Shiloh Francis, a history teacher at Hawaiʻi Technology Academy, has been named the 2024 Hawai'i History Teacher of the Year.
This annual award is presented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, an organization dedicated to K-12 American history education.
Francis is now one of 53 national finalists, announced last week. In addition to a $1,000 prize, Francis will receive an archive of American history books as recognition at a local ceremony.
"I was extremely honored to be recognized," she said.
The national winner will be declared in September.
Francis graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi, where she studied American history as an undergraduate and received her master's degree in education.
The 43-year-old has been teaching for 19 years. Francis said she's passionate about helping her students and hopes to inspire them to become historians.
"I care about young people and helping them find their passion," she said. "When you can trigger that through a course like history, where they can connect and make so many connections with themselves, their community, and others, they can start to feel empowered and confident."
Francis said teaching is in her blood. Her grandmother was a middle school history teacher, her mother taught nursing at UH, and her aunties were elementary school teachers.
Her favorite time period to teach her students is World War II.
"We've had so many local connections here to really try to understand the history from multiple perspectives," she said.
She tries to take her students on field trips to historical sites to help them engage and understand their history lessons.
This past summer, Francis chaperoned about 20 kids on a field trip to Japan. They went to Hiroshima and brought 1,000 paper cranes, wishing for peace.
"You can look at war from many perspectives, but more importantly, you can also look at peace and building peace, and trying to connect to why that's important in our society as well and to look at the world differently," she said.
Francis has her students look at firsthand accounts of what people were thinking and feeling during each time period. She said this helps her students develop historical empathy.
"I find that that makes them really start to relate to people, and not just names on a page or reading somebody else's summary from a textbook," she said.
