Personal Implications
Climate Change in Kwigillingok (continued)
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 them both aloud. This was powerful. Another student photographed seagulls that were hanging around later in the season than usual. She explained that “it’s unusual for them to still be here [in October], which suggests that [the ground] is not as cold as it looks.
Once the paragraphs had been written and recorded, students
responded to several prompts that they created themselves, 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.” When asked what message they wanted to send to the preservice teachers in Washington, 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 project’s final phase was to put our photos, words, and voices into a very short iMovie. The students helped plan the sequencing, and then we put it together. And while the “film” was only four and a half minutes long, it sent a strong message to the preservice teachers it was meant to educate. After viewing the movie, one of my preservice 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.”
Larger Implications
Place-based education, while not a new concept, is particularly well-suited for the inclusion of student voices. With its aim of grounding learning in local phenomena and students’ lived experience (Smith, 2002), it can be easily adapted to fit any number of school curricula. For example, nearly every city or town has local issues that can be studied in greater depth, be they environmental issues (toxic wastewater), social justice issues (migrant workers’ access to health care), or issues dealing with the economy (how city taxes are used to fund local schools). In the case of our project, climate change was an obvious topic for exploration, given our fortunate connection with students in the far North. Plus, the topic fits nicely into the definition of “sustainability education.” Within WWU’s Woodring College of Education, our underlying assumption is that education for sustainability (as opposed to education about sustainability) will result in citizens who are more likely to engage in personal behavior or contribute to public policy decisions in the best interest of the environmental commons and future generations (Nolet, 2009).
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When students take control of their learning, and take control of how that learning can be demonstrated, amazing things can happen. For the Kwig high school students, they learned that they had not only some very important things to say, but also an audience that was receptive to and respectful of their words and ideas. For my preservice teachers, they learned that they are not the experts on everything, and sometimes they have to step aside to let the experts step forward (in this case, the students themselves). This idea of relinquishing power in the classroom can intimidate a new teacher, but it is an important lesson, especially regarding student engagement.
After viewing the high school students’ film, my preservice teachers had a lot to say about place-based education, and how this project connects students to their local communities, and society as a whole. One student commented, “Obviously, the kids in the movie care about what is happening to their homes and land. We need that heart in schools, or what they are learning means nothing.”
Many students also commented on the topic of climate change. “Now I know why I take the time to recycle! It’s not much, but it’s a small step I can take to help preserve the world’s cultures.” Another student said, “Now that I know this—about the challenges facing Kwig due to climate change—I feel obligated to do something about it.” Climate change now has a name and a face. It’s personal.
Similar projects that focus on topics of local concern could
be created within other curricula. Any place-based study could benefit from hearing the voices of those most affected. Travel to each place is certainly not mandatory. Using even simple technology such as email or Skype could connect classrooms across town or across the world. Because, in the end, it is all about the relationships that can be forged as a result of storytelling. The more we know about others through their stories, in their own voices, the more inspired we might be to recognize those voices in our own.
References
Clark, C. (1999). The autodriven interview: A photographic viewfinder into children’s experience. Visual Sociology, 14, 39-50.
Nolet, V. W. (2009). Preparing sustainably literate teachers.
Teachers College Record, 111(5). Smith, G. A. (2002). Place-based education: Learning to be
where we are. Phi Delta Kappan (April), 584-594.
Lauren G. McClanahan (Lauren.
mcclanahan@wwu.edu) is a professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash.
www.clearingmagazine.org
CLEARING Spring 2018
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