 host of Journeys of the Mind and today we are here with Dr. the wonderful and beautiful Dr. Amber Makau and she is here to talk to us about teaching ethics and teaching philosophy and isn't that a wonderful, aren't those wonderful topics for today because in our world where we're seeing wars and craziness in our politics, ethics come to mind almost all the time and as well, you know, a philosophical approach to life. So let me make a brief introduction. Our guest is director of curriculum and research for the Ui Hero Academy for Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Hawaii but also she is director of the professional research center at the Hanaoli School here in Hanaoli. So Amber, welcome and my first question to you is describe your journey. How did you get to Hawaii? Have you been, where you were born and raised here and how did you get to these two wonderful positions? Thank you so much for having me Dr. Ackerman. I came to Hawaii as I was born and raised here. I am the descendant of missionaries that came in the 1820s and so I'm actually sixth generation here in Hawaii and my ancestors came to be educators at the chief's children school. So they were the teachers for the Ali'i and I like to think that this lineage of education has led me on my professional journey for the rest of my life and what I tap into for my own genealogy and thinking about who I am as an educator. I attended a small progressive school also in here in Honolulu and that school really gave me the grounding of what I have come to believe in terms of what is the purpose of schooling and that school is Hanaoli School and I'll talk a little bit more about it on our program here today. And was that Chief's School, Pudahou School or was it a different school? It was the Royal School so this was the school that was for the Kings and Queens children at its time period, an interesting time period in Hawaiian history when the Ali'i were seeking influence from the West in terms of wanting to know more about how this could influence their thinking about running the kingdom and Protestant missionaries came from the East Coast of the United States to be teachers there and those were two of my ancestors and a number of them also went on to be influential at Pudahou School as well. That's wonderful to hear. And so coming from this background, do you think that some of your ethics and philosophical approach currently are derived from Christianity in its form that was originally developed by these missionaries but I'm not talking about imperialism and things like this but do you think it's somewhat based in the Christian fold? That's a really good question. I don't think so. I think that I am six generations removed from those original purposes and really the goal of progressive education and the philosophy of education of which shapes the work that I do in the world is really looking at schools of levers of change for promoting a better future society. And perhaps Christian forms of education were also thinking about things in that way but the work that we do today is non-secular and not tied to any particular religion. In fact, it's all about giving kids the opportunities to be open to multiple ways of thinking about the world including religion and giving them the tools to think for themselves about what beliefs and ethical values and perhaps spirituality and religious beliefs that they want to have as they make their way through their world. Give me some examples because you're in charge of this, I guess, first initially sponsored by the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation but when you talk about professional development center and I get your wonderful emails about what's going on, what are you trying to do and can you give us some examples of these sort of ethical and philosophical approaches to education and to children? Yeah, so a little bit of background about my current work is I'm a professor at the University of Woyat Manoa in the College of Education and the university has a partnership with Hanaha Oli School which is a 105 year old progressive school that was founded here in Honolulu in collaboration with a number of influential East Coast philosophers and practitioners who were experimenting with this new approach to education in the late 1800s early 19th century and the school was really founded around this idea of we need to use education as a tool to help our democracy thrive into future generations and what we need in a democracy is people who can think for themselves, they need to know what it means to belong to a strong and caring community where they are respectful and thoughtful of other people that they know how to work collaboratively that they learn by doing and then reflecting on their experience because a lot of our life experiences beyond school are not necessarily textbook bound but through the actual experiences that we have and we need to learn how to use those experiences reflect on them to either improve ourselves or improve the world that we live in and so they introduced this new philosophy of education and my work today is about ensuring that more people have opportunity to learn about progressive education so that they can either start progressive schools of their own or implement a progressive practice in a more traditional school setting perhaps in their classroom so the entire project is really framed around this idea of how can we use schools to create a better future society and my mission is to build a partnership with the university and leverage the resources of the university and the school as a living laboratory where this has been happening in practice for a hundred and five years to give people the opportunity to experience it for themselves and then think about what this might look like in their own educational settings. That's a wonderful framework and so what comes to mind immediately is John Dewey and how closely are you linked to the philosophy of John Dewey? We're closely linked to the philosophy of John Dewey. Hawaii has such an interesting progressive education history I've actually just returned from a sabbatical where I've been doing some research on this and in the late 1890s early early late 1880s early 1990s there was a superintendent of schools in Hawaii named H.S. Townsend and he was learning about folks like Francis Parker and John Dewey who were experimenting with progressive education at the University of Chicago. In Chicago Dewey had an experimental school and Francis Parker helped run the teachers college alongside the school where people could be learning how to teach and then experiment with that type of teaching in John Dewey's experimental lab school and H.S. Townsend became connected to John Dewey and Francis Parker through the castle family who had a family relationship with it's a long story but with the department head in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago was married to a castle and through that exchange got this merging of intellectual ideas about how we can use schools to create a better society and the castles really did a lot of work of creating free kindergartens in Hawaii around that time period and then Townsend did work to bring the ideas of Dewey and Parker to Hawaii and he did this as the principal at Lahaina Luna school where he was experimenting with how can we have more progressive approaches in our public school system and for folks that are familiar with Hawaii and Hawaii's educational history you know that Lahaina Luna had a printing press and so Townsend and the students and teachers at Lahaina Luna produced a progressive educator newspaper that folks across the kingdom read and had teachers reading circles where they would learn about progressive education and then experiment with it in their classrooms so just as this progressive movement was bubbling up on the east coast of the United States and in Chicago it was also flourishing here in Hawaii in fact we could say we might have been one of the first countries to adopt a progressive approach to education in our public school system and so through this relationship long story short John Dewey visited Hawaii three times to give a series of lectures these lectures actually were led to the founding of the University of Hawaii and they also built strong relationships between Dewey and a number of folks here in Hawaii and I'd like to think that that was part of what inspired the founding of Hanaha Oli School. The history is actually that there was a fourth grade teacher from the Francis Parker School in Chicago who is traveling across the country giving public talks on how children could learn how to read through storytelling rich environments. Sophie Judd Cook attended the talk went up to this woman after the talk and said I'd love to start a school around these principles and philosophies and so was born Hanaha Oli School in 1918 and it was a true collaboration with these folks on the east coast that were experimenting with this approach to education and in fact John Dewey did visit Hanaha Oli School and I was gonna ask you that as Sophie wrote in her memoirs he gave it the green light and said this is everything I was thinking about when I was thinking about a progressive school and I just want to add that even though it was this partnership with the east coast from the very beginning in 1918 and I would argue the work that Townsend was doing in the public schools around the 1890s the progressive education that bubbled up in Hawaii was very much place-based and relevant to our particular multicultural environment and living in an island in the pacific and there's a lot of early writing about this in the journal about using a Hawaiian epistemology to nature study to teach science or when you look at Hanaha Oli School the way the whole school is architecturally designed and the different languages that were involved and the strong influence of Hawaiian culture and language in the school it was really a unique brand per se of progressive education that got born here in the islands. Well you know from what I know and you correct me if I'm wrong Amber, Lahaina Luna still has a working farm and all the in very dewy-esque type of style students would board there they had a boarding system like they get a fancy prep schools in the east coast and they would board kids but they actually made their own food I mean they you know they you know they harvested crops and they actually used their livestock you know they drank the milk from the cows and things like this so you know that's a very good example is this all true this is what I've heard and read but I wanted to make sure it was true about Lahaina Luna. Well I'm no expert on Lahaina Luna but I do know that when Townsend first arrived at Lahaina Luna he was actually coming from Kamehameha schools where he was an administrator the school had kind of fallen into disrepair and he himself traveled to Honolulu learned about becoming a draftsman learned about construction and he and the students helped repair all of the buildings at the school so I very much think that that goes along with the spirit that you're describing where the progressives really saw schools as embryonic democracies and as much as they could they should resemble life in an ideal democracy where people are working together collaboratively and thinking together about how to make their society run as best as possible. You know Amber this brings up another point you know we've discussed now you know your role at Honolulu and obviously this has a great history this school and a history and progressive education. Talk a little bit about your role as a professor at the University of Hawaii. Are you teaching classes and of course these students if you are would be much more mature and you know young adults so how does that all work? Yeah I have a really interesting role at the University of Hawaii we're fortunate to have a role called specialist and my work is really meant to serve the people of Hawaii through my capacity as a university professor and so like I've shared already part of my role is collaborating and creating a partnership with Honolulu school to create professional development programs for people across the state of Hawaii and beyond aligned to our progressive mission. In addition to that I also work in a teacher preparation program I primarily work with social studies teachers. I was a high school social studies teacher at Kailua High School for over 10 years prior to coming to the University of Hawaii at Manoa so I'm able to share from my personal experience from teaching in the DOE as well as my experience with progressive education. We also have a master's program in progressive philosophy and pedagogy that I co-direct with Dr. Chad Miller and this is a graduate program where folks get to use places like Honolulu and then a number of our partner schools in the Department of Education to experiment with progressive education and grow as progressive educators and my final role at the University I know it seems like a lot is I collaborate with the College of Arts Languages and Letters at the Ui Hero Academy for Philosophy and Ethics and Education and the Ui Hero Academy is the home of Philosophy for Children and Philosophy for Children is a worldwide movement that was started by an academic philosopher from the east coast as well at Montclair University and his name was Matthew Littman and he was a philosophy professor and he was getting students in his college level classes that he didn't think thought as well as they should or cared as much as they should for life in a democratic society and you can tell he was influenced by the writing of John Dewey as well and he believed that if you introduced philosophy into the K-12 setting that this would help improve children's affect and their dispositions towards school as well as their thinking and we are so fortunate to have an incredible human Dr. Tom Jackson who got to learn about Philosophy for Children from Matthew Littman as a philosophy professor here at the University of Poietmanoa and through his tireless devotion to this work has helped to found the Ui Hero Academy and what we do is support teachers and educators researchers and scholars worldwide who are interested in learning more about philosophy for children and you might be thinking in your head you know what does that mean are we having kids study Plato and Aristotle and Confucius but really what it is it's about this idea of little p philosophy we acknowledge that there is a canon of big p philosophers that are worth reading and studying but at at its heart we are all born philosophers we're all born with wonder and asking questions and this capacity to want to think big about what is our place in the world how does it work how do i fit into the world and so we can use philosophy the activity of philosophy in any classroom to help build these capacities and children and my coming back to my story of having gone to a progressive elementary school and then wanting to become a teacher and really wanting to emulate a lot of the practices that i'd experienced as a child when i was learning to become a teacher at the University of Poietmanoa i took Tom Jackson's class and at all of a sudden everything clicked i had these ideas in my head about the type of teacher that i wanted to be learning by doing constructivist asking questions learning how to think building community but i didn't have a classroom practice to bring that to life and when i learned about philosophy for children this was an actual practice that i could translate my progressive philosophy of education into the work that i did in my classroom so for over 10 years in the Department of Education i used philosophy for children or a philosopher's pedagogy as my approach to teaching high school social studies that's wonderful and you know you mentioned something as an aside and i think it's important for our viewers to know that when you're talking about you know basically the 19th century you're talking about the Hawaii kingdom and then the territory until the 1950s of Hawaii and then eventually statehood um also you know you brought up the DOE and you're teaching in the DOE because we have a statewide department of education you mentioned the DOE does that facilitate your work you know because you know you're going through one one body as opposed to many school districts like you'd have on the continent so does that facilitate your your ability to reach teachers and students or is it you know a mixed bag or how do you feel about it yeah so it's interesting the work that we do to advance progressive education and advance the progressive education movement especially we examine this in our master's program is you can take schools like Hanaholi school which from the top down is designed to be a progressive school um and then we have a number of schools some here in our department of education that are more traditional um and we like to look at growing progressive education from the bottom up and what we mean by this is philosophy for children is a completely invitational activity um it's never anything that we want to force people to adopt from the top down and we work with teachers who are interested so teachers reach out to us they say we've heard about philosophy for children we've seen people doing this we see how the kids respond in some cases we see how this improves test scores we'd love to work with you to grow our practice as philosophy for children practitioners so although we have a statewide public school system the work that we do to grow this progressive practice and just spread philosophy for children is really done by the with from the bottom up working with individual teachers and then in some cases we have schools where there's a critical mass of teachers who are practicing this at their school like Waikiki Elementary and Sunset Beach Elementary and Kailua High School and Waimanalo Elementary and Intermediate and in addition to working with the teachers we also work with the administration and these become model schools much like John Dewey's experimental school at the University of Chicago where we have a number of teachers in the school practicing philosophy for children and we can bring researchers and scholars and educators from across the state to come and learn about philosophy for children at these schools so I'm not sure if that directly answers your question but we don't need to use a model of a centralized school system in order to do professional development to spread this approach to teaching and learning it's something very much that we do through our relationships with individual teachers schools and principals so if you can what kind of things for example are happening at because you mentioned Waikiki Elementary school what are kind of some of the things that are happening there or do you know about that that's kind of yeah yeah so um well I'll speak to the influence of philosophy for children and you know over the years what we've developed is a model for schools that are interested in promoting philosophy and ethical thinking in their schools and what this entails is number one having some sort of introductory experience where teachers get to learn about the practice of philosophy for children and there are very specific classroom practices which involve establishing intellectual safety building community creating a tool for turn taking in the community and then we have a process for engaging in philosophical dialogue and thinking with one another and so we introduce teachers to this then we also create at the school a professional community of inquiry where the teachers get to experience it with their colleagues and their peers and use philosophy in their faculty meetings to help them think about professional problems of practice and the third part of the model is we have somebody called a philosopher in residence who is usually usually a university professor or a graduate student from the University of Hawaii who comes and supports the teachers who are doing P for C or philosophy for children at their school so if you come to Waikiki school on any given day there might be teachers having philosophy for children sessions in their classrooms and in addition you would see a philosopher in residence from the University of Hawaii that would be in those classrooms supporting their practice thinking alongside children as they engage in philosophical inquiry and also finding time to reflect with teachers afterwards and build their practice and over the years Waikiki elementary has just grown exponentially its philosophy for children practice and alongside that they've adopted a program called habits of mind where they're also teaching kids critical habits of mind that help with ethical engagement and thinking about the world that they live in so I hope that gives you a little bit of glimpse I could even paint a better picture of what a philosophy for children session looks like but Tom Jackson has been the philosopher in residence at Waikiki school for years as well as my colleagues Toby and Chad Miller and Ben Lukey that's really wonderful and you've got the you've got the key guy with Professor Jackson there I see so if if you're coming into an elementary school and you have to give the first lesson what do you talk to the kids about in terms of philosophy and ethics yeah it's interesting we really like to make clear that it's really difficult to do good thinking if you don't feel intellectually safe and you don't feel like you're a part of a community you really can't separate good thinking with some of those social emotional elements of school and so on our very first day with children what we do is we establish intellectual safety and this is the idea that you can ask any question or state any point of view as long as you're respectful of everyone in the classroom and to do this we make a tool called the community ball and what it involves is sharing some answers to questions that relate to yourself relate to what you're going to study in the classroom and we literally work with kids to make this yarn ball that we then cut and create and it becomes a tool for turn taking during our philosophical inquiries and what those look like is kids sitting in a circle uh kids generating questions about things that they wonder about putting all of those questions up on the board then allowing children to vote on the question that they want to talk about the most and then the student's question who gets chosen becomes the student that starts our inquiry and they take the community ball and share their initial thinking about it and then we use the community ball to take turns as a class but really the first day is about making sure it's a safe place where they feel like they can share their ideas and and make mistakes and and help each other correct their thinking and get better at it um that's interesting so like the first day is or maybe the first week is laying down the rules of engagement as it were a hundred percent um a lot of uh progressive education is around a lot of planning ahead of time by teachers and putting structures in place so that you can have an authentic experience that student led and where students are engaged and um yes the very first day is setting up what are those rules of how we're going to agree to think together well for the rest of the year you know what we're running out of time here but in the last couple of minutes what i'd like you to do amber is talk about um how do you get at ethical issues especially if the kids are young um because you know i mean there's certain things you probably don't want to talk about with uh young children but maybe you do so um how do you deal with the ethical part of your job well uh children are born curious um they are observing a lot more about the world we live in than many times adults give them credit for and in the work that we do we really want the questions to come from children and so as children are experiencing the world around them whether that be in their families may there be something they saw on the news as they get increasingly older in social media uh we ask them to generate questions about things that they're curious from and from there we build out the inquiry and uh the ways in which adults support this right is that they're able to offer additional perspectives or points of view or they start to think about well the the children are really interested in fairness here's a story i'm going to go find from the library that might bolster our thinking around this but i think the most important thing when we're talking about approaching ethical issues with children is that it starts from their own wonder and their curiosity about the world and oftentimes things that they're finding problematic and that they have deeper questions that they really need adults to think alongside with them and so what we're really doing is providing a safe space to ask those questions and then we're giving them tools to think about those questions responsibly with others where they can hear multiple perspectives and points of view you know um you ended with a very nice um comment um and i think it it touches on both uh philosophical approach and your ethical approach that is that there are many many different points of view and ways of getting at different intellectual issues and i i think that's such a such a nice way um to um end this but i have one last question is so will you continue this work or are you are you investigating other work um you were talking about writing doing some work about john dewey coming to hawaii um what's your what's the future look like uh for uh dr amber uh makayau i am 100 committed to continuing this work here in hawaii i am currently really focused on how do we strengthen university and school partnerships to help use schools to create a better future society and i think this is something that dewey and parker were really trying to crack at the university of chicago over 130 years ago and so i'm determined to find um institutional structures where we can be working as a larger system of education to make the lives of children and our communities better as well as our planet that so desperately needs our attention so more to come um along the same strand but i too like to approach my life as an exam in life and i go where the inquiry takes me uh and use my experience to build on what i know to help support the work of others that are interested in doing this work as well well um dr amber makayau we are so grateful for your um discussion of your philosophical and ethical approach to education and uh in the larger context of the dewey do we ask progressive education thank you for being a member of this podcast and for all of those watching uh Journeys of the Mind comes out every two weeks and we hope you will spread the news and of course anything you can contribute to think tech hawaii would be much appreciated aloha