First Person Singular: Documenting Climate Change

Originally appears in the Spring 2010 issue

When I look out over my classes, at my students who are working towards their teacher certification, I see a diverse sea of faces. They come from all walks of life, are at different points in their educational (and working) careers, and have different goals for their future middle and high school students. However, one commonality among the majority of them is their geog- raphy. Most of my students hail from western Washington state, up and down the “I-5 corridor.” Take the freeway north, and in 15 minutes you’re in Canada. A few hours south, and you’ve crossed into Oregon. On a daily basis, my students do not give much thought to climate change. Oh, sure, in a theoretical way, it matters. Many of my students claim to be “green” through and through. They recycle, use compact fluorescent bulbs, and buy local products whenever possible. But as for the big changes — the catastrophic ones that are happening in polar regions — my students just don’t see them. Western Washington is still rather far removed from any of the danger zones that they might read about or view on television. Much farther removed than parts of rural Alaska.

Kwigillingok is a small Yup’ik fishing village on the coast of the Bering Sea in western Alaska. Its population of approximately 400 depends on a subsistence economy, much as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.

Fishing, hunting, and the making and selling of crafts are as integral to their lives today as they have been for centuries. However, as of late, that livelihood is being threatened by a warming climate. The biggest challenge faced by the resi- dents of “Kwig” is the melting of the permafrost, that layer of ground that lies just below the surface of the earth and stays frozen year round. Recently, that permafrost has begun to melt, and, as a result, major changes are taking place.

For one thing, many of the homes and other structures in the village are beginning to sink, leaning to one side as the permafrost they were built upon begins to shift. In addition to the sinking homes, new, invasive species of plants are beginning to take root, and this in turn is slowly changing the migratory patterns of big game such as musk ox. Fishing, too, has been affected by the warming trend, and fish camps have had to be relocated with the changing location of the fish. These are not small changes, but big changes that can

be seen and felt and experienced daily by people throughout northern Canada and Alaska, including the high school students of Kwig. The students have a powerful story to tell, and the pre-service teachers in my literacy class wanted to hear those stories.

Several years ago, one of my former students took a job in the lower Kuskokwim School District in rural southwest- ern Alaska. As I heard her stories of how isolated she and her students were, and how difficult it was at times to motivate her students to write, we came up with an idea. What if she were not the sole audience for her students’ writing? What if my pre-service teachers paired up with her middle and high school students and exchanged their stories and thoughts and opinions through writing? Would that motivate her students to care more about their writing? Would it help my students learn how to respond to student writing? It seemed like a win-win situation.

After a few false starts (and lots of organizational issues), our students began to exchange writing regularly. The students in Alaska had a broader audience than they had had in the past, and my students were learning to respond — using rubrics and their own good judgment — to “real” student writing (as opposed to case studies we had read about in our textbooks). One topic that came up again and again in the Alaskan students’ writing was how climate change is beginning to affect the way they live.

The melting permafrost, the invasive plant species — they told stories about it all, and they wanted the future teachers “down there” to share these stories with all of their future students, so that perhaps something could be done about it. Someone in my university class had the idea that making a short movie might be the best way to tell this story, and the students of Kwig agreed. They wanted to let everyone know that climate change is real and has a face and a name — hence the “First Person Singular” project. This was a project that combined authenticity and students’ voices to create

a warning for those of us who do not have to prop up our houses with sandbags or go hungry because the fish are gone from our rivers. At least not yet.

The “First Person Singular” Project: Literacy meets pragmatism

Authenticity. Unfortunately, not many writing assignments in high schools can claim to be truly authentic. Typically, writing assignments are predetermined and assume that the classroom teacher is the primary audience. It is rare that students’ writing is purposeful, challenges their readers’ assumptions, and is meant to be read by a large audience — an audience that might be in a position to take action. Such was the case when I asked the students of Kwig if they would like to document the effects that climate change is having on their village. Because this project would involve working outside of regular class time, only three students volunteered to participate, but they were the ones who came up with the writing prompts (“What is worth preserving in Kwig?” and “What scares us the most about climate change?”), the evidence of climate change in their village, and the outlet for sharing their message with my literacy students in Bellingham (using a combination of pictures and words in the movie). Being asked to provide us with a “first person” account of what is happening to our environment right now was, for them, a rare and wonderful opportunity to be heard.

To help facilitate this project, I traveled to the school myself to spend a few days with the kids on their own turf. Before leaving, I asked the Kwig high school students to photograph any evidence of climate change that they could see. As luck would have it, one of my university students was in Kwigillingok School for his student-teaching internship and was able to help me coordinate the project. When I arrived in the village, I sat down with the students individu- ally to talk about the photos they had taken. This technique of using students’ own photographs as a starting point — something on which to focus our conversation — proved to be very beneficial. I was afraid that the conversation might otherwise become too abstract or even uncomfortable (as

I was a complete stranger, and not many strangers come to town). By focusing on the photos, we were able to get to the heart of what was important to the students. After all, we were talking about their photos of evidence of climate change in their village.

After the students told me about their photographs, I asked them to pick a favorite and write about why it was the best choice to illustrate the effects of climate change. Because we had talked about the photos first, the writing was easy. I then asked the students to read their paragraphs (or parts of them) into a digital voice recorder so that we could incorporate their voices into our final product, a short movie that we edited on the computer. One of the students volunteered to play the piano so that our movie would have a soundtrack.

One student selected a photograph of a leaning building and described it this way:

The world is changing. It’s getting warmer and warmer. Ice is melting everywhere, even under- ground. The melting of the permafrost causes hills, houses and other buildings to sink. Permafrost is a section in the ground where everything is frozen.

It melts and refreezes around the year, but lately, there has been more melt than freeze. If we don’t do something, we could lose this beautiful land that we lived in for thousands of years, forever.

He then wrote the same paragraph in his native Yup’ik language and read both paragraphs aloud. Another student photographed seagulls that were staying in the north later in the season than usual. She explained that “…it’s unusual for them to still be here, which suggests that [the ground] is not as cold as it looks.”

Once their paragraphs and voices had been recorded, the students responded to several other writing prompts that they created, such as “What is worth preserving in Kwig?” One student responded:

We don’t have a lot of money. We need to stay near the ocean so we can fish. We don’t want to have to move farther and farther back every few years. We can’t leave, but we can’t stay, either.

These responses were woven into the movie by displaying them as text over their photos. When asked what message they wanted to send to the pre-service teachers in Washing- ton, one student said:

Please understand that what you do down there has a great impact on us up here. Understand that we’re all in this together. Climate change doesn’t just affect polar bears — it affects people, too.

The final phase of our project was to put our photos, words and voices into a very short iMovie, for which the students helped plan the sequencing. While the film is only four and a half minutes long, it sent a powerful message to the pre- service teachers it was meant to educate. After viewing the movie, one of my pre-service teachers wrote:

Now that I know this — now that I have seen these kids’ faces and heard their stories — I can’t ‘un- know’ it. Now I have to decide what I can do about it, both in my classroom and in my everyday life.

Implications

As my pre-service teachers and I learned through this project, students’ voices are powerful. When students are allowed to take control of their learning and of the manner in which that learning is demonstrated, amazing things can happen. The high school students involved in this project learned that they had some very important things to say and an audience that was receptive to and respectful of their ideas. My pre-service teachers learned that teachers are not the experts on everything, that sometimes teachers must step aside and let the expertise of their students come forward. This idea of relinquishing power in the classroom can be intimidating to a new teacher, but it is an important lesson, especially if we want to encourage student inquiry and engagement. As an exchange between classroom com- munities, it is always empowering for students to learn directly from others who are living so closely to the topic being studied. But ultimately, it is the environment that can benefit from a project such as this, because the more aware- ness we have, the less we can stand idly by and pretend that we don’t notice.

Place-based education, while not a new concept, is particularly well-suited for the invitation of students’ voices and stories. With its aim of grounding learning in local phenomena and students’ lived experience, it can be easily adapted to fit any number of school curricula. In this particu- lar case, climate change happened to be an obvious topic for exploration, given our connection with students in the far north. Similar projects could easily be created to suit other curricula. For example, students could conduct an inquiry project on the topic of contaminated watersheds, beaches or stormwater runoff. One of my university students suggested that she would like her future middle school students to study the effects of the large amounts of pesticides used on local agri-business farms. Such topics are all highly political and highly engaging for students, as it is their generation that will inherit these environmental problems.

Any study of faraway places can be enhanced by hearing the voices of those who live there. And travel to each place is certainly not mandatory. Many schools in the far north of Canada and Alaska are rich with technology, so that simple applications such as email or Skype can connect classrooms across town or across the world. In the end, it is all about the relationships that can be forged as a result of authentic storytelling. The more we know about others through their stories, in their own voices, the more inspired we might be to find commonalities. As Corey, one of the Kwig students, wanted us to know, “Whatever you do ‘down there’ has a direct impact on what happens to us ‘up here.’” This was a powerful message for my students to hear — that we are all connected. Now they plan to incorporate similar projects in their own classrooms — putting a human face on problems that might otherwise seem remote.

Reference

Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. New World library, 2005.

Lauren G. McClanahan is an Associate Professor of Secondary Education in Woodring College of Education at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.