KMN 2.0’s culturally responsive framework provides teachers with instructional strategies and resources all aimed at strengthening our keikis’ skills in writing, all across content areas. We have adopted Ruth Culham’s “6 Traits of Writing.” These characteristics of good writing basically help give classrooms a shared language to talk about writing. And with the rubrics, the writing traits give teachers a very tangible, practical way to evaluate student writing.

By culturally responsive we mean ways that respectfully meet students where they are, honoring and affirming their extended communities, places, and relationships that our schools are important parts of. We use Hawaiian as the host culture for a place-based approach. This connects us all, whether we are coming from various diverse backgrounds or born and raised in Hawaii. You are viewing an image of a kalo plant that we developed based on the cultural iceberg of Hall as a part of our discussion with teachers of Zeretta Hammond’s framework on culturally responsive teaching and the brain.

We also provided concrete examples for how these can be applied into writing lessons that can be found in the Culturally Responsive Checklist and centered oral language as a bridge to the writing process providing oral language topic starters. These are oral history interviews that students are invited to do with kupuna.