Apr 30
This activity introduces grades 5-12 students to the technical sophistication of west coast Native peoples. Students are asked to design a shell-harvesting device and then compare it with the design used by one First Nation/tribe more than a century ago to harvest a special shellfish that lives 70 feet below the surface.
Apr 30
A “two-eyed seeing” activity for 10-15 year olds that integrates Western and Aboriginal world views while teaching about solstices and equinoxes
Apr 30
A multidisciplinary outdoor habitat study for grades 3-6. Native elders help students develop new perspectives on nature, learn about medicine wheels, and use their new knowledge to create a habitat wheel
Apr 30
In this activity, students in grades 6-10 deify ecosystems based on their physical characteristics, and consider how adding subjectivity to our perceptions of ecosystems might affect our treatment of them
An integrative science activity for 9-15 year olds which describes how to measure vitamin C levels in teas made from the needles of coniferous trees.
Apr 30
Students in an inner-city-school program learned that visual environments are a matter of choice: they can reflect and perpetuate cycles of poverty, or become opportunities to restore hope and self-esteem.
Apr 30
Apr 30
Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of organic architecture inspires students to consider how the beauty of nature could be reflected in their environment.
Apr 30
For middle and high school students, the concepts of visual pollution and transportation are excellent entry points for studying the complex issues involved in community growth and planning. In Kentucky, we have had great success introducing these concepts through two Youth Environmental Summits that attracted teams of students from 8 schools in 2003 and from 16 schools in 2005. This article will explore some of the benefits and challenges of organizing such events on a state- or province-wide basis.
Apr 30
Originally appears in the Fall 2007 issue
Young people today in southeastern Tennessee never knew the barren red hills and deep eroded gullies that were here in their grandparents’ day. By the late 1800s, open-pit roasting of copper ore in the Copper Basin of the southern Appalachians had produced the largest man-made biological desert in the United States, and the ecosystem was in trouble. Fifty square miles of forested land had been stripped bare to provide fuel for the processing of copper ore; and any vegetation that was not lost to clearcutting had been decimated by the sulfur dioxide fumes released in the ore roasting. The Basin had become so barren that the bald, red land could be seen decades later from space as a huge scar on the landscape — other than the Great Wall of China, the only man-made feature on the planet that could be recognized from that distance. Today, the natural beauty of the Copper Basin is re-emerging as the result of a successful but ongoing environmental reclamation project, a combined effort of government, private companies and local citizens and organizations.
Given the community’s history of environmental degradation in the pursuit of economic goals, teachers at Copper Basin High School were determined to create a better future by educating their Grade 7-12 students about community pride and character. Successful community partnerships helped us establish a Learning Center at the school, and the arts became a focus of a progression of activities that has expanded over the past five years. In this article, I will outline a number of our arts-oriented initiatives, as well as the partnerships and community support we have developed to maintain the program in our small high school of 331 students.
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