 Aloha, I'm Carol Monly and this is our new series, Education Matters, which is a program that will explore education-related information that affects not just formal programs like K through 12 and higher education and professional schools, but anything that informs the broader community. Today, I'm really happy to have as my guest Chelsea DeMott, who is a student, a graduate student, has been a graduate student at UH Manoa and is currently the president of Phi Alpha Theta, which is a national history honor society. So, welcome. Thank you so much for having me today, Carol. Thank you. So, tell me a little bit about Phi Alpha Theta and the Hawaii chapter, which you are president of. So, Phi Alpha Theta began in 1921, the national organization. In 1984, our local Hawaii chapter was founded by Dr. Robert McGlone. He's a long-term faculty member at UH Manoa. In the history department, right? Yes, taught for 45 years. He's definitely, he was the head. He was a heart of our organization. And he built upon something that's great. Our focus is promoting history in higher education and to an extent to the community. And so this is the Hawaii chapter. Yes, and we're known as Alpha, Beta, Epsilon. I see. And you are the president of Alpha, Beta, Epsilon for the year. Yes. I'm very excited. It's been a great opportunity. Uh-huh. So, tell me some of the things that Phi Alpha, that PAT has been doing. I guess it's easier to say PAT. Yes. That's also okay. Recently, this past year, we have been in the World History Association. We have helped volunteer at the conference. They were held at HPU in January. And we actually had some of our members participate, which is a great honor for us. And we're able to fundraise and served as volunteers to help them run it. So the World History Association, that tells us what that is. That is a national organization. It is actually, I believe, an international organization. International. And we are helping with their regional conference, so it's everything on the Pacific, West Coast, and then Hawaii. And so this year, they're holding it at HPU, Hawaii Pacific University, at the Loha Tower. Right. So, and again, this dovetails into the goals of PAT. Yes. This is because we want to be part of, like, even other organizations that involve history. We want to have our students reach out to other groups, participate in other conferences, and generally share our ideas. It's a lot of pride for us to be out there and doing things in the community. Right. So, in addition to that as a goal, what are your, you mentioned some of the conferences that you've been doing and the WHA one, were you all participating as conference presenters too? Yes. Some students presented, they submitted their papers and they were able to present. We are very honored that one of our students, Lee English, actually didn't want an award over there. Oh, which, and what was Lee's topic, and what was the award for? I believe he was, he did a paper upon China. I have to look to expand upon it more. And I believe he wanted an honorary award for his writing abilities. And how big is your chapter in terms of number of members? And do you also have faculty members, and are students just from UH or are they from all over the islands? In terms of our faculty members, a lot of our faculty are file-pathetic members and we do have two faculty advisors. When Dr. McLoan retired, we ended up with Dr. Jolly and Dr. Karen Jolly and Dr. Peter Hopperberg volunteered to serve as our new faculty members and they've been just wonderful. They've been a huge support. We couldn't have done this without them. And they're both faculty members at UH Manoa in the history department. Yes, yes. And about how many student members do you have right now? About current student members that are active, I believe about at least 30, 35. And are they all from Manoa? Yes, they're all from Manoa and also this includes all past members as well because BAPA Theta is a lifetime membership. We do invite other alumni to go and submit papers to participate in our organization. And we actually do have a lot of alumni coming as well. We are based at the UH Manoa campus and this is because each school has its own chapter. For example, Shamanad, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University and BYUH Hawaii, they all have their own FAPA Theta chapters. But you are the president of just the Hawaii UH Manoa? Yes. And about how many in the state of Hawaii do you think there are? A member? Yes. That's a great question. We only ever see them during our regional conferences. We're definitely probably the biggest chapter. Overall, it's got to be at least 75 to 100 ballpark, that's what I'm guessing from what I've seen. Right. So tell me, we just showed a great picture of the flag, I believe, what you would call it. Yes. So that's your motto. Well, let's see what it says. Phi Alpha Theta. Yes. A Greek, the Greek words out of letters and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the National History Honor Society. Yes. And you can see our chapter name right there as well, Alpha, Beta, Epsilon. Right. So can anyone join? In order to join, you do have to have at least four classes within history and maintain a GPA of 3.1. We actually are now restricted to history majors. We encourage people from other disciplines to join as well, anyone with a love of history. As long as they've taken enough required classes and have maintained an overall GPA of 3.0, we more than welcome them. We've had people from political science, philosophy, American studies, we're really an inclusive group. And we love sharing other ideas, other opinions, because each group, each department has a kind of their own way of looking at things. And then I know you recently had a conference about a few weekends ago, right? I think we have a copy. That is the cover of the program, which I believe you also designed. Yes, I did. Is that right Chelsea? You have many talents. Thank you. So can we read what that says? Yes. It says it was a 33rd annual Hawaii Regional Meeting of Alpha, Beta. It is where we are, the narratives that define us. Right. And where was that held? It was actually held at Shyamalan University. We are very honored because this was the first time that Shyamalan has ever hosted a regional conference. We do this once a year, typically in March, around spring break. And typically they were held at UH Mānoa for many, many years. And so we reached out to our fellow chapters. And we had people volunteer to use their campuses. And we love it because we love traveling around. We love seeing all these new ideas, new campuses that we all otherwise normally would not. So we've been to HPU at Aloha Tower. And we've also been to BYUH at Abenālaie. And next year, I believe, we might be doing it back at UH Mānoa. And then we're going to hopefully go to UH Hilo at some point. Okay, that's wonderful. Well, the conference is really important because in terms of educating Yes. the community, of course, the historians. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the papers that were presented and the topics that were covered? Yes. In the last chapter, this last conference, we had a lot of Hawaii based papers, which is very important because that history sometimes is not talked about, especially in certain, how should I put it? Because all the papers that we have, actually, we're going to submit on to the Biennial Conference. And what is the Biennial Conference? The Biennial Conference is held every two years. It's going to be the National Conference. Oh, Phi Alpha. Phi Alpha Theta. And having Hawaii papers makes a huge difference because the history is not very talked about on the mainland. Right. It's how important is that? It is. We're usually the only representations of any Hawaii history-pacific histories. And it's amazing going and seeing everyone's faces, learning about all these new things. And they ask a lot of questions. And it's a great honor for us. So I know that, of course, we as the 50th state are as far west as you can go. So I assume you're the only Phi Alpha Theta chapter in the entire Pacific, is that right? I mean, not beyond California, it may have. Only us, Charmin, are the other choppers, too. Right, of course, within Hawaii. Yes, I don't believe, I thought a long time ago there was talks about maybe doing a chapter on Guam. That would be really interesting. I'm thinking about reaching out more to the Pacific, because they are our neighbors and we would like to encourage them to also participate in history and then encourage them to submit papers and even do a teleconference maybe. So the papers that were submitted at the conference recently were from all of the different schools who participated. Within Hawaii. Within Hawaii. Within Hawaii. So it's our own regional and a lot of Phi Alpha Theta chapters do this even on the mainland. They'll have a regional based conference and then every two years we go to the national. Right, and so you mentioned some of the topics all relating to Pacific and the Hawaii region, right? So do you have a sense of are there emerging issues that are becoming more popular or discussed that would be perfect to bring to the mainland for further discussion? Oh, definitely. I know Uwe Veki Hopkins, she's been doing research on voyaging and that's been a very interesting topic and she also been talking about the new Disney movie with Moana. That was her last presentation and some of the parallels with Gardening with Pacific History and the movie. Fascinating. It was, I loved it. It was incredibly interesting. Right, and do you give awards at these, at the conference? Yes, at the Phi Alpha Theta conference here we do give awards. We have about, I think we're up to over 10 awards and it's nice because it honors all the students for their hard work and it helps also almost bring up the, it's good confidence because then they get their, they practice, sometimes this is a very first conference and that makes a huge difference to the students and we help coach them, we teach them how to do it and they get a better idea of public speaking and presenting their research, especially if they want to go on to more academic careers or higher education to graduate school, to like become a doctorate and so this is often the very first time of doing it and we're very proud to help introduce students to that. Yeah, so these papers, are they also distributed to locally in terms of how would a person from Hawaii who might be interested in reading more about this but is not a member of Phi Alpha Theta? Actually our conference is open to the public. So we do send out some invitations, especially we have some long-term community members that do come, so especially also the families as well. So through families we've had a lot of guests come and also too for some of our talks we promote some of the history department talks at UH Manoa and we present those emails out, we send them out to alumni, anyone who's on our email list. So if anyone's more interested in joining our email list we would love to send out more information. So how do they contact you to get on? Because I think people would be very interested in reading, finding out what the topics are that you've covered, voyaging, whatever other issues relating to Hawaii and the Pacific but how do you get ahold of them? How are they gonna get ahold of them? Our best way to get ahold of us is through our email which is Pat Manoa, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at Hawaii.edu. That's very simple. Yes. Manoa at Hawaii.edu. And that way they can contact you as president and you would be able to direct them to getting more information about publications, fundraising and other information. Because we love our community, we want to be more part of it. We think that's probably one of our strongest, our people and our community is our strongest asset within our organization. Do you, are you involved at all in high schools? We actually do participate in Hawaii History Day which is a big statewide event. The kids, high school students compete. They do papers, they've done presentations. They've done, I've seen posters. They get really creative and I've actually judged before I've had other members judge as well. Dr. Karen Jolly, she's a big supporter of this. She's involved a lot. And we go, it's amazing what these high school students can do. Yeah. Well, you know what, we're gonna take a break and come right back because I think that you mentioned we haven't actually said the date. Oh yeah, so it's coming up. Right, so as soon as we come back from our break we're gonna announce the date for History Day in Hawaii. So we'll be right back as my guest, Chelsea Demont. Thank you. Are you looking to get shrunk? Join us on Shrink Rap Hawaii. My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I see couples, individuals, families, because you know why? Because we all have problems. And if you're curious about shrinks and what they talk about, come look at my show, Shrink Rap Hawaii. And maybe you'll find your shrink. You wanna talk about some socially sensitive issues relevant to women? Listen to these guys. Well, I think it's important in Judaism that we don't take the Bible literally, we take it seriously. I agree. And really the key to understanding Christianity is compassion. If you're compassionate towards other people you are living a Christian life. And that relates also to dealing with women and men and women issues as well. Are women and men equal? They're equal. Who's better? Who's better? Welcome back. This is my guest, Chelsea Demont, who is the president of the Hawaii chapter called Alpha Beta Epsilon of the National History Honorary History Society, History Honorary Society called Phi Alpha Theta, which so we're very proud to have you here. And the importance of history and maintaining the interest and pursuing research and writing and engaging the public and others in history is really more important than ever, I think. Especially right now, definitely. Especially right now, lest we forget our history. So we left before the break the very important information is to the date for the History Day that's coming up. Yes, Hawaii History Day, the State Fair is gonna be held on April 15th at Windward Community College. And we definitely encourage the community to come and join us. We'll have a booth there. And it's pretty much the finals for all the Hawaii History Day competitions. And what are those competitions? Are they high school or college? High schools. I see. Yes, those are the ones that we do judge every year. I've participated before. And again, these projects are incredible and have really high hopes for future historians. Okay, so this means, is it just public schools or public and private schools? Public and private. And so History Day, all the history, different history, teachers and courses participate by projects? Yes. Or is it papers? Actually, there's different categories. So there are projects, there are papers, even performing arts. No kidding. Yes, in history. Yes, unfortunately, I wasn't able to see it last time because I was judging the posters, but there is performing arts and there's even, I think, visual, like documentary. Right, and so this, wow. So this is a full day of activity at Windward. And then your role, PAT's role, is to facilitate in terms of judging and what else do you do? We're also gonna give information about the history department at UH and the Honor Society in general. So we do wanna encourage students, one of our big things is that we wanna show them that history is a very viable field of study. We do this at the History Day and we also do this at Manoa Experience when the schools from around the area come to UH and they tour the campus as another one of our big events. And so at both events, we try to promote history as a field of study. We talk about the positive things such as you become a lawyer, there's all these different fields. Because our main problem is we notice that a lot of parents don't encourage history as a field of study. We don't see it as almost a viable career option, but we're trying to show them like, no, the skills that you learn in this can take you anywhere. Right, so your skill and your background in history, your undergraduate major who's in history, and I know that you've actually had a couple of changes in your career, right? And your master's is in... Library science. Right, but did you decide to continue in library science? No, I did not. I realized I wanted to be in a field that was more personable and more hands-on in people like storytelling. And so I went back to UH. I looked into doing the filmmaking program and then I did hospitality and I really enjoyed that. And so now you're going to use your history background in hospitality. So tell me how that's going to enhance your future career in hospitality. Definitely some of the enhancements is that I want to share with our guests and to anyone else. I'd like to join our history in a very accurate but in a very entertaining way. What do you say our history? As Hawaii, our local history, because I did notice sometimes in hospitality there is a problem with maybe the accurate information not being portrayed in favor of more entertainment-wise. So that's actually going to be my study is that I'm going to be doing a research paper on tourism and how that can alter the narrative of a place and focus here on Waikiki. Very interesting, very important. Yes, definitely. Of course, many of our larger resorts and hotels often have cultural parts of their tourist package, whether it's the hula or laymaking, but the historical part would be very valuable and therefore that's something that you with the history measures can go into. And actually the new trend is nowadays, especially some of our repeat guests, they really want to engage in real local history and they want to learn more about this place because they've grown a lot, but they come visit a lot and they want to do more. So does PAT and your chapter do anything in terms of the visitor industry, educating, outreach? Unfortunately, not to that extent. However, upcoming in August, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, they're going to come visit. Dr. Karen Jolly is one of our faculty members. She's in charge of this. She's helping host the conference here at UH. ISAS, right? Yes. And we will be actually doing an excursion in downtown Honolulu and our members, myself and a few other members are going to volunteer as tour guides. That's wonderful. And where are you going to go? We're going to go to Eolani Palace, Eolani Halle. We're going to be going to Kauai Hau Church, St. Andrews Cathedral. Do you go to Chinatown? And I guess it's not as historical as some of the other. Yeah. So we're going to focus on that for probably the day. And we hope it's going to be very interesting and informative and we hope you learn something from it. All right. So that means, is that just your chapter, the UH Manoa chapter will be involved? Yes, it'll be our chapter. I see. Great. So we've talked about other outreach issues and we've talked about awards. I know we have some great pictures of some awards that we can show. So we have two women here holding an award. These are our beloved faculty member and our former president Shirley Buchanan. On the left you'll see Dr. Karen Jolly on the right Shirley Buchanan. And when we went to the Biennial Conference in Orlando in 2016, Shirley was honored with an award for her participation in the national chapters. I see. And it was a huge honor because we actually sent 16 students from Hawaii to Orlando. We fundraised everything, the airfare and the hotels were all taken care of and we were the biggest chapter to participate in the entire country. That's amazing. It is. It's wonderful. And then we have another award. Oh yes. And faculty does hold a national competition between all the chapters. How many chapters are there, did you say? Oh, this is within the whole national. Right. There must be just hundreds. Hundreds of chapters. Hundreds of chapters. And we are fortunate enough, Ullevehi Hopkins, one of our great members. She's very tech savvy. She created a whole scrapbook of everything that we do throughout the year and she submitted that in 2014 and in 2016 we won best national chapters. That's amazing. It is. It was a huge honor. We're so proud of ourselves. Like everything we've done. That's great. And I think we have one more award that we wanted to show. And this is Dr. Robert McLoan and he is our founder, as I mentioned before, of our chapter. He was our faculty member for 45 years and he was truly like, he was a rock. He made everything of this possible and we owe everything to him and what he's done in his efforts. We miss him dearly. He retired in 2013 and then he passed away a couple of years later and we miss him all the time but we hold on to the hope that we've made him proud. And we want to continue this in the future. Yes, he's very beloved. Yeah, well thank you Chelsea. So tell us a little bit more about your fundraising efforts and how do you sustain yourself? How do you get contributions and how do you sustain yourself? We do. I remember a service we were especially good at writing because we're history majors. One of our great skills is we do some brand writing which helps us because we also have to sponsor the regional conferences. We help put in money for that and also because it's such an expense to go to the mainland and send our students there with airfare and hotel, we fundraise all the time. We do book sales, which are great faculty at UH Manoa including Dr. McGlone who left us his collection of books. We sell them every month, one dollar each. So please check us out on campus. We're gonna have another one in April. So any kind of books? Typically history books. These come from our professors, but we've seen some really random things. We've had romance novels. We've got books on gardening. So we have a huge variety and also we have bake sales. Our member- We have a picture here of a bake sale. Katherine Ulleb, one of our great members, she and her family actually made all of those baked, like they stayed up a couple of days making all those items for us to sell at a bake sale at Sako Maki Hall. She's a huge support. And then also surely, as I mentioned before, former president, she makes aprons. She makes aprons. She makes aprons. So what we try to do is all of our members have great skills in addition to being historians and we try to find ways to kind of do little things to make our money and help support our chapter. We're really, we're here for each other. And I think that's what makes our chapter really great. Yeah, so you mentioned your book sales, your bake sales. Do you also take in contributions? Yes, of course. We have had great support from our community members. And please email me at Padmanoa, I think, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at hawai.edu for more information. Our checks are typically made out of alpha, beta, epsilon, our region chapter. So please let me any information that you need. And also too, if you need any volunteer work within the community, we would love to have more opportunities to do that as well. Yeah, let's repeat that email address. Padmanoa, P-A-T-M-A-N-O-A at hawai.edu for all inquiries. Right, there we have it on the screen. Padmanoa at hawai.edu, thank you. So in terms of finances, how much money a year are you trying to raise to cover your travel expenses, your various expenses that you have? What's your budget? Our budget, I'll have to talk, Shirley's actually our treasurer. I just tried to manage with the other stuff. Everything financial-wise, she and Dr. Hoffenberg typically take care of. We just, we do have goals in coming up soon because we do have to start getting tickets for New Orleans because we want to send 12 students out there. And what's happening in New Orleans? In 2018, we have our next Biennial National Conference. So P-A-T sponsors a Biennial Conference every two years. And the next one is in New Orleans. And so we need to send at least a dozen or 12 dozen students out. And that's going to be coming up January 3rd through the 7th. So right before we start UH Manoa this school semester, we're going to go over there, represent Hawaii, do it proud. And I'm sure by the time we will fundraise, we can do it. We have a lot of faith in each other and I know we can do this together. And your goal and part is to bring to the national information papers regarding Hawaii and the Pacific. The history here, we have the Hawaii Pacific and also Asia as well. We bring in a lot of Asia papers. It's interesting because every time I go to the national chapter, I end up going in all these, we meet all these new people. And actually at this last one, we recruited a graduate student who was interested in joining our chapter. We gave him information. He ended up applying to UH Manoa and joining our- Wonderful. Joining our organization. Yeah. So there's also this community outreach on the national level. Right, all right. So can you long term think in terms of the future of PAT and the study of history and how it relates to the importance of continuing the interest in sharing what PAT does in Hawaii. I think what a very unique stage in the study of history is that we are still doing papers and everything, but I think we're also getting an interest and a broader interest. For example, I like documentaries. There's so many ways to portray history. There's so many ways to kind of expand upon it. And I think we're gonna be more creative in the future. I think the future will be incredible for the study of history. And I think we just need to let students know, future students, that history is a great field to be in. You get awesome skills. And history is a study of stories, almost. The human story. It's interesting. It's fun. And as you say, of course, you learn how to write to research. But in your own individual experience, applying that in the field of tourism is a wonderful expansion of, the narrow thinking of history is that you can only maybe teach or write, but actually applying it to a much broader community. You could take it anywhere. And I have to say that the skills that I learned through Phi Alpha Theta, including my very first conferences were through Phi Alpha Theta, and I learned how to speak. And that's one of the skills that I can never, that's invaluable to me. Because I used to be very shy. I could never do this. Well, we're almost done. And I want you to take one look in the camera too, Chelsea, and remind people about your upcoming history day. Yes. And anything you want to say. Thank you. I just want to let everyone know, please join us on April 15th at Wynward Community College. And we're going to have the history state fair. And we would love for the community to come to support our local high school students. And for any, we're going to have more fundraisers. And for any community inquiries, we would love to do volunteer work. We love to do organizational work. And so please, we want to hear from you. And again, email me at patmanoa.whai.edu. And we look forward to working with everyone. We're proud of where we're from, and we want to represent that to the rest of the world. Thank you. Thank you so much, Chelsea, P-A-T. And the work that you do with the history, study of history is so important. Thank you for coming. No, thank you so much for having me, Carol. I really appreciate it. Thank you for being a support. Okay, aloha'a. Thank you.