An accomplished Hawaii educator has been inducted into the National Teachers Hall of Fame after 34 years of teaching at Kamehameha Schools on the Big Island and Oahu.
Joel Truesdell, 69, was in Emporia, Kansas, on Friday to receive the award, which every year recognizes five exceptional career teachers from across the country.
In 31 years, 155 educators with at least 20 years of experience teaching students from pre-kindergarten to 12th-grade have received the honor.
“The selection process is inherently challenging,” said Maddie Fennell, acting executive director of NTHF, in a press release. “Every year, we are astounded by the caliber of nominees we receive.”
Truesdell, who is now retired from teaching at Kamehameha Schools Hawaii, learned he was named as a Class of 2024 inductee during a surprise announcement at the school in April attended by family, friend, former colleagues and students.
“I was surprised, of course. I knew I was nominated, but I really didn’t think I made it in,” Truesdell told the Tribune-Herald after learning he had been selected. “In my nomination packet, I mostly wrote about the cultural-based, student-centered approaches I took in my classroom, which is always how I learned best.”
Truesdell was a research chemist when he moved to Hawaii for a doctorate program in synthetic organic chemistry at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He had no plans to become a teacher until it happened organically.
In 1986, Truesdell began teaching night classes at Kapiolani Community College and enjoyed the experience. When returning the next semester, a mistake left his classes off of the list for student registration, forcing Truesdell to turn to substitute teaching high schoolers at Kamehameha Schools Kapalama.
“It was then that I realized I loved teaching and watching students succeed. The kids were wonderful, and also rascals, but I enjoyed it,” Truesdell said. “I took over a math class for a quarter while a teacher was on maternity leave. I ended up teaching them math through chemistry, engineering and physics. We had a ball, and they all did really well on the final.”
Truesdell started as a call-in substitute in February 1987, became a long-term substitute in April and was offered a full-time math teaching position to begin in August at KS-Kapalama. He decided to change the course of his life by saying yes.
“I had determined at that time that I was having such success with the youth, and it came naturally to me. I was impactful and thought to myself that this is what I was meant to do,” Truesdell said. “Those first classes, as well as meeting my wife during training for the full-time teaching position, led me to this path here.”
Truesdell quickly began implementing student-centered, culture-based education practices for his students. Over time, he would identify the barriers some students had to learningandthen share his own aversion to school as a kid, which helped him establish classrooms where students could talk about anything.
“When I started teaching each year, I would make sure to tailor the material to the barriers of each class and make sure everything was relative to culture,” Truesdell said. “With a project-based, inquiry-driven classroom steeped in culture, students got better grades and also strengthened their Hawaiian cultural identity.”
In 1991, Truesdell started the Hawaiian culture-based Kamehameha Summer Science Institute in Organic Chemistry of Hawaiian Medicinal Plants, or KSSI, for KS-Kapalama high school students at every learning level.
In the program, students would choose a Hawaiian medicinal plant and learn everything possible about it, with the ultimate goal of isolating its bioactive components. In the lab, they would utilize organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, microbiology and cellular biology to identify the components and test them against things like cancer cells and bacteria.
To complete the program, students had to write a 30-page paper about their research and give a 30-minute talk to the class, parents and administrators.
“Several of these kids started with zero knowledge about the subject and would end up loving the entire process. Some former students have told me it was a formative experience for them,” Truesdell said. “It didn’t matter what grades they had before, most of everyone finished the program and took something away from it.”
Truesdell’s dedication to KSSI was recognized when he earned the Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science for Teaching in 2002, which was two years before he left Kapalama after a 17-year stint and moved to the Big Island.
Truesdell and his wife, Elizabeth, both started the second halves of their teaching careers at KS-Hawaii in Keaau, where he continued to incorporate cultural practices through innovative student programs.
In 2012, Truesdell saw the opportunity to start a koa reforestation project on a long-abandoned sugarcane field at the school. This gave students the opportunity to raise koa seedlings and learn everything about the native tree before planting them to grow for years to come.
Over the years, Truesdell’s students found success and improvement in their grades, tests, confidence and culture, which he attributed to embracing Hawaiian culture and using it in his classroom and curriculum.
“After being in my class for a couple weeks, they usually knew what they had to do to succeed and what they were capable of,” Truesdell said. “I wanted their eyes and options open, so they could follow their dream and succeed without barriers.”
After 17 years at the Keaau campus, Truesdell officially ended his 34-year tenure with Kamehameha Schools and spent his final year of teaching at Tuba City Middle School, a Bureau of Indian Education school in the Navajo Nation of Arizona.
During his final year of teaching from fall 2021 to spring 2022, Truesdell was tasked by the Department of the Interior to develop a Native Summer Camp for Native students in the Grand Canyon Area through the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program.
“I spent the year developing the handbook, working with the adults at Tuba City Middle School as well as the scientists at the US Geological Survey,” Truesdell said. “From August 2021 through May 2022, we developed the summer camp mostly remotely while in Reston, Virginia. The camp was held in Tuba City, Flagstaff and Page, Arizona in late June 2022.”
Truesdell and his wife are back in Hilo now to enjoy retirement, although they often fly to the mainland to attend and speak at conferences and workshops for educators.
“Now that I’m retired, I feel like it’s my job to help other teachers and pass along my knowledge,” Truesdell said. “We do try to plan vacations and cruises to go on and enjoy afterward.”
More information about NTHF and its museum focused on the history of education, visit nthf.org
Email Kelsey Walling at kwalling@hawaiitribune-herald.com.