Performing Department
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Non Technical Summary
The Huaka'i 'Ike '?ina (HI'?) project builds a robust multi-campus higher education leadership pathway toward FANH careers in Hawaii through experiential, transdisciplinary and place-based learning. HI'? is a curriculum-to-career pathway between four University of Hawaii (UH) campuses that is grounded in Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK), Native Language Preservation, and integrated with western scientific approaches to teaching and learning about agri-food issues. Building on prior USDA-funded projects, including UP-BEAT (#2021-38426-35160), Hiag! (#2020-38426-32343) and Aloha '?inaAcademy (#2021-67037-34214), HI'?builds and expands a curriculum-to-career consortium to link Leeward Community College (LCC), Hawai'i Community College (HCC), UH West Oahu (UHWO) and UH M?noa (UHM) to strengthen the institutional capacity of each campus and the UH System to: 1) enhance educational equity for underrepresented students by addressing barriers in the curriculum; 2) prepare students for FANH related careers through leadership development and community-building skills; 3) collaboratively develop curriculum to improve coherence, facilitate of articulation between institutions and cross-campus course sharing; and 4) increased ITEK pedagogical capacity building. The post-secondary educational pathway will directly support 57 transfer students and 2 graduate assistantships.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
Although Hawai'i has historically excelled in agriculture, post-secondary student engagement and retention within Food, Agriculture, Natural Resources and Human Sciences (FANH) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines is low, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) students are underrepresented in these areas (Kerr et al. 2018). In addition, the current education system continues to teach FANH content primarily through a western science and narrow disciplinary lens, despite the need for innovation in post-secondary agrifood systems education (Ebel et al. 2020; Livstrom et al. 2022; Collier et al. 2024). The proposed coalition of 2 community colleges and 2 degree granting institutions include the University of Hawai?i -West Oahu (UHWO), Leeward Community College (LCC), Hawai?i Community College (HCC), and the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) at UH M?noa (UHM). HCC and LCC are both feeder community colleges to UHWO and UHM, 4-year undergraduate universities, which prepare students for graduate studies at UHM. LCC hosts programs in Sustainable Agriculture, HCC in Agroforestry Management, UHWO in Sustainable Community Food Systems and UHM has multiple programs under the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR). All programs are heavily experiential with strong community partnerships. Collectively, the individual institutions coalesce around shared values relating to meeting the needs of Hawai'i's food sovereignty, engaging in experiential and community-based activities, and supporting Indigenous and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (ITEK) as a way to heal our food systems and support the cultural renaissance led by Native Hawaiian organizations and community leaders. Each campus has the required bona fide experience with experienced PIs/Co-PIs (see § d. below). They also converge interests in desiring to create stronger transfer and shared curricular experiences geared to NHPI and underrepresented students.This project is a Education/Teaching Consortium Project in the Need Areas: i.) Curricula Design, Materials Development ii) Faculty Preparation and Enhancement for Teaching and v.) Student Experiential Learning. It is aligned to the USDA's Strategic Plan Goal 2: Ensure America's Agricultural System is Equitable, Resilient and Prosperous and is aligned to USDA's Science and Research Strategy Priority 5: Translating Research into Action. It includes activities on 1) Enhancing educational equity for underrepresented students, 2) Strengthening institutional educational capacities, 3) Preparing students for careers related to FANH, and 4) Maximizing the development and use of resources to improve FANH educational programs. Specifically the consortium (called a "Coalition") focuses on impacts in building upon a FANH curriculum to career pathway with agribusiness and community organizations in support of revitalizing and strengthening sustainable, culturally relevant and socially equitable food systems in Hawai?i, and will be a model for ITEK curriculum nationally and internationally focused on Hawai?i and Pacific ITEK. There is growing international scientific consensus around the urgent need for food system transformation to address the many ecological and social externalities driven by food and agriculture and promote health (Webb et al. 2020; von Braun et al 2021; Zurek et al. 2022). NHPI communities living in Hawai?i and the Pacific Islands are some of the most negatively impacted by dysfunctional and vulnerable food systems, e.g., high rates of NCDs (non-communicable diseases) like obesity, diabetes and chronic illness (Hawaii State Government, 2024) and face the greatest external threats to their food systems such as food chain supply issues, smaller economies of scale, dependence on foreign imports, climate change and disasters (Parsons, C., 2022, USAID, 2024; Salem, S., 2020, Pacific Island Times, 2022) and the COVID-19 pandemic (Davila, F. et al., 2021) facing high prices, acute shortages, or an overabundance of poor nutritional value processed foods. Many of the current vulnerabilities in Hawai?i and Pacific Islands food systems are a result of a history of external forces imposing political and economic changes on the islands and their communities (Look et al. 2020). Creating healthy, equitable, resilient, and sustainable food systems requires knowledgeable and skilled knowledge-holders in food production and distribution, FANH policy development and administration (e.g., local and national government agencies, including the USDA), education, community-based organizations and other NGOs, and others within adjacent disciplines that help to understand and design solutions in food systems.?Innovation: Creativity and indigenous knowledge are challenging how western science has conventionally functioned (de Araujo Goes, et. al. 2023). The co-applicants all focus on indigenous agricultural models that support engagement of Native Hawaiian students. This project will involve undergraduate researchers to Wayfinding Huaka?i which integrate western science and Hawaiian knowledge and thereby challenge modalities of western thought and assumptions that lead to epistemic crisis. Weaving these Hawaiian values into the implementation of our coalition activities aligns with NHPI student interests who have a strong cultural identity and ties to place, and therefore will lessen barriers that impede the recruitment and retention of participants who may not be typically prepared for college or career outcomes (Penetito, 2009). Furthermore, evaluation of this project is built in from the beginning with curriculum mapping and transfer articulation as a known structural problem, data analysis of student enrollment into experiential courses, campus differentiation and synergies, and career pathways through creative and collaborative leadership team of campus key persons and PIs collaboratively shaping the coalition through shared vision and understanding as a known strength, helping this project design and implement solutions for NHPI student success and inclusion into FANH.Objective 1: Improve student experience, exposure to different places, and relationship to placeObjective 2:Build cross-consortium partnership to strengthen a system-wide support network for NHPI students along ITEK informed FANH career pathwaysObjective 3:Evaluate & Disseminate project accomplishments to demonstrate efficacy of utilizing place-based and collaborative education
Project Methods
In this coalition each campus will manage its own funds to meet its needs, while participating in the coalition capacity building program components administered by UH West Oahu. All campuses need congruence built into the UH M?noa graduate programs and connectivity to each other through regular research hui (gatherings) including public service and community outreach events to transform Hawai?i's food systems. Quarterly hui (meetings) will keep the campuses connected on implementation and future work. This team will be reporting out at the systems level, using this program evaluation to continue to build justifications for a future center. The coalition builds on existing undergraduate experiential learning activities for NHPI student success and support pathways from the associate to the graduate level that aim to systematize ITEK programs through curriculum mapping. IK/TK/ITEK has synergies in between cultural, language, humanities, health and food disciplines, and in particular has a strong multi- and interdisciplinary "anchoring" in Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, attracting larger numbers of NHPI across the system and "precipitating" these sources for enrollments. A curriculum review or mapping or shared resourcing between the human sciences, drilling down with a specific interest to Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, and flowing outwards to both food and health studies integrating IK/TK/ITEK will be a focus of the coalition. Systematization, or uniformity, is important for ITEK at UH in order to draw from the larger pool of expertise at UH across the institutions and "draw down" that expertise to support active engagement with the community partnerships that exist at the CCs (Community Colleges, particularly LCC and HCC).The success of the coalition relies upon the strong working relationships among the project leads. To facilitate cross-institutional collaboration, the coalition will take advantage of a pilot program being offered at the system level called C3S (Cross-Campus Course Sharing). C3S is directly related to UH's system-wide participation in a NASH (National Association of System Heads) Improvement Community (NIC) focusing on curricular flexibility (Inside Higher Education 2022). Although UH M?noa, UH West O'ahu, and Leeward Community College are the three UH institutions that have executed formal agreements to participate in the NIC, the UH System intends to scale this initiative and make C3S available to students across the ten UH campuses. This project thus aligns closely with the objectives of the UH Strategic Plan Student Success Imperative, as C3S is designed to increase student access to innovative learning opportunities by removing barriers that hinder cross-campus enrollment.As the three lead campuses with C3S, this coalition will focus on transfer student success interventions using Place-based Education (PBE) noted above. The C3S NIC allows for direct enrollment by students in courses from other campuses, which can be taught remotely or online. Alternatively, through creating new courses at our respective institutions we will provide the opportunities for students to take courses offered at each others campuses by having an "instructor on record" create the course but have the course taught by professors from other institutions. For example, TPSS 200 is offered online at UHM and is a prerequisite for the entire TPSS program. A sister course (lets call it AG 200) will be created at HCC in which students at HCC can enroll but will be given access to the UHM course. At UHWO, an Introduction to Sustainable Food Systems course (SCFS 295) would be a UHWO course that would reserve 5 seats available for CC students---these seats would allow the students to register without having to apply to UHWO, pay CC tuition, and no additional fees. The C3S NIC is currently functional for CC to 4-year transfer, and is working on configuring this to work between the 4 year campuses.Campuses will map their experiential and pedagogical modes and models for ITEK curriculum. Experiential student learning modules in the identified courses will allow the coalition to develop leadership training modules for faculty and community members that speak to core Hawaiian values, such as aloha '?ina, and to better prepare not only students and teaching faculty, but community organizations and government institutions to create strong grounded pedagogical communities of practices as undergraduate, graduate and community practitioner/ researchers of ITEK based on communal experiences and relationships made through experiential learning expeditions and support mechanisms in PBE, student internships and career shadowing placements. The overall anticipated outcome is a strengthened interconnected experiential learning program that enhances educational equity for Native Hawaiian students, and strengthens student recruitment and retention pipelines to FANH career pathways that explicitly address known barriers to our local rural and NHPI students. We anticipate that our program will increase enrollment, retention, success, and ultimately employment of our target populations.Leadership Workshops for faculty ITEK-interested NHPI and non-NHPI faculty, community leaders and internships partner organizations will identify a coalition plan of action around C3S NIC FANH career pathways and professional development micro-credentialing proposals and outputs beyond what we already have that includes the novel outputs of: 1) 3 new micro-credentialing courses focused on ITEK to support state workforce needs (i.e. serving FANH related state agencies and departments, professional development, agribusiness, community members, health workers, and cultural practitioners in high NHPI communities) as well as 2) a new transfer recruitment program piloted Wayfinding Huaka?i. Wayfinding Huaka?i will be created in the first 3 months with advising guidance from PIPES, a learning community program at UH Hilo. Eligibility for students recruited into the UHWO-led pilot of 6 students will be based on enrolment, transfer status (from a CC with an aligned program at HCC or LCC), prior work experience, personal essay or portfolio and oral presentation and financial need statement. The evaluation of the pilot will be a part of the strategic leadership workshops. Additional community workshops will also be facilitated for partners to be included in the evaluation process on the front end.?