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Teaching History through Service Learning at the University of Guam

Scholars across Oceania have long bemoaned various forms of cultural alienation that have resulted from the imposition of colonial education in the region. Chamorro educator Dr Katherine Bordallo Aguon points to the damaging impacts resulting from Guam’s wholesale importation of the American school system, calling upon Islanders to develop an educational programme that incorporates Chamorro cultural values such as ‘interdependence, respect for nature, the supremacy of familial obligations, respect for old age and respect for social position’. In the indigenous language, these values are encapsulated in the term inafa‘maolek, defined literally as ‘making it good for each other’, a feat achieved through ‘interdependence and cooperation within Chamorro society above individual gain or self-concern’. Application of inafa‘maolek includes the quest for respectful and harmonious relations with nature and with authority figures such as elders and community leaders, as well as immersion in networks of chenchule‘, the Chamorro reciprocity system. Inafa‘maolek, considered by many scholars to be the core Chamorro cultural principle, shapes the ways in which humans interact with the world around them, so that group harmony and stability take precedence over individual pursuits. Aguon’s critique of Guam’s educational system highlights the absence of this indigenous epistemology in favour of the standard American curriculum. With chagrin, Aguon writes, ‘it still saddens me that children frequently learn the ‘‘four seasons’’ before Guam’s ‘‘two seasons’’ and that snowballs are a bigger preoccupation in curriculum materials than coconuts’. Indeed, Bray assesses that, throughout Oceania, ‘The curricula are designed mainly to westernize Pacific peoples’. In Thomas’s estimation, this has occurred primarily because each colonial government adopted ‘the course of study found in state schools of the colonialists’ mother country’, including the blanket adoption of colonialist textbooks. Consequently, Cruz asserts that Pacific Islanders have little knowledge or understanding of the impact upon their lives of significant historical