14 Mar People
At CRDG, our strength is our people. These are just a few of the talented and creative people whose work is featured throughout this report.
Val Krohn-Ching
Val Krohn-Ching, a faculty member and head of the Art Section at CRDG, was selected as the Hawai‘i Art Educator of the Year for 2004 by the National Art Education Association (NAEA). The award recognizes an individual for outstanding service and contribution to art education. In nominating Val for this award, Hawai‘i Art Education Association president Betty Lou Williams emphasized Val’s long years of service to the field in both teacher training and graduate studies as a faculty member; her teaching, through which she has influenced generations of students; her commitment to continuing education for teachers; and her contributions to the development of art education standards for the state of Hawai‘i. In addition, Val is a working artist whose art pieces have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and a scholar whose publications emphasize cross cultural inquiry. Val has works in the permanent collections of the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, the City and County of Honolulu, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts, as well as in private collections around the world.”. Krohn-Ching exemplifies the highly qualified individuals active in the field of art education today: leaders, teachers, students, scholars, and advocates who give their best to the professions,” said NAEA president Mary Ann Stankiewicz. Examples of Val’s work can be seen locally in the lobby of the Paliku Theater at Windward Community College and at the Honolulu International Airport (near gate 20).
Kati Kuroda
CRDG was happy to welcome Kati Kuroda home in 2004. Kati had been teaching art and drama at the Laboratory School for thirteen years when she left in 1983. Feelings of burnout and a need to feed herself artistically led her to move to New York, where she ended up staying for twenty-one years working as a professional actress and director with such groups as Roundabout Theater, Manhattan Theater Club, Pan Asian Rep, and Shakespeare in the Park.
Kati believes it was fate that brought her back to the Laboratory School. The convergence of a desire to return home, an accident that kept her from working, and a call from ELS to see if she might be interested in teaching again, resulted in her return to the school in the fall of 2004. Kati is happy to be home, and feels she has so much more to give to the students after the experience she gained in New York. As for teaching again, she is “having a great time!”
Francis M. Pottenger and Sandra Shimabukuro
Francis M. Pottenger and Sandra Shimabukuro use the Hawai‘i Interactive Television System, or HITS, to work with teachers throughout the state to upgrade science instruction in the elementary grades. Participants in the HITS programs have taken a professional development course to implement CRDG’s award winning elementary science program Developmental Approaches in Science, Health and Technology (DASH). The HITS programs, which are broadcast over cable television, provide field support to teachers on all the islands to help them implement the inquiry-based DASH program in their classrooms. The programs have been supporting elementary science education for over ten years and have served over 1,000 teachers. Recently, the program has helped teachers focus on action research in order to fulfill the DOE’s new professional development requirements. The weekly sessions concentrate on grade level-specific science content, instructional and assessment strategies, sharing of classroom experiences, and guidance in preparing the required Learning Results Portfolio.
Erin Baumgartner
Since 1999 CRDG has partnered with the University of Hawai‘i Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (EECB) program in a National Science Foundation project known as Graduate Fellows in Grades K-12 Education, GK-12 for short. The GK-12 program provides fellowships to EECB graduate students to work with K-12 teachers and students. The program’s goals include improving the fellows’ communication skills, strengthing teachers’ content knowledge and ability to teach science as inquiry, and positively impacting student achievement. Erin Baumgartner has been involved since the program began.
Erin first got involved in K-12 education when she became a GK-12 fellow while pursuing her PhD in zoology. As a fellow, Erin worked with the teachers and students at Kawananakoa Middle school, sharing her research in the behavioral ecology of fishes. When Erin completed her PhD in 2002, she joined the faculty at CRDG and became co-PI and education coordinator for the GK–12 project. She also became a GK–12 teacher partner when current fellow Chela Zabin joined her ninth-grade marine science class at ELS to work on a project to monitor intertidal biodiversity. Being immersed in all aspects of the program has been invaluable to Erin in her work with the GK–12 fellows, teachers, and administrators.
Morris Lai
Since January 2004, Morris Lai has been an active participant in the Evaluation Hui, a group of Maori and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) evaluators working on the development and dissemination of evaluation methods appropriate for evaluations involving indigenous peoples. In November 2004 Morris, together with Fiona Cram from Katoa, Ltd. in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Kanani Aton from INPEACE in Hilo, and Alice Kawakami from the University of Hawai‘i at MƒÅnoa College of Education, presented a Presidential Strand panel entitled “Decolonizing Evaluation Practice: Indigenous Values and Methods as Improvements for Evaluation Practice” at the annual meeting of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) in Atlanta, GA. The panelists expect to receive support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to further develop the approach and to make presentations in 2005 at the AEA conference in Toronto, Canada and at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education (WIPCE) in Hamilton, Aotearoa.
Measure Up is a Team Effort
The mathematics team of Barbara Dougherty, Claire Okazaki, Hannah Slovin, Fay Zenigami, and Linda Venenciano continued to attract international attention and interest in their work on the Measure Up elementary mathematics project in 2004. Barbara made presentations on the project at the International Congress of Mathematics Education in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Barbara and Hannah made presentations at the Psychology of Mathematics Education Conference in Bergen, Norway. The project has also attracted the attention of funders interested in improving student achievement in mathematics. To date, funding has come from a broad range of public and private organizations including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, Best Practices in Education, Open Society Institute, the Quadey Foundation, the David and Cecelia Lee Foundation, and the Harold K. L. Castle Foundation. The project team is currently at work on two book chapters they have been asked to author: one for an upcoming volume by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on research in the classroom, and another for an upcoming book on early algebra.