College of Education (COE) Recruiter Janet Kim and Educational Administration Assistant Professor Ethan Chang have been named Hubert V. Everly Endowed Scholars in Education for the 2024–2025 academic year. The focus of this award, which comes with a $12,500 allowance per scholar, is to promote individual careers and provide opportunity and resources for scholarly activities that address the problems and issues of importance to the public and private P–20 educational system.
The goal of Kim’s proposal, Building a College-wide Strategic Enrollment Management System to Support Successful Student Matriculation Outcomes, is to support the college in addressing the state’s teacher shortage needs by providing a database and method to track matriculation patterns of students from recruitment through to graduation and into the workforce.
“By systematically building an enrollment management database, we can better identify strengths and areas of growth along the full student experience, so that we are better able to increase successful outcomes of our various student populations in teacher licensure and graduate programs,” said Kim.
Kim started at the COE in 2013 as a full-time special education (SPED) MUSE mentor, transitioning to a newly established position as the SPED Recruitment Specialist in 2014. After nine years of consistently growing enrollment for the SPED program, Kim began another new position as the COE Recruiter.
“Being selected as a 2024-2025 Hubert V. Everly Endowed Scholar allows me to create a system that can serve as the foundation for this new position in the college,” said Kim. “This award provides me with the resources, professional development, and time needed to provide a more effective and efficient way to support prospective students, enrolled candidates, and our faculty. I believe that recruitment means nothing without retention, so having the opportunity to focus on the entire matriculation process provides me immense purpose and joy as I engage in this work.”
Chang, who joined the COE faculty in 2020, was selected for his proposal, Accountability without Punishment: How ‘Āina Informs Abolitionist Learning and Leadership. This project is an extension of his ongoing work alongside young people and educators of Alternative Learning Programs (ALPs) – a branch of the Hawaiʻi Department of Education that strives to provide nurturing, culturally-sustaining learning opportunities for young people pushed out of schools.
“We are interested in how the loko iʻa (and out-of-school, ʻāina-based contexts broadly) offer greater freedom for educators and education leaders to choose something other than conventional approaches to accountability as punishment, surveillance, and/or exclusion,” said Chang. “Our work strives to build classrooms and communities where no person is disposable and aims to contribute to broader scholarly conversations at the intersections of ʻāina and abolition.”1
Chang and Kumu Kimeona Kāne will split funding from the Everly award to grow their lifelong efforts to perpetuate Hawaiian places of learning within and beyond the university.
“This award allows us to deepen work already in motion. We want to mahalo Valerie Shearer, Director of the Grants Support Center at the Dean’s Office, for working with us to explore creative channels for honoring community-embedded scholars like Kumu Kāne.”
1. Hernandez, C. A. A., & Beckham, K. (2021). “Abolition education in high school and alternative spaces.” In Education for Liberation Network and Critical Resistance Editorial Collective (Eds.), Lessons in liberation: An abolitionist toolkit for educators (pp. 254–261). AK Press
Kaba, M. (2021). We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books.)
The Hubert V. Everly Endowed Scholars in Education award honors the legacy of Hubert V. Everly, the college’s longest serving dean who made numerous contributions in developing the COE and improving education in Hawaiʻi.
