Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
NPR had facinating story recently about unlikely groups working together. It’s about a town in Nevada that banded together to save a toad from going extinct. The groups working together include environmentalists and the Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley (aka STORM-OV).
Most of the exploration we studied this cycle were European expeditions. One group wanted to do something a little different, so I suggested they look in to Chinese explorations of other parts of the world. There was much Chinese commerce across the Indian Ocean, and in a non-Christian twist on the “God” theme for exploration, the Chinese brought Buddhism back from India in the third century AD (we’re studying exploration under the themes of God, Gold and Glory).
Another interesting aspect of research into Chinese exploration is the rather controversial work by Gavin Menzies that suggests that great Chinese fleets explored the Americas and circumnavigated the globe in the 1420’s, a long time before Columbus and Magellan.
There is a lot of evidence that there was no such Chinese expedition, but it’s a fascinating hypothesis and, in a way, very similar to the All About Explorers project: although Menzies’ work is not an intentionally educational hoax. Indeed, it is much more subtle and much more detailed. My favorite line of critique asserts that Menzies’ books, “.. may well prove to be the Piltdown Man of literature.” I don’t know if I’ll have the time to try to unpack that one for my students.
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
One of the major motivations space exploration is the search for extra-terrestrial life. The SETI project is the most visible initiative and there are a lot of neat educational resources on their outreach page. And you can participate. seti@home allows you to download a screensaver that actually helps them process data.
The NPR program, To the Best of Our Knowledge, has a nice program asking the question, “What is Life?” The last part of the program (at about 45:00 minutes in) is an interview with Paul Davies who is head of the SETI post-detection task group. It starts with question of silicon based life, the theory of which is based on the locations of carbon and silicon in the same column in the periodic table. It also talks about what life might look like once technology really takes off and life starts “evolving by design”.
But SETI searches for signs of intelligent life using radiotelescopes. There are other projects that look for any sign of live. One of the major reasons the Mars rovers and satellites spend a lot of time looking for signs of water on the planet is that life, as we know it, requires water.
It’s also why space agencies are so interest in Europa, the moon of Jupiter that’s covered with ice. Europa also has signs of volcanic activity under the ice, which makes it doubly interesting.
All About Explorers is a wonderful site if you’re interested in talking about the credibility of sources. It looks real, is well organized, well written and could easily pass for credible to the uninitiated. The article on John Cabot starts with:
One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure.
Now, there are more telltale clues that everything is not on the up-and-up, particularly where they mention Cabot’s cartographic exploits on his ”alleged” return to England from growing up in Italy:
In 1484, John Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. This was a great career move for John. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far East.
I find sites like these delightful. To think that someone spent the time, energy and intelligence to create this particular little snare, says something wonderful about way the human mind works.
Nicely, the “About This Site” section notes:
All About Explorers was developed by a group of teachers as a means of teaching students about the Internet. … Because we wanted to make a point about finding useless information even in a site which looked at first to be fairly well put together, all of the Explorer biographies here are fictional. While many of the facts are true or based on truth, many inaccuracies, lies, and even downright absurdity are mixed in indiscriminately. As such, it is important that you do not use this site as a source of reference for your own research!
The site also has a set of lessons, handouts and other stuff on its “For Teachers” page.
This wonderful animation shows the exploration of the North American Coastline from 1500 to 1876, updating the map as the different explorers push further along the coastline. Most of the action occurs to the north, as expedition after expedition sough the Northwest Passage.
What’s nice, is that the names of the explorers, like Cabot and Franklin, should be familiar to students after this cycle’s research.
The BBC has an excellent podcast series called, A history of the world in 100 objects, which does a nice job of getting into history and culture by talking about the significance of important archeological artifacts: a Korean roof tile; a North American Otter pipe; and Harlem wall painting fragments for example. The objects span the time from 2 million years ago to the present day.
The website, where you can see the objects as well as quite a number of user-contributed objects, is also excellent (the contributions by the British Museum are the ones in the programme, and the Wikipedia page also has images of all the artifacts). The objects are organized by time period, location, culture, theme (war, religion, food for example), colour, and even material. It’s nice to see all the layers of meaning that can be gained from a single object by viewing it from different perspectives.
There are also short videos with Kay Topping from Haslemere Education Museum (that are not accessible in the U.S.) on the power of actual artifacts in the classroom.
When I explain that this object was made for a real ancient Egyptian by another real ancient Egyptian I can see the kids faces reflecting this ‘Wow’. Only objects and the actual places where events happened are able to do this.
— Kay Topping (2010) in Paul Sargeant’s History of the World project blog: Object lessons for schools
The Powers of Ten video, which we use in the lesson on modern exploration is now online.
The Powers of Ten website also has a nice little interactive illustration that shows all the different scales.