Catastrophic Events and Culture

How do stories of cataclysmic events help inform students about geosciences and cultures?

On January 12, 2010 I walked into my classroom and threw my lesson plans in the trash.  You see I teach Earth science and was in the middle of teaching the Catastrophic Event unit which I had spent many hours with various colleagues designing the summer before.  We had all these great articles, experiments, and demonstrations that would teach students all about earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis.  On January 11th a 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti.  As a classroom and as a nation we read articles, watched the news, and waited.  In school we learn about teachable moments and this is one that I will remember forever.  Technology changed the way we interact, learn, and respond to disasters.  When the Alaska Earthquake happened in 1964 it took days, weeks, and months for the nation, let alone the world, respond.  Forty plus years later when a disaster happens it is a matter of moments and we were receiving live feeds, sending aid for relief and watching with the rest of the world as the saga unfold.  How is this changing our culture?

I really enjoyed the Teacher's Domain videos this week.  I spent some time getting to know the website and learning how to save videos and lesson plans to folders.   I noticed that most of the videos that we have been watching were from a larger lesson called Alaska Native Ways of Knowing.  As I mentioned earlier I would like to organize a Native Knowledge Science Fair.  There were plenty of resources and ideas on this site that I can use.

Check out the November 2010 issue of Science Scope.  There are great activities about Maps and Mapping.  There is a great activity on using Google Earth to study the basic characteristics of Volcanos.  There are some parts that I will have to walk my students through (tangents) but I think it will be a great activity. 


3 Colleagues

Martha Gould-Lehe

I enjoyed reading Martha's blog.  She had two very interesting resources on Volcanoes.  One in particular was looking at art of beautiful picture of volcanoes. 

Tyler

I really liked the Global perspective that Tyler offered in his blog.  It made me really think about the globalization of our world and the affect it will have on our culture.

Kristine Owens

I really related to Kristine's blog this week when she talked about the things she learned this week being how to make a link in her blog.  Me too!!

Landscapes

In her book of short stories titled An Unspoken Hunger Terry Tempest Williams wrote that "Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend.  By understanding the dependability of place, we anchor ourselves as trees."  This quote appears in a short story about the authors, who is a naturalist, first experience in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania.  She describes the connection of the Maasai people to the landscape..."the umbilical cord between man and earth has not been severed here."  The picture above is of my and some friends after climbing Mt. McGinnis.  Mountains for me are that umblilical cord.  They are the landscape the I naturally comprehend like Terry Tempest Williams described.

This week we were challenged to look at landscape.  Since I am teaching Earth Science, which just happens to be following the same content I decided to pose the following question to my classes,  what does landscape mean?  The responses I received varied from what you see outside the window, to the people that plant trees and shrubs.  This was a great reminder to me that we seldom all start on the same page.  So, we began by defining the word.

I have talked to my students about this class that I am taking and told them that I was going to be using some of what I learned with them.  So, after watching the various videos that were associated with this lesson I decided to challenge my students to answer the essential question for themselves:  How are landscapes formed and how, in turn, are cultures shaped by their landscape?  This will be the beginning of an on going  project.  This week we just began by defining land forms and discussing the various types including mountains, plains, and plateaus.  I then had the students do a fast write in their journals about how their lives are shaped by the landscape around them.  Most of them focused on the recreational opportunities that they have here in Juneau whether it is hiking, snowboarding, or fishing.  Hopefully I will be able to have them broaden their ideas to include the landscape affect how people make a living whether it is mining, tourism, commercial fishing, etc.  As I develop this unit over time I want them to move from how the landscape shapes their lives and the lives of others in our community today but to also look at it culturally not only here in Alaska but since I also teach US History I would like for them to be able to look at how landscape has shaped our history over time.

I have taught students about how land and its features is formed using various methods over the years  so the actual information for this module was not new.  I do want to share some other great resources though.  Here are a few of my favorite sites:

Berengia is a website for a museum that is in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.  If you ever get the change to go it is great.
 www.berengia.com 

Explorelearning has many great simulations that can be used in the classroom.  There is one that has the students putting the plates together and looking at fossil evidence.  There are also others that look at volcanos, and many other topics.  The site is organized by subject, grade and by standards.
www.explorelearning.com

The United States Geologic Survey is a great resource.  you can get up to date information on earthquakes and volcanos as well as a wealth of other information.  There is a great map here that gives the location of the location or recent earthquakes and volcanos.  Then, there is a layer you can add that shows the location on the plates.  Great visuals!
www.usgs.gov

Middle school Science is a great place for all sorts of science ideas including catastrophic events such as earthquakes and volcanos. 
http://www.middleschoolscience.com/

 I really enjoyed watching the videos on teacher's domain.  I feel like they really helped me understand the connection between a person and the landscape.  Students love to make videos and with today's technology it is easy and almost everyone has access to a camera.  It  would be a great culminating project to have the students make their own videos of how the landscape is a part of their daily lives. 

This weeks assignments made me reflect on the Rose Urban Rural Exchange Program that I have taken part of over the years.  If you are unfamiliar with the program it allows classrooms to connect through a series of defined lessons that teaches one another about life in that place and then a group of students are chosen to go to the different site and report back about various aspect of life there.  I have had the opportunity to got to Tuntutuliak and Napakiak with students, as well as host students from the villages here in Juneau.

3 Colleagues

http://www.scienceinalaska.blogspot.com/

I chose Alicia's blog because I wanted to read a fresh perspective of someone who is new to the profession of teaching.  I also really appreciated her beginning quote:  The joy of the journey is in the ride.

http://www.scienceinalaska.blogspot.com/

I chose Cheryl's blog at first because of an interesting picture that I was trying to figure out.  She talked about our landscape being our tradition and what we are used to.  She also talked about being her first earthquake.  It reminded me of the first time I experienced one and made me chuckle.


http://danadair.blogspot.com/

I chose Dan's blog because he said he was from Colorado.  I really liked that he talked about bringing in other native american groups into his class.  In my blog I talked about wanting to do this in my American History class.

It's All About Connections!

"Perhaps it was just understood that over time we'd put the pieces together on our own as we processed the information; or that specific content is learned more effectively as discrete components".  This statement from our reading this week really jumped out at me.  As a teacher I have struggled with this idea of putting the pieces together but far to often I dismiss this uncomfortable feeling saying that I have to much to teach and not enough time.  After this weeks module I am beginning to see that by combining what I usually focus on, The Western Scientific Ways, and the Traditional knowledge that I can begin help students make those connections and put those pieces together.  

This weeks module is all about connections.  Hopefully each and everyone of us has felt connected to something or someone.  Whether it is to a place, like we explored last week, a person, or belief, we as humans value being connected on a basic level.  By first examining the importance of connection and then looking at the different ways of knowing (Western and Traditional)  I became excited about the places that there is overlap, besides I love Venn Diagrams.  The idea that two seemingly divergent ways of knowing actually have common ground is exciting to me.  I particularly liked that there were four main groups including organizing principles, habits of mind, skills and procedures, and knowledge.  These groupings reminded me there is so  much more to education than knowledge. 


In thinking about how I will use the information from this weeks module I am thinking about how to organize and implement a school wide Native Science Fair.  I think many of the science teachers are trying to incorporate various traditional ways of knowing into our curriculum but I think if we were able to get together as a group and get organized it would be much more intentional and in the end much more powerful.  The Juneau School District has implemented Professional Learning Communities (PLC's) and early release days every other Monday.  This would be a time when we can meet together and get organized.  It would be even better if we could meet with the teacher's from Dzantiki Heeni  which is the other middle school in Juneau and do something together.


As a district and as a state, we know that we are not meeting the needs of all of our students.  I believe that if we can make some of the connections for our students whether they are native or not, they might see value and relevance of what they are learning.  I think it is also important that students see role models like Dustin Madden and Dolly Garza who is another native educator that has a video on Teacher's Domain but we also need to find people in our own communities who want to come in and share their stories and give us insight into what we can help our students make some of these connections.

Here are a few resources that I found interesting:



http://ankn.uaf.edu/index.html


 

Geneva Glen

Nestled in the foothills of Colorado is a place that is as familiar to me as the beating of my own heart.  It is a place the is a part of my history as well as a  place that is a part of my present.  Geneva Glen is a summer camp.  Each summer kids from all over the country and at times, all over the world, come to hike, climb, swim, ride horses, and just enjoy being a kid.  Even as a child I knew this place was special.  I knew that it was a part of my heritage.  My great grandfather was a part of the story from the beginning.  He spent weekends there building the first lodge that still stands today.  There is a sense of coming home, of belonging to this place that even though it was been many years since I spent my summers there.  Some might say it is in blood.  I don't know if it is, but I do know that it is a place that gives me peace.  It is a place that connects me with family and it is a place that I find myself visiting even if I am thousands of miles away.  My children are the 5th generation of my family to walk these mountain trails.  Can they feel it in their blood?  I hope so.  We all need a place to call home.

When asked to describe the landscape of the place that I was born in Module 2 I automatically started thinking of the formation and geology of the place that I described above and then I remembered that although this is the home of my heart, it is not the the home of my birth or the following years.  I was born outside of Chicago, Illinois.  Most of the Illinois is part of the Central Plains.  In my mind I had to struggle with a way to describe a plain so I thought about what it meant to me.  In my mind a plain is a flat area.  This doesn't really fit because I remember rolling hills.   Like much of our landforms these plains were carved out from Glaciers during the Ice Age.  I know I learned this idea that the place I lived some how was carved out by a massive sheet of ice years ago.  Now though, years later I live only a few miles from a glacier that I have watched retreat over the years.  I can go up and touch the rocks that only a few years ago were covered with ice, now I can understand the power and the force that created this landscape of my childhood where I played and lived... now that is a connection!