SCHOOLS Archives | JuneauNature

For our schools and teachers

This section is being added in fall of 2020, in support of our partners in education seeking place-based natural and cultural history resources.

1) Connor-Carstensen landforms course

For the fall 2022 semester at UAS, Geologist and old friend Cathy Connor and I are teaching a 393-Geol class called Teaching the landscape of Southeast Alaska. This page will link to resources as we proceed, and hopefully become a rich, permanent home for the geomorphology of northern Lingít Aaní.

2) Nature near the schools: Áak’w & T’aaḵú Aaní

From 1990 to 1993, under funding from a Dwight D. Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education grant, Discovery offered teacher workshops. The first were held locally within the Juneau School District. Part of the series was site-based, focusing on immediate surroundings of each school existing at that time (Others, such as Riverbend and Thunder Mountain were built more recently). Deliverables to school libraries, post-workshop, included detailed site-description manuals, stereogram-&-puzzler pages, and powerpoints with teacher-scripts.

About three decades later, in collaboration with School District educators, I’m digitizing and uploading these now-historic materials. Eventually I hope to load materials here for all educational institutions in the CBJ: For now, this section includes primarily our older (pre-mid-90s) elementary (& one middle) schools: Auke Bay ● Mendenhall River ● Sít’ Eetí Shaanáx (Glacier Valley) ● Riverbend ● Dzantik’i Héeni Middle ● Harborview ● Sayéik (Gastineau)

3) Nature near the schools: Lingít Aaní

Following site-based and thematic workshops in my home kwáans of Áak’w & T’aakú Aaní, Greg Streveler and I took Nature near the schools ‘on-the-road’ (marine highway, actually) to 5 communities in the northern & central archipelago. At the Haines workshop we also had teachers from Skagway, so we titled this Northern Lynn Canal Schools. The Icy Strait workshop at Hoonah had teachers from Gustavus, Elfin and Pelican. Tenakee’s principal attended the Chatham Strait workshop at Angoon, and Wrangell teachers came to the Petersburg workshop. Sitka was too far from other communities for out-of-town teachers, but had the highest local turnout of the series:

● Jilkáat & Jilkoot Aaní (Haines-Skagway).● Xunaa Káawu (Hoonah Gustavus, Elfin Cove and Pelican). ● Xutsnoowú Aaní (Angoon,Tenakee) ● Sheet’ká Aaní (Sitka) ● Shtax’héen Aaní (Petersburg Wrangell)

4) Nature near the schools: Thematic & overview materials

Many of the site-based and overview resources listed and linked above date back almost 30 years to an Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education grant that funded Discovery for 3 years of intensive teacher workshops that we titled Nature near the schools. For that project we not only built place-based libraries for local and northern-Southeast schools, but also delivered teacher classes on themes,

These themes reflected (and still do!) the seasonal sequence of subjects typically offered by Discovery naturalists in our primary program called Nature Studies, for grades 3 through 5. Course materials are presented at high school level and can be adapted by teachers for any grade. Roughly in order of season, they are: ● seeds ● natural communities ● landforms ● tracking ● birds

Overview materials In addition to these natural history themes, our early-1990s workshop series culminated in:

● Nature near the schools: overview & supplementary materials. and ● A naturalist’s look at SE Alaska,

5) School-history pageflippers

About a decade after the above workshops-&-materials from the early 1990s, we entered the age of GIS. In ArcMap, I georeference historic aerials, then export precisely scaled and aligned 2D air-views, ordered on adjacent pages of pdfs for precise point-to-point comparison of changes with human build-out and successional development. “Pageflippers” make decade-to-decade comparisons easier than in stereopairs, where alignment is dependent on the plane’s flight direction.

6 Recent teacher outings

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7 Middle school STEAM group

For the past several years, Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) has facilitated a coalition of Middle School teachers from schools throughout Lingít Aaní. I’m adding this category page in 2023 as an ongoing portal for resources of interest to their discussions and activities. One text for this year has been Haa L’éelk’w Hás Aani Saax’ú: Our Grandparents’ Names on the Land. I’m eager to assist in making Lingít (& K’áyk’aanii) place names accessible to Southeast educators.

SCHOOLS

“Ecosystem:” a rant

Nature near schools: 1990-93

A naturalist’s look at Southeast Alaska

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