KEALAKEKUA — Standing in front of their peers and a panel of community members, Jade Onaka, Van Petrovic and Naia Balancio faced a crowd that could have intimidated a Ph.D candidate defending their dissertation.
But the Konawaena Middle School eighth-graders were unfazed, quickly and smartly diving into a presentation about gender equality and the struggles women and men face in their professional and private lives.
“Every day, shadows are cast on the innocent souls of the world, just because of their physical and biological features,” said Balancio as she stood at the front of the class kicking off the team’s slideshow presentation.
The team’s presentation charted the history of gender inequality and the broad effects inequality has on society — from women in the workplace to suicide rates among men — and also offered some solutions of their own.
The students also took their peers and panelists outside for a game of bean bag toss, but it had a catch: the girls had to toss the bean bags from farther away.
After the presentation wrapped, the kids said they were feeling good about what they communicated to their audience.
“I feel like we opened our fellow classmates’ eyes to see how this problem is bad,” said Petrovic.
The team was just one of many on Friday to present their projects for the Kulia I Ka Nuu — Hawaiian for “strive for the highest” — panel presentation.
The program, which has been in place at the school for about 20 years now, challenges students to identify and research problems on the local, national and global levels and develop a presentation along with some potential solutions to a crowd that includes fellow students and representatives from the community.
The annual project starts in January with a massive brainstorming effort on hundreds of possible issues, said Rhianna Clark, lead teacher for the oni pa’a team and who coordinates Kulia I Ka Nuu.
Students, Clark said, have a wide range of creative freedom when it comes to selecting their projects.
Topics on Friday ranged from big-picture issues like distracted driving, government corruption and immigration to local concerns like the preservation of Hawaiian culture and protecting native plants and forests.
And selecting an interesting issue to explore is crucial. Clark said the most successful teams tend to be those that have picked topics close to their hearts.
“When they do that, then they are naturally invested in it,” she said. “I mean, there’s no more powerful way to hook the kids than to tell them, yeah, we’re working on this all quarter, but if you choose right, you choose something you’re personally vested in, they have a blast, because they’re totally into it.”
After choosing their group and selecting their topic, the groups research the issues and each student writes an 8-10 page research paper about some aspect of their respective topic.
Those months of work culminated on Friday with the panel presentation, which included people from throughout the community.
This year, the school invited a West Hawaii Today reporter and a photographer to attend and evaluate the students’ presentations.
Also among the panelists Friday was one of Konawaena’s own former students, Joy Personius, who gave her Kulia presentation in 1998 and returned to the campus to hear from the latest cohort of students.
Personius’ presentation, which students gave individually at the time rather than a group, focused on the positive effects of technology for deaf people.
Now a resource teacher for the West Hawaii complex area where she supports schools in social emotional learning, Personius said the Kulia panel presentation was a pivotal moment in her education.
“It was really fun to have ownership of my education, to be able to do something that I wanted to do,” she said.
And sitting at the panelists’ table this time around, she said, she’s inspired by what she saw at the front of the room.
“It makes me just really excited for our future with these topics,” she said. “But it also is just encouraging to know that Konawaena Middle School is sticking to some of the key components of their education that made it so important to me and memorable and valuable.”
The project also requires students to incorporate some other visual aid outside of the presentation themselves. Those elements on Friday included a cup of fruits and nuts for a presentation on healthy lifestyles and hibiscus cuttings for a presentation on protecting native plants.
Like Clark, students also noted the importance of picking issues they’re passionate about.
Onaka said she put the topic about gender equality out there because she enjoys hearing about people’s stories and experiences.
“So do that for your group too,” she said when asked about advice she’d have for future classes, “because if you do a topic that you know it’s big but it isn’t very near and dear to your heart or you’re not passionate about it, it’s not going to be worth the months that you prepare for.”
And Petrovic suggested picking topics students have personal experience with or have witnessed.
“That will help with the research a lot,” he said, “because sharing personal stuff could help tie everything in and show the panel members that you’re truly passionate about that topic.”
The project also has a big impact on students beyond just learning what they’ve researched, Clark said.
“The biggest thing the kids always tell me when they’re done is that they didn’t think they could do it,” she said. “The pride they feel when they complete the 30-minute presentation in front of community panel members, a representative of the mayor and the media, they are so proud of themselves when they’re done. That’s my biggest thing.”