Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui: A Critical Place-based Education Approach to Wildfire Mitigation and Land Stewardship

Jadda M. Miller

K-12 science education has an opportunity to enhance its relevance by connecting classroom learning with the complex social-ecological challenges that students experience in their communities. Through a community-based participatory research project with a high school ecology teacher, a local watershed nonprofit, and a biocultural conservation biologist, we examine a novel project called Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui (protecting the land of Maui, a name given to the project by the students), which combines culturally relevant pedagogy, critical place-based learning, and Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) Biocultural Knowledge. Through the Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui project, 21 high school students in Maui, Hawaiʻi engage in hands-on stewardship work for wildfire mitigation and riparian restoration. Through a mixed-methods research design, including pre-post surveys, pre-post interviews, observations, and artifact analysis we explore how this project influences students' engagement with four intended learning outcomes: (1) understanding of social-ecological systems resilience; (2) integration of Kānaka ʻŌiwi Biocultural Knowledge with Western science practices; (3) agency with environmental science, and (4) sense of kuleana (responsibility or privilege to care for a place). This project was collaboratively created after the devastating 2023 Lahaina wildfire and represents hope-in-action—a proactive response to trauma that fosters landscape and community healing. As many educators and researchers seek to transform K-12 science education into a discipline that prepares students with the resources and experiences to address social-ecological challenges, projects such as Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui allow our team to ask and answer research questions that critically inform and further advance the knowledge and practices of science education.

About Jadda M. Miller

Jadda Miller is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Davis, in the School of Education with an emphasis in Science Education and a Designated Emphasis in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Jadda's research interests focus on collaborative and community-based approaches to addressing local environmental challenges, with a particular focus on engaging youth in critical place-based science education to protect their local ecosystems. Her dissertation research examines how engaging high school students in land stewardship informed by a Kānaka 'Ōiwi Biocultural Knowledge and Western science can increase social-ecological systems resilience and wildfire mitigation in Maui, Hawaiʻi. During her graduate school tenure, Jadda has been a graduate student researcher at the Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis, where she has primarily been working with MPA Watch, a statewide collaboration of volunteers and nonprofits conducting monitoring within and outside California's network of 124 marine protected areas to inform policy and conservation. Before graduate school, Jadda was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal and an educator with the Hawaiʻi Department of Education. She taught middle school science at Kīhei Charter School, her current dissertation research partner. At UC Davis, Jadda has held fellowships at the Institute of the Environment, the Office of Public Scholarship and Engagement, and the Center for Community and Citizen Science. Jadda is a first-generation college student with an MS in Environmental Studies from Green Mountain College and a BS in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems from UC Davis.