“These Different Ideas, Traditions, and Values Make My Thinking Unique and Creative”: Bringing Native Hawaiian Ways of Knowing to Engineering Education

Abstract

Contribution: This article focuses on the study of Native Hawaiian student experiences in engineering education. Telling these stories illustrates the importance of legitimizing and appreciating different knowledge types in engineering as we move toward a more inclusive and sustainable field. Background: Native Hawaiian engineering students live oppressive realities due to the history of settler colonialism and occupation that attempted to erase their culture and ways of knowing, including in engineering education. This study shows how students overcome these realities to enact their ways of knowing in a field where it is not always respected. Informing the field of ways to promote and respect the different knowledge types of marginalized groups can help to create a more inclusive and sustainable engineering field. Research Question: In what ways do Native Hawaiian students bring their cultural ways of knowing into engineering education? Methodology: We conducted semi-structured interviews with three undergraduate Native Hawaiian students using Manulani Aluli Meyer’s Holographic Epistemology as a theoretical lens to inform the questions and qualitative analysis. The analysis uses a combination of inductive and deductive analyses to create the hologram that Meyer outlines in her work. Findings: The participants found different ways to enact their cultural ways of knowing. We interpret them through the Native Hawaiian values of pono, kuleana, and hō‘ihi. This illustrates how engineering educators, researchers, and programs can legitimize the knowledges of the students by promoting authenticity and reciprocity toward marginalized students and their ways of knowing.