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A'o Makua, an online learning program for adults, is helping Raymond Kailiuli of Utah reconnect with his island roots. Kailiuli has taken Hawaiian language and culture classes through the Kamehameha Schools program. - Photo: Courtesy of Raymond Kailiuli |
Online learning, Hawaiian style
A'o Makua program celebrates one year
For 64-year-old Raymond Kailiuli now living in Utah, learning Hawaiian via an online class takes him back to his "hanabata kid" days running around his grandparents' home on Horner Street in Kalihi. In those days, relatives would come over, sit in a circle and the room would fill with talk story in 'ōlelo Hawai'i as children ran around.
"We didn't really know any better so we just played and made noise, not really sitting down and listening to the elders," said Kailiuli, a 1962 Kamehameha Schools graduate who moved to the continent after retiring in 2000. "I miss that, so when these classes came up, I thought, 'This is a good connection.' "
Kailiuli has reconnected with his roots with the help of Kamehameha Schools' A'o Makua online enrichment program for adults 18 and older, where the classroom is a computer and teachers are a click away. "You know what is good with this class?" he asks. The teachers can review tapes of you speaking and provide critiques, all via computer, he said of the Hawaiian language class. "I listen to my (speech), I sound like one old Hawaiian now."
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At last year's A'o Makua launch, one of the instructors demonstrated the online learning system. - Photo: Blaine Fergerstrom |
A'o Makua, now celebrating its first year since launching in February 2008, is designed for parents, caregivers and adults to learn the Hawaiian language and culture – at their own pace. "We get a lot of comments that online courses work for a lot of people just because it's convenient," said Kelly Dukelow, manager of Kamehameha's distance-learning programs, including A'o Makua. "We can pretty much offer it to anybody who has an Internet connection."
"As far as online programs," she added, "we think we're pretty unique that we're enrichment, but we're fully facilitated – students get an instructor with them the entire time and all of our content is developed primarily with the help of our curriculum support and dissemination branch and reviewed by Hawaiian culture specialists."
The program's slogan, A'o Aku, A'o Mai, "means 'to learn and share,' so as you learn, it's your kuleana to share," Dukelow said. And with students participating from Hawai'i, the continent and internationally, "we find that all these people across the nation have the same desire to learn culture, to learn the language – and oftentimes they share resources too."
"The courses are really more focused on learning and growing," she said. "We don't have tests or worksheets, and activities have to do with taking concepts and reflecting on how it relates to you and sharing with the other participants."
Among the most popular offerings are the Ola Nā Iwi genealogy course and the Ku'u One Hānau culture class. "We like to push that one because we have kūpuna do most of the content for us through live interviews with them talking and singing," Dukelow said. "We didn't pull a lot of stuff out of books or CDs; it was primary sources straight from the kūpuna. And you can't find it any place else. They did it just for us."
In March, the program will add a new culture class, Mālama: 'Āina, which will cover the ahupua'a system, how Hawaiians traditionally lived in harmony with the land and how people can incorporate those ideas in contemporary times, Dukelow said. More additions are also possible. "Our development is dependent upon our enrollment," Dukelow said. "The more we can get the word out, the more we can get people signed up, the more courses we can offer."
ONLINE COURSES Kamehameha Schools' A'o Makua online learning program for adults offers three-week language courses and four-week culture courses.
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