Module IV Response

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

Storytelling is a method of communicating events using language, pictures, or sounds. Every culture on the planet has used stories to entertain, educate, teach moral values, or preserve pieces of indigenous cultures. It is one of the oldest and best forms of teaching. Stories are a great way to inform students about geosciences and cultures for a number of reasons:

1. Stories are basic: In every culture there is a story of how the world began, how people came to be, and how to behave. In cultures that live surrounded by the possibility of cataclysmic events, there are stories about why there are earthquakes, volcanoes, or tsunamis. It is the most basic way of explaining a particular phenomenon. Although the stories are not always accurate explanations for why an event has occurred, the story itself provides insight into the culture telling it and how they are shaped by the event. An example of this is a group of Indonesian people that refuse to evacuate the area around an erupting volcano, Merapi, because of their belief that an ogre living on the summit must be appeased.

2. Stories are memorable and highly accessible: The way stories are told makes them easy for students to remember. Making the student wonder what happens next is a very easy way to keep them interested and engaged. Stories of cataclysmic events are very accessible due to the Internet. A good example of this is the Alaska earthquake of 1964. There are various websites collecting personal accounts of the earthquake. Alaska is packed full of local resources that have experienced, or know someone close that have experienced an Alaskan earthquake, volcano, or tsunami. Growing up in Sitka, I remember hearing stories about the tsunami that was a result of the 1964 earthquake. A good friend of the family, John Littlefield, told me of how the water was removed from the channel between Japonski Island and Baronof Island in front of Sitka prior to the tsunami reaching the town. He said it looked like an extremely low tide. Then the tsunami arrived, not in a wave, but washed in high enough to flood some basements. This story was told to me once, and I have never forgotten it.

3. Stories can provide local insights: Stories provide scientists insights about the geologic activity of a particular region. A good example of this is the story told by the indigenous people of the Columbia River Gorge area of a “bridge of the gods” that spanned the Columbia River. In the story the bridge collapsed due to a conflict between two male mountains in the area, over a female mountain. Scientific evidence tells that there was in fact a bridge that was created by an enormous landslide, but later collapsed due to the most recent Great Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes.

Stories are one of the oldest and best ways to convey events to our students. It is no different when informing students about geosciences and cultures. Stories are a basic way to explain a phenomenon, they are memorable and highly accessible, and they can provide local insights.

Using resources such a Google Earth to orient students to a particular region can be invaluable. Actually being able to see the wave scar in Lituya Bay, and seeing the obvious fault plain to the right of the bay was essential to my understanding of the tsunami of 1958. Then, hearing the personal account from Sonny and Howard Ulrich made the event that more real in my mind. Resources such as Google Earth, YouTube, video clips on Teachers' Domain, stories, or personal accounts are essential supplements to any lesson or unit of study.

Module III Response

Essential Question: How are landscapes formed and how, in turn, are cultures shaped by their landscapes?

EXPLAIN
My family owns a summer house outside of Pelican, Alaska. Pelican is a small Southeast Alaska town located on the Northwestern part of Chichagof Island, inside fjord called Lisianski Inlet. Southeast Alaska is comprised of over 1000 islands peppered throughout an island chain called the Alexander Archipelago. The islands are a result of tectonic action between the Pacific Plate converging into the North American Plate. The Fairweather Fault is the geologic boundary between the plates, and runs directly down the middle of Lisianski Inlet. A combination of activity from the fault, glaciers from the last ice age, and weathering from high winds and rain, have carved a steep mountainscape down to the waters edge. These geologic forces have formed a unique landscape and local culture.

by IVA_039

EXTEND
Pelican lies in the midst of extraordinary resources. An old growth temperate rainforest carpets the island. Upwelling currents create habitat for high marine biomass. Rocks are also proven to be rich with precious metals. Despite the natural wealth of Lisianski Inlet, its population and prosperity remain modest due to natural barriers to accessing the resources.

The town of Pelican is built on a boardwalk, pressed between the steep mountains of the inlet and the ocean below. The town would not be able to expand even if prosperity arrived. It is an outpost of even smaller centers of commerce. It is just far enough away from regional hubs, and small enough of a population that the cost of running a business and the cost living are multiplied. The buying and selling of low margin commodities like fish and forestry products are often not optimized. You can only get to Pelican by float plane, personal boat, or the ferry, so very few of Southeast Alaska’s millions of tourists ever make it there.

by Gavrilo_Serbia

by Jim Nieland

EVALUATE
Google Earth and other global information technologies pinpoint our location relative to everyone else. Someone might argue that it is just like having a map. But, the cool thing about Google Earth is that it is a two way street. I can see them and they can see me. Prior to Google Earth, very few people had a map of places like Pelican, and that alone can impact your world view. When I plan a vacation, I spend a lot of time on Google Earth trying to find a location that appears to have the climate, geography, and culture that I want to experience. My dream vacation is a kayaking adventure in the inside passage of Southern Chile. From looking and searching on Google Earth, I can find no other place in the world that resembles Southeast Alaska so much, but has summer in January.

Module II Response

Essential Question: How is everything connected from the perspectives of indigenous peoples and Western scientists? What are the advantages to knowing both ways?

How is everything connected from the perspectives of indigenous peoples and Western scientists?

First of all I believe in order for us to make connections between indigenous ways of knowing and Western ways of knowing, we must look at each as equally valid. I noticed that blogger, Bill-Alaska Geoscience, said that “The Inuits did not do actual science but understood their environment.”

So what is science? According to Wikipedia, the word science means “knowledge” in Latin. Wikipedia defines science as “any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.” Looking at this definition, I reflect on my experience of building a traditional Western Greenland Inuit kayak. The Smithsonian institute refers to the kayak as “the most sophisticated boat ever built for a single purpose.” Each component is treated, bent, and carved with a specific prescription based on the builders’ proportions. This creates an amazing balanced and functional vessel that even modern materials and engineering methods cannot duplicate. Clearly this technology evolved over time. This evolution required focused specific questions that had to be answered through trial and error. The control would have been the first design, and the manipulated variable would have been the modified element. I have to conclude that Inuits did do actual science in determining what worked or what didn’t while coming up with the “prescriptive practice” of building a kayak.

Even this interpretation of the kayak’s evolution fits a classroom’s more narrow definition of science. In the classroom we tend to refer to science as a stepwise process that tests a hypothesis, or the scientific method.

So how is everything connected….Actually, it’s all science!

What are the advantages to knowing both ways?

There are many ways to answer this question. I noticed that blogger, Explore Alaska!, answered this question in terms of knowing both ways in a survival situation. Explore Alaska! stated that “integrating the two can have deadly consequences.” and “If you are in a life and death situation, stick with what you know.”

I would like to answer this question in terms of teaching both ways in our classroom. I believe the advantages to knowing and teaching both ways is that simply, multiple view points are always better than one when you are teaching to a classroom of diverse individuals. I really liked blogger, Bill-Alaska Geoscience’s quote from Richard Glenn that said “Each point of view is like a flashlight shining down the same path.”

I also believe that including Indigenous science makes science concepts relevant to all students. Indigenous science is place-based science. When you take science and teach it in a way that connects the concepts to what students are able to observe and experience in their local environments, suddenly you have a whole classroom that is engaged and learning.

Another reason to including both in the classroom is that both types of science can validate each other. An example of this is the Navajo’s taboos related to mice. If a mouse came in contact with anything belonging to a Navajo such as food or clothing, tradition said that it would have to be burned. Now Western science validates this tradition after discovering the deadly hantavirus carried by the deer mice in the Four Corners area of the United States (http://www1.umn.edu/ships/culture/index.htm).

Including both ways is essential in teaching a world view as well as a local view of how science is applied in student’s lives. Like blogger, Woven Ideas and Practices, so eloquently put it, “I to would like to see our state and our people use the gifts of our cultures to play together as one orchestra!”