On my honor: creating space for thinking and living Girl Scouts differently in (post)colonial Hawai‘i

ABSTRACT

Girl Scouts aims to foster leadership by encouraging girls to discover themselves, make connections, and take action to make the world better. This paper chronicles the five-year journey of eight professional mothers of color who sought to provide their daughters with a space to ‘think and live differently’ as Girl Scouts and young women of color in (post)colonial Hawai‘i. Through questionnaires and a semi-structured focus group interview, mothers reflect on their original intentions to create a ‘safe space’ for their daughters to engage with the politics of gender, race, and class and to rethink, review, and rework their identities. Mothers’ reflections reveal success in creating safe spaces for the critical analysis of gender, but comparatively less success in critical analyses of race and class – a phenomenon that the mothers suggest may have been complicated by (1) the enduring myth of Hawai‘i as a multicultural paradise, (2) Girl Scouts’ assimilationist history, and (3) the mothers’ own relatively privileged positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Girl Scouts
• motherhood
• informal learning
• gender
• race/ethnicity
• class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Patricia Espiritu Halagao is Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research interests focus on culturally responsive education and policies, with an emphasis on Filipino, immigrant, and EL communities.

Julie Kaomea is a Native Hawaiian professor in the College of Education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research examines the enduring effects of colonialism in Native Hawaiian and other Indigenous educational communities.