Kurt Kaaekuahiwi

Kurt is currently serving as an Assistant Principal at Aspire Golden State College Preparatory Academy. He is committed to creating equitable learning access for all students through caring-authentic relationships, and transformative leadership. His instructional leadership focuses are project-based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, SEL, arts-integration, horizontal leadership, and Ethnic Studies curriculum development.

Over the past 10 years, he has designed Ethnic Studies MS curriculum and frameworks for OUSD, developed an MS arts-making project-based learning program, and piloted a national SEL MS curriculum through Center For The Collaborative Classroom. He served as a teacher-leader for CASEL’s Collaborative Districts Initiative with OUSD to build integrated SEL programming throughout the district. As a teacher-researcher for Agency by Design, Harvard’s School Of Education Project Zero Classroom, he collaborated in a multi-year research initiative investigating the relationships between maker-centered learning and student dispositions and sensitivities towards design, making, and systems. He continued these investigations by designing a project-based learning program combining arts-making, and Ethnic Studies as a teacher-fellow for Arts Integration and Maker-Centered Learning in Oakland. As a teacher-participant for the Center for Critical Environmental and Global Literacy he participated in international teacher collaboration around climate justice, critical ecology, and environmentalism in El Salvador and Oaxaca, Mexico. Most recently, he co-founded the Global Community Cultural Exchange program, an international service-learning, arts-integrated, and cultural/language youth exchange program that brings students from Oakland, California, and Cienfuegos, Cuba. He continues to be involved and inspired to create transformative learning experiences for under-resourced communities, and students in urban public schools.