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. I’ll begin with a huge library of materials created for Nature near the Schools—Discovery’s first teacher workshops in the early 1990s, including: 1) descriptions of most schools in our district, 2) materials from associated natural history classes andgeneral background, and 3) materials for other school districts throughout the archipelago.

Next, we’ll gradually add more current resources, such as 4) school-history ‘pageflippers’—pdfs with precisely-scaled and aligned air-views of school surroundings, for easy toggling back and forth, studying change.

1) Nature near the schools: Áak’w & T’aakú Aaní

From 1990 to 1993, under funding from a Dwight D. Eisenhower Mathematics and Science Education grant, Discovery offered teacher workshops. The first ones 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)

Harborview class on natural communities and forest succession

2) 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.
● A naturalist’s look at SE Alaska, by Streveler & Carstensen

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) School-history pageflippers

About a decade after the above workshops-&-materials from the early 1990s, we entered the age of GIS. In ArcMap, I’ve begun georeferencing historic aerials, which makes it efficient to export precisely scaled and aligned 2D air-views, ordered on adjacent pages of pdfs for precise point-to-point comparison of changes with human buildout and successional development. Many of these air photos are the same as those included as stereograms in the earlier workshop materials. The difference in these “pageflippers” is that they make decade-to-decade comparisons easier than in stereopairs, where alignment is dependent on the plane’s flight direction.

SCHOOLS

“Ecosystem:” a rant

Nature near schools: 1990-93

A naturalist’s look at Southeast Alaska

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