Written June 2011

 

Portfolio Writing:

Local & Alaskan Knowledge

 

Write a paper which draws the reader’s attention to the appropriate sections or aspects of your unit plans in the appendix that demonstrate the following performance: 3.c. Apply local and Alaska knowledge to the selection of instructional strategies, materials, and resources.

In the curriculum below, I demonstrate performance 3.c., which asks that I apply local and Alaska knowledge to the selection of instructional strategies, materials, and resources. In so doing, I:

  • utilize Alaskan content standards
  • select content and materials that are relevant to Alaskans
  • select topics and themes that are relevant culturally to all of my students
  • bring Elders into the school
  • send students out to seek elders in the community
  • provide students with flexible projects that allow them to explore and share the experiences of their own communities.

 

In my “Culture at a Crossroads” unit, I incorporated Alaskan Cultural Standards A and E into the planning of the unit. In the Unit, I use To Kill a Mockingbird as a jumping off point for discussing the civil rights movement in the American South, and then connect the Alaskan Civil Rights movement. West High School is highly diverse, with a majority-minority population (40% Caucasian); my classes this year included Chinese, Korean, Samoan, Pacific Islander, Sudanese, Filipino, Hmong, Hispanic, African-American, Native Alaskan and Caucasian students. The content is relevant to all students in our classroom, regardless of their race and backgrounds, as we will be emphasizing the connections between various civil rights movements in the state and nation of their citizenship. These movements which have directly affected their lives and opportunities, and the lives and opportunities of their parents; they have directly determined who has the right to sit in the classroom; they have defined “peer groups”.

 

Similarly, I select materials that are relevant locally. In teaching my “Uniquely Alaskan Lesson” I used hypothermia as a “hook”, drawing students into the dark Alaskan tale of “To Build a Fire” and teaching them the message of the Naturalist literary movement, and an important lesson for their survival in Alaska; nature overpowers man. Furthermore, by having students go outside and experience the cold in an uncomfortable manner and then write about it descriptively using the five senses, I am giving them the opportunity to write about something that they have lived in their lives in Alaska, rather than just writing about the experience as described in their reading.

 

Finally, I utilize local resources in my community. After reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I hosted visiting speaker and community Elder Jane Phillips Cason, age 84, to come in and give a talk in my class (the basic process and context is outlined in my “Culture at a Crossroads” unit). She is the grandmother of six West High graduates, and three future West High graduates. She lived in the Jim Crow South, and moved to Alaska long enough ago to have voted in Alaska’s first state election, raising three sons in Homer. She taught school for over 30 years before retiring. She is uniquely qualified to speak to school segregation and segregation in general in the American South and in Alaska. My students came up with questions to ask her during her visit, and afterward, after a lesson in proper thank-you writing, they all composed thank you notes for her. By connecting my students with elders in the community, I help them understand the value of their Elders in transmitters and recorders of history.

 

In a similar project, outlined in my “Podcasting Lessons”, after training my students in interview protocol, I have students go out into the community and interview elders about their experiences growing up, selecting from a list of possible foci or posing their own. Then, upon returning, they edit the stories into five-minute clips that they then present to the class. With a community as diverse as that of Anchorage, the sampling of Elders chosen will undoubtedly be broad and their stories varied. This assignment not only connects West to the broader community and individual students to individual elders; it also serves to connect the stories of these elders with all of the students in the class, giving students a broader sense of the diversity of experience in the community in which they live.