| The first story about kapa I ever learned as a haumana is two words: "just beat." These words were offered to me from my kumu kapa Aunty Verna Takashima, who heard them from her kumu kapa, Ka'iulani de Silva. Over time, these words became a metaphor, a pedagogy, a language. Until they became stories built upon stories, the threads of the tapestry that both carry the 'ike of a practice and weave us together. Even now, five years later, as my practitioner lens embraces researcher and educator lenses, the ideas and stories in this text are summed in these two words. So, this dissertation is a story of these stories.;This inquiry does not ask what kapa is, but how it is experienced through story. Using the .ohe kapala design of the pewa as a visual metaphor, the mo.olelo of three generations of kapa practitioners are genealogically presented in the "positive spaces": Ka.iulani de Silva (part I), Aunty Verna Takashima (part II), and me (part III). These mo.olelo are contextually situated within practitioner, researcher, and educator "layers" that also represent the multiple lenses I wear. Negotiating my relational responsibilities among these shifting contexts and narratives fill the "negative spaces" of this text. Together, these positive and negative spaces---the mo.olelo and underlying narrative of my positionality---are the stories that comprise this dissertation.;Qualitative research is increasingly reshaped by inquiry that prioritizes narrative and relational ethics in exploring the phenomena of human experience (Clandinin & Caine, 2008), and this dissertation reflects this methodological commitment. Creating a space for these mo.olelo creates a space to peer closely beneath the layers where philosophical spaces lie: about shaping identity, about our understandings of educational practice, about how we come to know. And in so doing, presents an opportunity for the reader to engage with these stories, to reflect, and discover the lessons that lie in the folds of mo.olelo built from those two words, "just beat," the way I did. |
