Students, families realize they’re ‘not so different’ from one another
Posted: December 16, 2025
Students at Kīhei Elementary on Maui are getting excited about reading again, thanks to the efforts of two English learner (EL) teachers at the school.
EL Coordinator Erin Kowalick and Mahala Quintana, an EL teacher, both of Kīhei Elementary, launched a “Culturally Relevant Books” project at their school, aiming to equip each classroom with diverse and culturally significant titles to help K-5 students see themselves on the pages.
Their list of over 150 books, is a public, editable Google sheet that breaks down the titles by culture at the bottom. Each title also has a genre, description, and recommended age category.
“We would love to see this list grow, within our complex, within the DOE. We need more hands on deck,” Kowalick said.
The list has already been shared widely with EL teachers across Maui. Their long‑term dream is to turn it into a fully functional public website that any teacher can access and contribute to.
Social justice PD course helps book project take flight
Kowalick and Quintana have been working together for over a decade with the school’s EL student population. After talking to teachers around campus, they identified a need: more books in their libraries and classrooms to represent their diverse students.
“We just didn’t have hardly any books that really represented the students around our school, either in the library or our classrooms,” Kowalick explained.
A few years ago, the pair enrolled in a social justice professional development course offered through a partnership between Hanahau‘oli School, the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, a move that helped bring their project to life.
The course, taught by Dr. Jingwoan Chang, provided the structure and time to build the project from the ground up.
Quintana said, “It was so inspiring to see the options of what was already out there. We could really see how it could work in our community.”
With that inspiration, they decided it was time to finally pursue their “dream project”: building a collection of culturally relevant books that reflected the full diversity of their EL students and their families.
Putting the pieces together: Telling the story of their students
With funding from their school’s Title III funding and EL student-weighted formula monies, Kowalick and Quintana sourced books on various cultures and ethnicities.
“It took a lot of deep diving and hours and hours of work to find [them],” Kowalick said. “There’s not just one website you can go to… For Hawaiian, you can go to a website and find a bunch of Hawaiian stories. If you want to find books about Hispanic culture, you can go to a website and find that. But our other underserved and underrepresented cultures, our Marshallese, our Micronesians, you really have to dig deep.”
That challenge didn’t deter their mission, though. And once they started bringing in titles, the students’ reactions made it all worth it.
“It’s been the coolest thing,” Kowalick said. “We have the funniest picture of one of our first deliveries. There might have been, like, 20 boxes delivered, and the kids are just wide-eyed, like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’ They were so excited, and they started opening the boxes just because they couldn’t even stand it, and they couldn’t believe that this was all for them.”
Each classroom now has a book cart with about 30 culturally relevant titles, and the school’s total collection has grown to more than 150 books across classrooms and the library. The students’ reactions have made the effort worthwhile.
Kowalick shared that the students “have been saying on their own, ’Hey, we do that too. Or, hey, my family does that. Oh, your family does that? We do that in my culture, too.’ They just have a lot more rich conversations with each other, comparing and just hearing the language and having them discuss and realize they’re not all so different.”
Students at Kīhei Elementary enjoy books that depict their different cultures, helping them boost self-esteem, critical thinking skills, and excitement for reading.
Building belonging one title at a time
Beyond stocking shelves, Kowalick and Quintana have also created a shared drive of lesson plans and supplemental materials to support teachers in using the books, including social-emotional learning (SEL) tie-ins and writing and discussion prompts.
“We know time is the biggest challenge teachers face,” Quintana said. “But you can incorporate the overlap of cultures with SEL by reading a children’s picture book and then doing an amazing writing [activity] off of it at the higher grade levels.”
They also run an after-school EL multicultural club with games and books, and sponsor a winter literary night with the entire student body.
“We are just so passionate about what we do, and the children that we have under our care that we feel give more back to us because of the enrichment of learning, their culture, their foods, their traditions,” Quintana said.
“There’s this excitement now that these books are represented because it creates a natural community with their families. The families feel loved up, there’s a connection, and they want to talk to us as much as we’re trying to talk to them. That’s where it’s going to be really powerful moving forward — students can see what they can be.”