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For a number of years, Kent Sakoda has been teaching at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in the Department of Second Language Studies. His course, "Pidgin and Creole English in Hawai'i," is popular among students on campus. He has also taught at Hawai'i Pacific University. Because of his expertise on the grammar of Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole), Sakoda is a frequently-invited guest speaker. Sakoda was born in Hanapepe, Kaua'i, and grew up there in the 1950s and 60s. His parents owned a garage repair shop, where they spent most of their waking hours. Sakoda recalls his youth as an idyllic time. Everyone in this small rural community knew each other and helped each other out. He and his friends spent many hours playing in the town's park, swimming in the nearby stream, and frequenting one or the other of the town's two movie theaters. They attended 'Ele'ele School, situated on a hillside overlooking Hanapepe. Sakoda's family lived right below the hill. Sakoda remembers the school having a courtyard and large wooden buildings with lots of greenery surrounding it. His classmates were Japanese American, Filipino American, and Native Hawaiian. Like many Japanese American children of his time, he also attended Japanese language school. And like the other youth growing up in Hanapepe, his first language was Pidgin or Hawai'i Creole. After graduating from the eighth grade at 'Ele'ele, he attended Waimea High. In this interview, Sakoda talks about his introduction to Pidgin as a subject of study and then discusses some of the basic features of Pidgin grammar. (Contains 1 endnote.)

During the mid-1960s, the War on Poverty ushered in a change in outlook on the poor and stimulated Neighborhood House (a social service agency that began as a settlement house) to focus on educative, community-building initiatives. Yet ironically, while staffers offered educational programs for residents, they were themselves becoming educated. The space Neighborhood House provided emerged as a powerful venue in which staffers developed their talents to become socially minded civic leaders. This study of the post--World War II transformation of settlement work in a city in the Pacific Northwest reveals commonalities with other places as well as distinctiveness to Seattle conditions. The article expands the extant scholarship on multi-ethnoracial communities, War on Poverty programs, and settlement house responses to societal changes. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which Neighborhood House provided an important educative space for those who worked there, a place that nurtured their growth as civically minded community builders.

While narrative history has been the prevailing mode in historical scholarship, its preeminence has not gone unquestioned. In the 1980s, the role of narrative in historical writing was "the subject of extraordinarily intense debate." The historical backdrop of this debate can be traced to the preceding two decades, when four groups of thinkers became discernible: (1) social-scientifically oriented historians, in particular the Annales group, among them Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, who saw narrative history as nonscientific; (2) analytical philosophers, among them Hayden White and Louis Mink, who "sought to establish the epistemic status of narrativity"; (3) semiologically oriented theorists, among them Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who saw narrative as "one discursive "code' among others"; and (4) hermeneutically oriented philosophers, among them Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, who viewed narrative as the "manifestation in discourse of a specific kind of time-consciousness." In this essay the author discusses the first two of the major challenges to narrative history and talks about the role of theory in educational history. Because the narrative has dominated the works of American educational historians, the author's distinction between narrative and theory is an attempt to encourage educational historians who are narrativists to open themselves to theoretical works. She argues that there exists a canon of narrativity that should be challenged. In other words, there should be a prominent seat at the educational history table for such scholarship that marries theory with narrative and/or foregrounds theory in examining historical issues in education. (Contains 19 footnotes.)