The excitement and joy of graduation season in Hawaii is palpable. We love the iconic image of the island graduate with “choke” lei up to the nose celebrated at a family feast. I’m reminded, with every graduation luau invitation I still receive, of the importance of celebrating achievement as a critical piece of the learning process.

In my team’s work in culture-based education, every learning project’s completion is celebrated with a culminating hoike — a showing and sharing of the learning achievement. Families are invited. Hawaiian protocols are invoked — such as opening and closing oli (chants) — to signify the importance and solemnity of the occasion. A show reel of the students’ digital animations is played. Students and families and teachers all applaud each and every child’s work. Food is shared. My role at these events is to guide the students to reflect on their learning, and to imprint in memory their deep acknowledgment of their own strength in overcoming challenges as well as their shared pride in collective achievement.

I learned about the power of celebrating learning in community long ago as a beginning teacher, transplanted from New York City to the fourth grade at Hauula Elementary School. I learned to plan and actualize “culminating activities” in which we produced and shared collective, cooperative works of art. The ancestors of those children were gifted a collective enterprise, working together to accomplish great mutual purposes and achievements that went far beyond what any individual could produce alone.

Their descendants have that potential giftedness, too, and it was deeply gratifying to give them opportunities to experience its fruition.

Throughout the year, I tried to seize chances to create “culminating closure” to each class-family’s learning efforts, whatever they turned out to be. In our end-of-year hoike, we really showed all that we’d learned — skills, values, attitudes and behaviors. And while some of those learnings may have been initially alien goals (like writing and individual speeches), they’d been “Hawaiianized,” used to Hawaiian purpose, to express a Hawaiian cognitive product in which all the connections — life, experience, self, culture and language — were intact.

At each hoike, I — and the audience — bore witness to, and were moved by, our collective power to astonish, entertain and awe ourselves and our family-community. And we were exalted by the revelation and knowledge (ike) of ourselves as learning heroes.

I carried that ao (learning/teaching) knowledge with me to my next assignment and a different community at Keolu Elementary in Kailua. The practice of planning culminating hoike — showing, sharing and celebrating learning in community — proved just as powerful and joyfully reinforcing as it had up the Windward Coast. With my grade-level partners, we produced quarterly hoike, with song and speeches, and nominal awards for all sorts of achievements including attendance, completing homework and learning multiplication tables — celebrated with families and food.

The idea of hoike — showing, sharing and celebrating learning — underlies all my educational practice, including mentoring beginning teachers and providing culture-based learning activities to schools.

The essence of hoike resonates on the micro as well as the macro level. The principle of showing the learning achievement, specifically and explicitly, is the basis of all meaningful feedback to all learners. The joy of recognizing and celebrating the achievement — especially in community with fellow learners and family — never fails to thrill and so to streng- then and empower the resilient learner.

Kailua resident Elly Tepper is a consultant educator and Ulu A‘e Transitions grant team member.