Mapping Native, Shared, Hybrid Spaces: Place-Based Science Education’s Critical Role

As US schools struggle to educate the diverse group of students who enter our classrooms, the Hawaiian classroom setting provides an extreme example of these challenges.  Geographic isolation, a unique environment, and the sharing of social and physical spaces by indigenous peoples and colonizers, all work together to create distances between the lives of Hawaiian children and the curricula that so often constitutes "school science."  Such disconnects serve to perpetuate the under-representation of these students in the STEM pipeline.  Repeated studies have found that these distances can be diminished through science education that is based in the specific history, ecology, and culture of the local school setting.