Life on the Edge.....Shishmaref, AK

OK, I got this all a bit backwards.  The assignment for last week was to develop a presentation abut a place as experienced through Greunewald's 5 Dimensions of Place. I went way outside of the geographic to the metaphysical and basically constructed a geneology of place- which turns out to be a different assignment. So, here is the link to the Multiple Layers of Place assignment:

https://prezi.com/view/NpU0FwUIdYhVjIlEbVV7/

I saw the picture above in a magazine article a few months back and clipped the picture out to post in my classroom.  Underneath this (now) laminated photograph is a question: "What do kids in Shishmaref , AK know about climate change that we do not?"
This question has now taken center-stage in quarter 2 5th grade engineering lab.  We are going to explore the role of environmental engineers in a changing climate.  I have made contact with a teacher at Shishmaref School and we will be setting up some informational sharing sessions once our kids have done some background reading on this unique place and have decided what to share about their own concerns regarding the impacts of global climate change on their own place of Maui.

This was not an easy "sell" to the grade 5 teachers- some of whom just ask "what do I need to teach the kids, what do they have to know?"  Some need to see the specific standards I plan on addressing (so far, I've got Life Science, Earth Science, Physical Science and several Science and Engineering Practices, that ought to satisfy the standards craving!) and are not completely comfortable with a project-based approach and the uncertainty of the planning phase.

For her part, sixth grade teacher Anna in Shishmaref seems super positive and welcoming in our initial phone conversation.  I am excited to see where the questions and the conversation lead... here is the letter of introduction I sent which details why I am hoping our students can work together:

Aloha Anna,

 Mahalo (thank you) for being so willing to consider a way our students in Kahului, Maui and Shishmaref, AK might learn about this changing world together.

I am the STEAM teacher at Pōmaikai elementary school in the central valley of Kahului, Maui, HI(pomaikai.k12.hi.us). Pōmaika'i means "blessing" in the Hawaiian language. Most of our students are local born of mixed Filipino, Asian and caucasian ancestry with only a few having indigenous ties to the Hawaiian community. 

That being said our school builds cultural practice and respect for Hawaiian traditions into the curriculum- including morning chanting and opening each staff meeting with appropriate protocol. We value our place and know that we can not understand it if we remove it from the cultural practice of the native people, even in a modern world. The "A" in the STEAM acronym represents Arts integration and 'Āina (in Hawaiian, "that which feeds").

My fifth grade students explore the work of environmental engineers in their STEAM curriculum, beginning after Fall Recess on October 16. In the past we have looked at questions of how engineers plan, build and prepare for extracting resources from the earth including how they mitigate environmental problems that might arise from those human activities.  Last year, in considering how an engineer would design a cleanup protocol for an oil spill, we explored the interconnections between living an non-living parts of a community where an oil drill or pipeline might be located as well as the human health and cultural elements in thee places.  Standing Rock protests were very much in the news at hat time and they mirror many concerns that our people have about development and degradation of our cultural and environmentally significant places on Maui and elsewhere in Hawaii (http://content.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2017/08/telescope-protesters-poised-to-confront-convoy-to-summit/).

This year I would like to refocus our questions about the role of environmental engineers in building not only technology but processes and monitoring to prepare humans for the impacts that climate change is bringing and that will continue to be amplified.  I do not want to approach this from a purely scientific or even sociological perspective.  I want to tie these questions into the most basic motivation that we have for caring about any of these questions in the first place- our sense of place. Kids brought up on an island, either high, volcanic islands like Maui or low, less geologically stable dune islands like Sarichef, have a unique world view. Many families are tied to the land for subsistence and/or cultural practice in such a way that makes living anywhere an almost imperceptible idea. These places are remote and life is, by necessity, more self-contained and changes are felt with more immediacy and urgency.

The choices our kids will have to make about living with their environment are ones families in your school are already making.  These stories share a common thread and a message about what we can change, and maybe what we have already done to our world that we can't change.  By 5th and 6th grade students can and should understand that reality and, in some cases, prepare to be active participants in shaping the future for their community and larger society.

Whew- that is may passionate position on this!  I am not sure what form our collective learning can or should take but I think it starts with learning out about each others' place and what it is like to grow up there.  I think remote, arctic Alaska and tropical Pacific Island are both pretty misunderstood by outsiders!

From there we can begin to build questions about how a changing climate is and likely will impact our places and what has been the response from a cultural and a scientific perspective.  For our part, I would like my students to learn about the power of nature in your part of the world and where they see that here (ex: large winter swell) and what can be done to engineer  for the future as those events that are modeled by climate scientists become  (or as is the case in Shishmaref, continue to be) reality. I can see us moving forward to think about so many other people whose places are facing these climate changes now.

Would you like to explore this further?  What sort of access to technology do students have at your school?

I look forward to hearing what you think about what I have brought up. We have a proverbial saying in Hawaiian:

A'ohe pau ka 'ike i ka hãlau ho'okahi  (all knowledge is not learned in one school). I feel strongly that our kiddos can learn from and teach each other.

Aloha nō,  Merrill