In this project, WGBH Educational Foundation will partner with the Alaska Native Science Commission (AKNSC), the University of Alaska/Fairbanks (UAF), the Alaska Staff Development Network (ASDN), and the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Center for Children and Technology (CCT) at the Educational Development Center (EDC). The primary goal of the project is to engage Alaska Native students and their teachers with the Geosciences, through a K-12 educational multimedia initiative.
Major project activities include: - Developing a new resource collection on Teachers' Domain (WGBH's K-12 Pathways Portal of the NSDL), focusing on climate change and related threats to the Arctic ecosystem, highlighting indigenous worldviews in addition to Western science perspectives, and featuring video portraits of Alaska Natives who study and work in geosciences. - Developing an online professional development course module on Arctic climate change for middle and high school teachers, using resources from the collection to improve both content knowledge and pedagogical skills. - Developing and piloting a distance-learning course based on the "Native Ways of Knowing" television series. - Running face-to-face training and support sessions for Alaska teachers. The centerpiece will be a multi-day workshop in Anchorage, with invitees from all 53 Alaska school districts.
This project could potentially impact the approximately 130,000 students enrolled in Alaska schools, nearly 1/4 of whom, or about 32,000, are Alaska Natives. In addition, as of March, 2007, Teachers' Domain reaches nearly 40 percent of K-12 public schools in the U.S. and 400,000 user visits a month are now coming to the site. These visitors will also have access to the Teachers' Domain resources developed under this grant.
WGBH Educational Foundation (WGBH) and its partners, the Alaska Native Science Commission (ASNC), the Alaska Staff Development Network (ASDN), the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and Educational Development Center (EDC), completed the OEDG project, "Engaging Alaska Native Students in the Geosciences, on June 30, 2011. This project, which spanned four years, was designed to use the power of digital media and the expertise of the partners to convey relevant content in the geosciences to middle and high school students, especially those of Alaska Native descent, primarily through their teachers and educational programs. The project built upon the work of Oscar Kawagley and Ray Barnhardt of UAF, investigating ways to incorporate a traditional, "Native Ways of Knowing" perspective into science education. The Native perspective includes descriptive, multigenerational observations, a holistic view of natural phenomena with parallels to Earth System Science, and approaches to subsistence living and adaptation that preserve language, culture, and traditions. Over the course of the project, WGBH developed a set of 40 media resources that look at issues in geoscience that are particularly relevant to students in Alaska, including global climate change and its impact on northern latitudes, contaminants in the Arctic, climate science, tectonics, and volcanism. These were adapted from a range of sources, including various public media programs, independent productions, universities, and research organizations, and contextualized to help teachers use them with their students. We also developed three lesson plans and one online student self-paced lesson. These can be found in the "Alaska Native Perspectives on Earth and Climate" collection on Teachers' Domain, at www.teachersdomain.org/special/ean/. (Note that this url will migrate to a new location, as part of PBS LearningMedia, in 2012.) From the launch of the first parts of the Teachers' Domain collection in the winter of 2009, through June 30, 2011, the resources garnered over 70,000 page views. Together with the Alaska partners, we presented a professional development workshop for 20 teachers as part of the Anchorage schools summer institute, and out of this experience, the partners developed an online teacher professional development course, which has now been offered twice to cohorts of Alaska teachers. These experiences incorporated the media resources from the collection to train teachers on geoscience content relevant to Alaska and on ways to present the content from both western scientific and Native perspectives. The partners have also incorporated the media materials into an online course on Alaska Natural and Cultural History that has been submitted for approval for fulfillment of the Alaska teacher certification requirements; this has the potential for widespread impact because of the geographic dispersion of Alaska teachers, as well as high teacher turnover rates, especially in remote areas of the state where Native students are in the majority. EDC's evaluation included these findings: The Alaska special collection of resources was seven times more likely to be viewed by an Alaska user of Teachers' Domain than the average U.S. visitor, and these users ranged across all regions and community types in Alaska. In Alaska, those resources that presented a Native perspective were more heavily viewed than those with a Western perspective, while the opposite was true in the rest of the U.S. The collection and the course provide a strong tool to help teachers increase student understanding and engagement with the geosciences, providing a tool for applying both indigenous and Western perspectives. While the collection and the course may help teachers encourage students to pursue careers in the geosciences, additional supports may be necessary. Over the past couple of years, the partners presented the collection to a wide range of educational and community groups, both in Alaska and throughout the indigenous world community, where it has been viewed as a promising model for engaging students in the sciences. At an expert summit hosted by WGBH in September 2010, a select group of sixteen scientists, educators, and NSF officials recommended that the current Alaska collection had tremendous potential benefit, in-state and out-, and that the concept should be expanded to address indigenous perspectives in other areas of the country. We have since proposed and received positive ratings on a new proposal to extend the concept to the Pacific Islands region.
