, but even in classrooms in the region. What makes it difficult, if you're the sort of teacher, as I was when I got down there, I want to be able to ask questions to my class, get them to think and respond. Very often in an island setting where it's considered disrespectful for young people to talk, they won't. That doesn't happen. They ask a question, you just get 30 minutes of silence back, which ruins your lesson plans. And again, a lot of the reasons we go to kindergarten when I was a kid was to help develop social skills, but on a small island where you're always in a group, those things develop naturally. So it's a whole different education system that needs to be understood down there. That's what trial comes in to try to help. Yeah, and it's particularly challenging, because at the same time, as you wish to prepare students to pursue traditional livelihoods and all, you also want to open up the doors to those students, if a student wants to pursue engineering and electrical engineering or biochemical engineering and go off to Stanford. And you really want to give them every chance they can to go to Stanford and do well, right? And we do know they're coming here. They're coming here and they're coming to Guam. And so what could work down there doesn't always immediately adjust to here. And this is where we're starting to see some tension develop as students from a small island suddenly are dropped down into an Oahu public school system, and they don't know how to assimilate into a classroom setting. Right, yeah, because there's huge differences in the relationships among their peers, with the teachers. Again, the whole relationship between family and school is just vastly different. And the expectations, unwritten expectations here are sometimes very puzzling to families moving here, right? Oh, definitely. And again, I just think that's one of the things prowl as we kind of expand on our original vision of just doing research. Now, after 30 years, what practical applications can we make here, especially, and in Guam and some of these other places, to put the place, some of this research that we've done? And it won't just play out here, because there are now Micronesian communities scattered across it. Arkansas and Alaska and Minnesota, Texas, Virginia, yes. Yeah, and those teachers, I mean, Hawaii's teachers are probably at least marginally prepared for that in the sense that they're used to dealing with quite a diversity of students from different backgrounds and different cultures. Yes, if you're a teacher from small town Arkansas, and suddenly you have 10 Marshallese students show up in your class one year. Well, the interesting thing is that some of the research has shown the farther the islanders go to the east, the better they're doing, assimilating in school with health issues. Here seems to be a unique situation. What we're facing here in Oahu and what they're facing in Guam, there's a lot of similarities. But it's not necessarily transferring. There's a lot more success stories. Not that there aren't here, but there seem to be fewer issues the further east that they travel. Interesting. We're going to follow up on that, but we're going to take a short break right now. Paul Haddock is here with me, Ethan Allen, on our new Pacific Partnerships in Education show. Thanks for watching, and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the second half of our first episode of Pacific Partnerships in Education. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, my co-host, Paul Haddock. We're talking about in the show, parallel in particular, Pacific Resources for Education Learning. We've drifted off in the early half of the show to talking about some larger issues in Pacific Education. But that's what we expect to do throughout this series of shows. These are big issues. They are complex issues. There are a lot of different kinds of challenges that we face. A lot of, at the same time, a lot of tremendous resources available. And Prail has certainly developed a lot of them. So these days, Prail really speaks of it doing its work in several different areas and creating conditions for learning. Ecoliteracy, we talk about. Some early learning focus, a bit on health literacy, because health issues are so important. And languages and learning. And we've had various programs in some of these different. Focus more or less on those areas. Why don't we dig into a couple of those? Prail has, I guess maybe it's the most general thing, is the Pacific Regional Comprehensive Center. So this is a center that's funded to provide technical assistance. Pretty much technical assistance. So we oversee a grant from the federal government. And we go down to the 10 regions we mentioned earlier. So the FSM, the marshals. We say, here's money available for you. How can we help you? What are the areas of needs you have? So we meet with directors and ministers of education, government leaders throughout the Pacific on do you want to do some more vocational work? Well, we'll connect you with research. We'll connect you with people who've done this sort of work before. Do you want to do more health literacy? And they may not have the capacity in the region, but Prail will link them with people who've done work on health literacy in the schools. That's kind of what that grant is. There's money available to the regions. We help link them with the experts and the resources. Right, so again, it does emphasize that the issue of partnerships here is not the Prail is stepping in and saying, we'll do this, but we're seeking their input on what they see that they need assistance in. Yeah, and actually moving forward with this grant, what we're trying to do is, because we've been in the region 30 years now, where are the island experts on these issues? For many, many years, having lived down there, organizations like ours and others were considered the high-priced outsiders coming in for a week, telling us what to do and then leaving. There's now a good class of PhD holders, of people who've been educators for 30 years, of people who are parts of organizations like PAHOA, the health organization and others, who live down there, who are islanders themselves, who can now take the lead on a lot of these projects. That's the other thing Prail is trying to do, build this umbrella of Micronesians, helping Micronesians who can take the forefront of a number of these projects that are coming out from these programs like PRCB. Yeah, because that's capacity-building. That's how the whole way... Human capacity-building. Yeah, the only way the systems really are gonna improve themselves there. Yeah, absolutely. Some programs still, of course, do sort of get brought in, but again, always with interesting sorts of ways. So the Pacific Climate Education Partnership, but it was funded by the National Science Foundation to promote learning about climate and weather among the Pacific Islands. And it was interestingly to my early interactions with it to see that most Pacific Islanders understood that climate change was happening. They were seeing it firsthand, right? Well, I lived on a small island and the beaches aren't there anymore. So you notice when your beach is gone. If you're from a place like Maduro where the tallest above sea levels is maybe six feet and that's a man-made bridge, everything else is inches above sea level. You've got lagoon on one side, ocean on the other and during high tide, the tide is washing across your entire island. You notice those things. When the ocean's coming through your front door, as I heard someone say today, we don't care about the politics of it, we don't care about the science of it, we know it's happening. Right, yeah, I know what are we gonna do about it? Yes. And that was very much the focus of that grant. That's now a five-year grant just winding on down and basically infuse climate education into the formal school curricula of all the different regions. So at least in theory, all the kids are hearing about climate and climate issues and climate adaptation and mitigation strategies from a relatively early age throughout their schooling years. And practically things like El Nino. So when I was living on Koshai once we had a very serious El Nino, we went weeks without running water. And when you're in a house with eight to 12 people, running water is a big deal. So it teaches you how to recognize when this may be coming, how to prepare for it ahead of time. There's some very practical applications out of some of these science things so that young people can see science is not just a textbook. It's a way that I can live and survive in a changing climate. Right, so that would take us then to my favorite program, Right, Water for Life, where we work outside of the schools. It was really one of Pearl's first ventures to really go beyond the school systems and work directly with a diverse array of community organizations, the EPAs, the weather service, the water resource management, the municipal water systems. Trying to, again, help the local communities, get the local leaders in these sectors to say, gee, what is our need here? Is it that we need to improve rainwater catchment systems that are in place but just have degraded over the years? Is it that we need to shore up and protect water comes up in a spring that the community uses? And we would work with them to help, again, sort of find the resources. And again, usually largely all the labor and designs, everything came out of the community itself, basically, to figure out, here's the fix for this. Then nice tie-ins with schools, we had kids, we've got kids now on Majuro and all the schools testing their water on a monthly basis from every water dispenser and turning that data over to the EPA on Majuro. So that's great because the EPA now gets more data than they were getting before, because they don't have the staffing to test all the schools. Yeah, and very few houses then that have potable water. Right, right. And my wife's now been here for six months. She doesn't understand she can drink water from the sink. So to this day, we still buy bottled water from a store. She doesn't trust that you can drink sink water. She's never heard of such a concept. I mean, you brush your teeth outside or when you shower, you keep your mouth tightly closed, especially after a rain, when you may have tadpoles coming out of your shower head or little bits of rocks and pebbles. So things like clean drinking water being available in a house or in a school, there's no water fountains at schools at most of those places. So that project had a lot of practical application for people down there. Yeah, no, that was a nice sort of synergy because the accreditation agency and the Marshall Islands had just mandated that schools provide clean drinking water. All schools are required to have clean drinking water, which is hard if you've got 1,000 students at a high school and you've got no potable water. And the municipal water systems there may run a few hours at a time, a few times a week. And you're not drinking that water. Right, right, but what comes out when it does come out, yeah, you've got to treat before you can drink it, right? Yeah, so that's the kind of thing. We've had other kinds of projects, of course, that cover many other areas. We've done work on the Pacific Child Project. Did a lot of work with helping look at early literacy and early childhood education. We've done beautiful things in arts education, of course. Our staff member, Lori Phillips, Dr. Lori Phillips, draws our talent out to the most amazing degree from people. Well, her belief is that, and she's correct, that down in the region, we love to tell stories. We love to sing songs. That's how we educate each other. We tell stories and through the storytelling process, we learn. You don't throw a book at a kid with 500 pages in them and say, this is how you learn. You don't throw a bunch of students in a warehouse hot classroom and lecture at them and say, this is how you learn. We learn through storytelling. And what Dr. Phillips' project and other projects have done is we give the student their imagination and say, tell us a story, learn to illustrate that story. Let's put that story into a couple languages and now we can develop dual language materials that the children can relate to. My first couple years down there, it was hard to teach reading classes when it's a Jack London to light a fire in the middle of a snowstorm. My kids didn't know what any of that meant. But there are wonderful stories that are Pacific Island based stories that the kids are interested in reading. You develop the interest, you develop the storytelling, you develop the art skills, the imagination, which is the keystone to learning. Now you have an education system. Right, and it can really, it can transcend the language barriers and really improve kids' lives and help them make whatever choice in life they want, which is really the key thing here, right? So be sure these... Prepare a young person for a future that benefits themselves and their community. That's an education. Yeah, exactly. And what that community is, their small local community or the community of the globe, and those may require different things, but yeah. So what as CEO, what's your vision for the future, Prell? My vision for the future is, I think not just on the island stand on there, but Hawaii here, the question needs to be asked, what's an education? We spend more and more money on education, but we get less and less satisfied with the result. Is it necessary in today's world to make kids memorize so much information when it's available at your fingertips? We've taken away all the non-testable things aren't important anymore, music, arts. These are the things that develop the mind and creativity and imagination and make us start asking, why are things the way they are? That's what I think we need to start developing, especially very often in island communities where children grow up being told what to do and respectfully responding without ever pushing back and developing critical analysis skills. What I want Prell to do, not just down there, but also here, have all of us sit down and start to question, let's throw out a system we know doesn't work, it's not satisfying anybody. Rethink education so that we're preparing young people for a future that benefits themselves in their local community, not just a future that can do well on a test. I made it to be a CEO of a company and I couldn't take half of those tests to that. It's just something we do to fill in some blanks with the government and none of us are happy with it. But down, especially in these small islands where the culture is changing and the big world is pushing in either through climate change or suddenly these islands are in between North Korea and the US, they're suddenly geopolitically important. What is the future down there? Yeah, big questions, big issues. And Prell is gonna be a player in helping shape that future. Hope so. Yeah, that's what we're working on. And that's what we're gonna be discussing in future episodes too. So I hope you'll come back and join us next week and the week after, I guess not next week, it's every two weeks, every other Tuesday at 3 p.m. for Pacific Partnerships in Education. We'll see you the next episode. Until then.