A few weeks ago, I had the honor and pleasure of sharing a storytelling session with two sixth-grade classes at Kaumana Elementary School on Hawaii island. I was there with my Ulu A‘e Transitions Grant teammates, to launch the next activity — Family Stories — in our culture-based and tech-rich project program. My job was to impress the students with the importance and value of mo‘olelo (stories) in Hawaiian culture and to inspire and support them in collecting a family story of their own and creating a digital video to share their story and its personal significance to them.

I wanted them to understand the powerful role of mo‘olelo in passing the ancestors’ vast knowledge of history, geography, science and engineering, as well as critical human values, from generation to generation over centuries. I wanted them to see how perfectly stories can inform us — explain observed natural phenomena and teach us how to be good — to know and do the right thing to live a pono (righteous and harmonious) life with our fellow humans.

In my best dramatic voice, I shared the story of the kipuka (green oasis in a lava field) at Kapoho with them and asked them to tell a classmate what they thought the “lesson” of that story was. Then I told them my own personal story — now our family legend — of how I and my two little sons met Tutu Pele — maybe — 50 years ago.

The adults in the room were surprised at how the students listened to the stories in hushed raptness — even the “rascal” ones who usually couldn’t sit still or keep quiet or keep their hands and eyes off their devices — and how eager they were to tell their intuited “lessons.” I wasn’t surprised because I was thrilling to the memory of what I’d learned from the Hawaiian homestead children of Hauula Elementary School 40 years ago when I was a brand-new teacher recently transplanted from the continent.

From the beginning of my teaching experience, I had known that language was the key ingredient in the teaching-learning process, the big bridge between the teacher and the student, and often the big stumbling block, too. I knew that my triumph in learning to understand pidgin was critical because that language depended so much on intuitive or implicit assumptions of shared experiences. I had a strong sense that language — and not only the spoken words, but the purposes, expectations, uses, and beliefs about language — was the window to cultural consciousness. The Hawaiian language is beautifully poetic and metaphoric. A relatively small word bank produces vast meanings, which ancient Hawaiian speakers “got” depending on their shared understanding and experience.

Pidgin English works the same way. A primary task of the Hawaiian child or language learner is to intuit the connections, meanings and lessons of language communications. An implicit Hawaiian cognitive assumption is that language has power. And that is the primal overlap between their culture and mine — we can agree on the power of the word.

Our island students today are the heirs to an awesome oral tradition. The gifts of attentive listening, intuitive thinking and accurate retelling are their birthright even though they seem to be buried beneath an avalanche of digital data and standardized test requirements. The challenge of regenerating those skills and supporting the transition to written composition may remain, but the ancestral learning pathway can be accessed and repaved for now and future success. We can start by telling more stories in school.

Elly Tepper is a consultant educator and Ulu A‘e Transitions Grant Team member.