As a practitioner of p4c (philosophy for children) Hawai‘i, I love to explore the flow of (metaphorical) brackish waters. The intermingling of ideas from one world (my metaphorical wai) and the thoughts from another world (my metaphorical kai) oftentimes result in a creative intermingling that leads me to unexpected insights and new understandings. So it is that, on this quiet Sunday morning, the intersection of reading Hanahau‘oli Head of School Lia Woo’s posting in this blog (“Teachers as Scientists: Watching Life and Children Alertly”), a recent p4c inquiry that I shared with a remarkable group of children and youth, the many learnings that I have gained from Pono Shim, Miki Tomita, Hye Jung Kim Tano, & the rest of the Foundations of Aloha ‘ohana, and my colleague and friend Dr. Amber Makaiau’s patient encouragement, have inspired me to compose this posting.

Hanahau’oli School celebrated 100 years of joyous work in the 2018-19 school year. At the time, the Board of Trustees called on Hanahau’oli Head of School Lia Woo to think about her vision for the school for the near term. Woo studied the school’s history and educational philosophies, and reflected on her own personal experience learning and growing at Hanahau‘oli as a student to identify timeless and universal themes. The themes helped to provide a framework for thinking about the current and future world and helped to lay the foundation for her vision moving forward.

In the previous blog we reflected on changes experienced by faculty and staff over the course of the pandemic, regarding how and why they gather together. In this entry we continue to explore the art of gathering in the context of progressive philosophy and pedagogy by celebrating an enduring hallmark of the progressive education movement--the schoolwide assembly. Progressive education pioneer Colonel Francis Wayland Parker was the first to experiment with whole school gatherings as a regular part of the weekly school schedule. He called them “Morning Exercises,” and they were primarily student-led.

In his 1891 Talks on Pedagogics, one the most important thought leaders of the progressive education movement, Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, asserted, “Observation as a mode of attention, its relations to the central subjects of study, and its place in teaching, has significant educational value” (p. 107). A foundation to progressive philosophy and pedagogy — careful and first hand observation of self, society, and the natural world — is critical to a meaningful education. After all, explained Parker (2001), the motivation for lifelong learning “can only come to the one who gains some apprehension of the boundless knowledge and the depths of truth by actual personal experience” (pp. 128-129).

The spirit of Dewey is alive and well as we enter the sixth week of the University of Hawaiʻi’s Progressive Philosophy and Pedagogy program! Engaged in coursework, which requires participants to generate their own questions as a starting point for inquiry and learning--the thinking that has emerged from this first cohort of students has brought to the surface some of the biggest problems facing education in our time and have provided an incredible window into the ways progressive educators are well-poised to engage in tough work to address each issue.