On my honor: creating space for thinking and living Girl Scouts differently in (post)colonial Hawai‘i

Girl Scouts aims to foster leadership by encouraging girls to discover themselves, make connections, and take action to make the world better. This paper chronicles the five-year journey of eight professional mothers of color who sought to provide their daughters with a space to ‘think and live differently’ as Girl Scouts and young women of color in (post)colonial Hawai‘i. Through questionnaires and a semi-structured focus group interview, mothers reflect on their original intentions to create a ‘safe space’ for their daughters to engage with the politics of gender, race, and class and to rethink, review, and rework their identities. Mothers’ reflections reveal success in creating safe spaces for the critical analysis of gender, but comparatively less success in critical analyses of race and class – a phenomenon that the mothers suggest may have been complicated by (1) the enduring myth of Hawai‘i as a multicultural paradise, (2) Girl Scouts’ assimilationist history, and (3) the mothers’ own relatively privileged positions.     

On non-fragility of controllers for time delay systems: A numerical approach

In this paper an explicit numerical procedure is proposed to determine the non-fragility of parameters of controllers used to stabilize a class of time delay systems. The proposed procedure finds the largest possible circle inscribed in a stability subregion delimited by a simple closed curve in the plane of the controller parameters. The center of this circle is declared to be the controller’s least fragile parameters. The obtained theoretical results are applied and compared with some of the most relevant examples found in the literature. This illustrates that the proposed procedure improves previous results found in the literature so far.     

Transnational audience reception as a theater of struggle: young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas

This study examines the ‘theater of struggle’ in young Filipino women's reception of Korean television dramas in view of the American cultural imperialism that is deeply entrenched in the Philippine society. Mainly anchored on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and Stuart Hall's encoding-decoding theory, the researcher conducted a reception analysis through a textual analysis of selected Korean television comedy-dramas and focus group discussions with young Filipino women in different colleges. The young Filipino women expressed cultural affinity with the culture, storylines, values, and environment in Korean and other Asian television dramas that have invaded the Philippines in the twenty-first century. ‘Negotiation, resistance, and struggle’, in Hall's sense, against both the liberalism in American dramas and the pre-modern themes in local dramas were manifested in the young women's discourses. Consequently, American cultural imperialism in the Philippines was undermined, challenged, and to some extent subverted. The study also looked into the young women's dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings of the dominant capitalist patriarchal values and ideologies that were embedded in selected Korean dramas. While there were young female participants who subscribed to global capitalist values showing their cooptation within Western cultural hegemonic domains, the young women largely articulated negotiated readings of capitalist values and oppositional readings with regard to the dominant ideology of capitalist patriarchy. In reading the selected Korean dramas reflexively, the young women identified social pathologies of poverty, class inequality, and capitalist patriarchal values and constructed emancipatory discourses with regard to these.     

An audience response system may influence student performance on anatomy examination questions

This study integrated an in-house audience response system (ARS) in the human anatomy course over two years to determine whether students performed better on high-stakes examinations following exposure to similar interactive questions in a large lecture format. Questions in an interactive ARS format were presented in lectures via PowerPoint presentations. Students who chose to participate in the anonymous ARS sessions submitted answers via their personal wireless devices (e.g., laptops, smartphones, PDAs, etc). Students were surveyed for feedback. Student participation in ARS activities was greatest (65-80%) in the first lecture. The number of students who actively participated in ARS activities decreased over the next four sessions, and then slightly increased in the last two sessions. This trend was the same for both years. Use of the ARS did not dramatically enhance overall student performance on examination questions that dealt with content similar to content presented in the ARS sessions. However, students who scored in the lower quartile of the examination performed better on the examination questions after the ARS was implemented. Accordingly, our findings suggest that the effect of ARS to improve student performance on examinations was not uniform. The overall benefit of an ARS to enhance the lecture experience was confirmed by student surveys.     

Questioning The Aloha in a Multicultural Teacher Education Course

Hawaii is often perceived as the “Land of Aloha”, a racial paradise where everyone gets along. But do we? The author explores Hawaii's distinct cultural dynamics with pre-service teachers in a multicultural education course that problematised race and ethnicity. Using an inquiry approach and culturally relevant activities, the class examined the social inequity that exists between privileged “non-minorities” like Japanese, Chinese and Whites, and “disadvantaged minorities” like Filipinos, Native Hawaiians and Samoans. This study found that living among diversity in Hawaii made recognising racism and social inequity difficult. Patterns of student engagement reflected one's positioning in Hawaii's racial and socioeconomic hierarchy. Students from privileged groups minimised and deflected their role in contributing to racism, while students from disadvantaged groups assumed a more critical stance towards society. This study reframes the dialogue on race in education and provides implications for multicultural teacher education.