For a third year, this summer workshop at Chaminade sought to help teachers incorporate financial literacy principles into their classroom lessons.
For one week this July, 26 educators from across the island headed back to class at Chaminade.
They weren’t on campus to teach but to learn—as participants in Chaminade’s annual Economic Education Center for Excellence’s Summer Workshop, which ran from July 22 to 26.
Now in its third year, the workshop offers elementary to high school teachers innovative pedagogical instruction for incorporating key economic and finance principles into hands-on class lessons.
Attendee Daniel Quiamas heard about the summer workshop from a friend, Thomas Yeung, a teacher with Farrington High School’s Business Academy who attended last year’s series of workshops. Quiamas—a math teacher at Waipahu High—said after just two days that he had already learned new ways to incorporate economics and finance into his classroom instruction for ninth to 12th graders.
“I was never really taught about financial literacy so this workshop is very informative,” said Quiamas, after listening to Joanne Ching, a financial wellness partner with HawaiiUSA Federal Credit Union, which was one of the sponsors of this annual Summer Workshop and a strong proponent of financial literacy.
The ECCE’s summer workshop is taught with a combination of lectures, in-class games and group activities, hands-on projects and field classes. Organizers say the curriculum places an emphasis on real-life examples and situations, and includes economics and personal finance concepts based on the Hawaii Department of Education Social Studies Common Core standards.
Some of the key topics covered include market operations and government interventions, environmental economics, personal finance education and financial wellness.
Guanlin Gao, director of the Economic Education Center for Excellence and an associate professor of economics at Chaminade, said the ECCE’s mission is to advance economic justice in Hawaii and across the Pacific. In addition to offering educational programs for teachers, students and the community, the center tackles research projects that dovetail with its mission—and can help inform policy-making.
Gao said the program has so far trained 62 teachers who work in schools statewide. Its economic literacy curriculum and programs have positively benefited more than 7,400 Hawaii students.
“The importance of financial literacy and basic economic principles can’t be overstated,” Gao said.
“It impacts people’s everyday lives.”
The ECCE’s growing outreach efforts come amid a greater push nationally to underscore financial literacy in schools nationwide. According to the Council for Economic Education’s latest biennial Survey of the States, more than two-thirds of all states now require personal finance classes for high school graduation—a sharp increase from 2022 when fewer than half the states had such mandates.
On the last day of the five-day ECCE workshop, participants were asked to give a presentation on how they plan to incorporate what they’ve learned into their own classrooms. Some said they would use it as a “bell ringer,” devoting the first few minutes of class to financial literacy and personal finances. Others planned to take a more comprehensive approach, developing specific age-appropriate lesson plans.
Social studies teacher John Silang, a 10-year veteran with Kapolei High School’s Business Academy, attended the workshop aspiring to learn how to stop systemic poverty.
“I call it Adulting 101,” Silang said. “I wanted to learn how college educators teach economics and how they apply the theories in the classroom.”
For Gao, the moral imperative of teaching financial literacy is clear.
“We recognize that there is still much to be done to improve financial literacy in Hawaii. However, we take pride in our efforts to make a difference and establish ourselves as a center for economic education,” Gao said. “Financial literacy doesn’t have to be daunting or out of reach. It should be accessible to everyone. In reality, we all have innate economic instincts; you might just not be aware of them—yet.”
