Wednesday, September 24, 2014

The Allegory of the Hale

We've been talking about ethical approaches to problem solving and moral development, but the sources we looked at were very general. What specifically does Hawaiian culture value? What is lawena kūpono in Hawaii?

To find out, we browsed through Mary Kawena Pukui's ʻŌlelo Noʻeau collection to infer values from Hawaiian proverbs. 

Then I sent you all outside to draw the little konane hale in front of Hale Akamai 1. It was bright and hot but you did a great job drawing the shapes you could actually see made up the hale.

Once the drawings were done, we thought about our values. What value is our foundation? What value is our support? What value protects us from the elements?

We wrote the values we thought corresponded with each part of the hale. On another paper, we wrote sentences for each value, describing why it was well represented by that part of the hale.

Here are some examples of the hale drawings-- sorry for the poor photo quality! 

I hope you all have had a chance to consider not only values, morals and ethics in general, but specifically your personal values as built around you by your immersion in the Hawaiian culture.

I hope you have had some practice applying different approaches to ethical dilemmas and making inferences.

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