The Curriculum

An 18-week, place-based studio that apprentices students to a real watershed — moving from story to system to design to return, and leaving them a link in its living succession.

A studio, not a survey

Students don’t study systems in the abstract. They enter one specific place, learn its moʻolelo, map how it works, design a real intervention, and hand the work forward — the full moʻo cycle, lived over a semester.

The course braids moʻolelo (story), ʻike kūpuna (ancestral knowledge), systems thinking, and design practice. Water is the recurring teacher; the watershed is the classroom.

The Arc

Six units over eighteen weeks

Opening the Moʻo · Weeks 1–3. Enter the place through its story. Meet the land, its people, and the moʻolelo that carry its memory.
Seeing the System · Weeks 4–6. Map the flows, relationships, and succession that produced today’s conditions — the moʻo made visible.
Designing in the Moʻo · Weeks 7–10. Find the break and the leverage; prototype interventions with the place, tested against pilina and reciprocity.
Ritual, Reflection & Reweaving · Weeks 11–13. Integrate what’s been learned; repair relationships; mark the work with ceremony, not just critique.
Futures of Wai / Futures of Us · Weeks 14–16. Project forward — scenarios for the water and the community, and the descendants who inherit both.
Hoʻi i ka Piko · Weeks 17–18. Return to the center. Present the design to the community and hand it forward, so the next cycle can begin.

The signature lesson

The whole method compresses into one flagship studio lesson — “Where Does the Water Go?” — anchored in the moʻolelo of Ka Wai a Kāne (the Water of Kāne) and the principle that water is kin. It’s the fastest way to feel how story, systems, and ancestral inquiry work together.

Open the lesson kit →

Who moves through it

The studio meets students where they are — three composite journeys:

Lehua · Gr 11

Drawn to moʻolelo; discovers that story is a rigorous form of data, and that her people’s knowledge belongs in the design room.

Isaiah · Gr 12

Curious and skeptical; his hard questions become the class’s sharpest systems analysis once he sees the method hold up.

Malia · Gr 10

Practical and grounded; thinks in systems already, and learns to root her instincts in place, relationship, and reciprocity.

How it’s assessed

Not by tests. By a real design offered to a real community, by the depth of a student’s reflection, and by the quality of the relationships they built along the way. Success is measured the way the framework measures everything: by what is returned. Bring the studio to your school →