Engaging Alaska Natives with the Geosciences - Track 2

Wgbh Educational Foundation, Brighton MA

Investigators

Abstract

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.