Title: Associate Director & Instructor
Department: Curriculum Studies/Pacific Master in Education (PACMED)
College/School: College of Education
Showcase Course: EDCS 632 / Qualitative Research Methods
Email: nimmer@hawaii.edu
“Through experiential learning and community engagement opportunities, I strive to inspire my students to create positive changes in their homes, schools, villages, and the broader Pacific region.”
Table of Contents
Showcase Video
Teaching Philosophy
My philosophy is rooted in building relationships, focusing on relevant content, employing place-based cultural-sustaining teaching strategies, centering holistic development, and engaging communities. Education should nurture students’ identities, values, and connections to their cultural heritage.
I recognize the diversity within Pacific communities and prioritize Indigenous knowledge, languages, and customs. I aim to foster academic learning as well as social and emotional well-being while promoting critical thinking to address current challenges.
Through experiential learning and community engagement opportunities, I strive to inspire my students to create positive changes in their homes, schools, villages, and the broader Pacific region.
Teaching Practice
The Pacific Master in Education (PACMED) program prioritizes a team-teaching approach. The vision and labor of many colleagues–throughout many years–created the EDCS 632 Qualitative Research Methods course. The foundation created by this collaborative group of instructors laid the groundwork for the current innovation. This description focuses only on one strand of the course that built upon this earlier work and was added to the syllabus in Spring 2023.
The 42 PACMED candidates enrolled in the course were full-time professional educators in the Marshall Islands and Chuuk who were working on their graduate studies after hours. This is an online, cohort-based program with students living and continuing to work in their home communities.
This strand of systematic learning activities was intentionally designed to develop professional knowledge and skill development in the area of place-based, culturally-sustaining, ethical qualitative research methods. The scaffolded stand was grounded in Talanoa (storytelling/talk story), an Indigenous research method documented by Vaioletti (2006), which inspired the Marshallese equivalent, Bwebwenato. Ethical qualitative research using storytelling respects the cultural nuances of the diverse region of Oceania while privileging and prioritizing Indigenous knowledge, fostering community engagement, and ensuring the rights and dignity of research participants. This learning strand incorporated the following sequence, which was woven throughout the 16-week course:
1. Introduction to Talanoa and Bwebwenato, through sharing a journal article (Talanoa) and dissertation (Bwebwenato). Students engaged in group discussions about the components of Talanoa and posted key ideas on a Google Jamboard. The online group discussion focused on how the method could be applied and how it would feel to use it in their home communities.
2. Review of global uses of storytelling, including the StoryCorp project which archives oral interviews in the Library of Congress. As of January 2023, only three of the 325,000 StoryCorps interviews featured Micronesians, according to the database’s metadata. We watched and analyzed the videos and determined that all three featured Micronesians in the U.S.-based diaspora and that it could be ground-breaking to add to the Library of Congress archive by recording Micronesian stories in Micronesia–some in English and some in the Indigenous languages of the region.
3. Sharing ethnographic research studies, including details of culturally grounded ethical considerations and practices. I and a co-instructor (Dr. LJ Rayphand) shared our own research experiences in the Marshall Islands and Chuuk, respectively. Students engaged in group discussions about these methods and how relationship-building and the components highlighted on the earlier Jamboard (from #1 above) were implemented. They brainstormed about how they could employ these and other strategies to build trust and respect during talk story sessions of their own.
4. Learning from the past: ethical violations in Pacific research. By inviting community members from the Marshall Islands and co-instructors from Chuuk and American Samoa, students learned about and discussed the devastating real-life impacts of unethical research in the Pacific. Of note, the Commissioner of the Marshall Islands National Nuclear Commission shared about the nuclear weapons testing legacy through the lens of research ethics and their current efforts to enforce mandatory research guidelines for anyone conducting research in the Marshall Islands.
5. Crowd-sourcing data from the 42 students to answer a common research question. In the context of our class of professional educators, we focused on: What cultural knowledge or values do you want to pass down to Marshallese/Chuukese young people? Each of the 42 students reflected on their position as an educator, community member, parent, child, etc., and identified what one type of knowledge or value they wanted to include in the curriculum of their schools.
6. Practicing Talanoa/Bwebwenato while creating teaching and learning resources (audio recordings) for use in Marshallese and Chuukese schools.
*They identified an Indigenous expert on their chosen topic and determined how they would engage this person.
*Next, they used the online StoryCorps tool to record their interview/talk story session.
*Each limited their final audio to less than 5 minutes, tagged it with keywords, and determined whether to keep it private for only class viewing or post it to the public StoryCorps archive.
7. Storytelling as relationship-building and knowledge-sharing. Each student posted their recording to a class Padlet and wrote comments or posed questions on each other’s work. Those who chose to post publicly in the StoryCorps archive were encouraged to share the link with their family, friends, and the broader community.
By grounding the work in research methods developed in Oceania, this teaching strand honored the cultural values and practices of the students and co-instructors. In addition, the StoryCorps component addressed a significant issue of equity: exponentially increasing the representation of Micronesian voices in the Library of Congress archive. Those students who chose to publicly post their recordings contributed to the public body of resources available to the residents in the Marshall Islands and Chuuk, their brothers and sisters in the diaspora, and members of the general public.
This learning activity strand could be used across the field of education and more broadly in all social sciences. The StoryCorp platform is a useful tool for a vast range of learners across nearly all disciplines.
Impact
88% percent of students performed at the “excellent” level on the graded assessment. In addition, students demonstrated their skill mastery by posting their authentic work on Padlet and some chose to publicly share their work through the StoryCorps website.
Course evaluations revealed positive learning experiences. (NOTE: This only represents the students assigned to my section.) 100% of students strongly agreed that “the instructor both sets high standards and helps students achieve them” compared to 56% across the university. This indicates the scaffolded instructional approach and systematic implementation challenged the students while providing support for them to thrive.
Regarding group learning activities, one student wrote, “[I]t gives us confidence that we are working together and learning from each other.” Another appreciated the opportunity to learn from locally-based experts, “It is more meaningful to be in the footsteps of those who have done work in the field, but most of [all] because they are our people and from our islands.”
There are now exponentially more Micronesian voices represented in the National Archives at the Library of Congress. Some PACMED candidates indicated they would implement a pared-down version of this with their own students, which will extend the impact to Chuukese and Marshallese youth.
These results suggest that this approach to acquiring new knowledge and skills related to ethical, culturally-sustaining qualitative research methods was effective, engaging, and meaningful.