By ARIADNE WILL
Sentinel Staff Writer
The local environmental group Youth for Sustainable Futures sees updated science education standards as an opportunity to introduce more place-based learning into Sitka’s high school science classes.
But science teachers at Sitka High and at Mt. Edgecumbe High School say place-based learning is already practiced in the local schools.
“I’m not a cookie cutter, buy-your-lab-kits kind of gal,” said MEHS science teacher Chohla Moll.
Moll’s science classes meet the educational standards mandated by the state, but she teaches by using connections based on place-shared experiences that come from living in Sitka and in Alaska.
Jaycee Bourdokofsky looks at an ocean sample during a Herring Week boat field trip in 2017. The trip was part of a week-long collaboration with the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Sitka Conservation Society and Sitka National Historical Park. The data collected was compared to previous years. (Photo by MEHS yearbook staff)
For those who may be unfamiliar with the term, “place-based” education makes a student’s local community a primary resource for learning. This nationally popular educational philosophy, proponents say, grounds students in “the history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of their particular ‘place,’ or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.” This helps a student retain a “sense of place” - and a connection to place - that can be lost by focusing on abstract ideas and issues that the student may not believe they connect to.
Moll said place-based education occurs in everything from students conducting field research on cell phone use among their boarding-school peers, to their science experiments in the osmosis and diffusion lab Moll developed.
“I always talk about drying and smoking fish and all the kids know what I’m talking about,” she said of the lab. “The kids start to make the connection between the lab and the traditional and indigenous knowledge that we’ve had for thousands of years.”
Fish drying and smoking processes involves brining the fish, which kills microbes on the surface, she explained.
Teaching science in this format allows students to connect to the place in which they are learning, she said. Moll hopes that her science program will create a sense of stewardship among her students.
“We’re super lucky here in Alaska where we can help students make connections between the content and the place where they’re living,” she said. “It helps connect their learning better.”
Sitka High School biology teacher Stacy Golden uses place in her lessons, as well.
Golden said she partners with several community programs to teach science to her students.
Students and MEHS and SHS practice place-based science in Sitka with help from the Sitka Sound Science Center, Sitka Tribe of Alaska, Allen Marine, the U.S. Forest Service, Sitka Conservation Society, and other Sitka organizations.
Golden said place-based learning can allow students who don’t do well in a traditional classroom setting to succeed in their educational endeavors.
“Some of the kids struggle with your traditional pencil and paper learning,” she said. “You throw them outside or in the woods and they’re the first ones to put on the waders, to flip over rocks and look for fish.”
She said these are students she sees entering science fields post-high school.
“There are the kids who get way into it and they’re the ones I find out are getting jobs in science fields,” Golden said. “They’re suddenly realizing that the things they’ve loved about Sitka they can turn into a career.”
But place-based learning can lead to a love of any subject, Moll said.
“My son’s third-grade teacher ... had these little writing prompts that (he) had to do every single day,” she said. “He had such a great time figuring out how to answer these prompts and they were all connected to something that he was interested in, or that he was doing at home.”
She said these prompts inspired him to write about things relevant to him, such as one prompt that he answered by inventing a new blueberry plant.
Moll said seeing her son answer those prompts made her think about how place could be used in social studies or English classes.
“In an Alaska history class and with my students who are from all these places that have their own story about the history of their people and their home, (place-based learning) could be such a powerful thing,” she said. “Think about the resources that are untapped in rural Alaska about the history of Alaska.”
Moll added that people interested in practicing place-based learning do not have to come up with a program like she has overnight. She said small steps are important.
“Just take one lab,” she said. “Just one couple-day activity ... and start with that. Get them thinking. It doesn’t have to be all of it at once.”
