Latest News And Updates

The students in Cordova Alaska, like all students, live in a complicated world of systems. In this rural Alaskan town, the economy is rooted in commercial fishing. With the majority of the town relying on the fishing harvest or supporting the fisherman, they are very aware of factors that can affect fish populations. There are man-made systems, such as the fishing regulations, that impact the catch. There are also ecological systems, such as the water and carbon cycles, which impact fish populations. And there are complicated phenomena affecting the town’s ability to thrive, such as climate change, that touch on multiple systems. While students are aware of all the factors affecting their fishing community, it can be hard to visualize how they interact. When teaching about complex and multi-dimensional issues, it helps to approach problems with “systems thinking”.

The fifth-grade science standards in Alaska focus on the Earth’s different spheres and their interactions. Throughout the year, the 28 fifth graders have been learning about the geo-, atmo-, hydro-, cryo-, and bio-sphere and how they interact to aid or hinder our local salmon. 

When we reached the unit on the atmosphere, we focused on the carbon cycle, and students took deep dive into ocean acidification. Ocean acidification is the result of the interaction between the atmosphere and hydrosphere, in which the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. An increase in carbon dioxide leads to a lower (more acidic) pH of ocean waters. Creatures such as shellfish struggle in higher pH waters, and recent research suggests that acidic waters impair a Salmon’s sense of smell and decrease the metabolic rate and growth of juvenile pink salmon.  To see how the effects of ocean acidification can stretch beyond the ocean and salmon, students used the Sustainability Compass. 

Ocean acidification was written in the center circle. As this was a new concept for the students, words such as “carbon storage,” “shell structure,” “mariculture,” “cultural practices,” and many others were listed in a word bank. As a class, we went through the words one by one and discussed how they could be related to ocean acidification. We specifically highlighted the word “mariculture” because the focus of our next session would be on mariculture. There was a chance at the end of our discussions for students to add any other words they thought might be relevant to ocean acidification. None of the students had any ideas for additional words. In the future, I will solicit their ideas first and use a word bank as a backup. 

Step one was for the students to sort the words into the four categories, Students were quite engaged in sorting the words into the four categories and participated in lively discussions. Words that were particularly “hot” were those that could fit under the Economy category or the Society category which led to the class trying to define each of these categories with a succinct difference between them. Step two was to draw lines of connection between the words. 

In our next session, I asked students to go back to their lines of connection. With a yellow highlighter, they highlighted any connections they noted with mariculture. I introduced the i guest speaker, Dr Cypher, who would be talking about her research with kelp. Using the lines of connection as inspiration, each group wrote down three questions for Dr. Cycpher. Some of the questions that stood out were:

• How much carbon can mariculture sequester?
• What sorts of traditional foods are made with kelp?
• Is kelp healthy to eat? 
• How much money can you make in mariculture? Will mariculture replace fishing?

The questions led to a lively conversation that impressed the visiting scientist. Unfortunately, as this was the last lesson of the year, we were unable to follow up with more Sustainability Compass work. If we had more time, I would have liked to zoom in on mariculture as a focus for the Sustainability Compass. I believe that after having done a compass worksheet for ocean acidification and meeting the mariculture scientist, they would have been able to complete another Compass worksheet independently. This could have served as a good assessment tool for understanding how much they gained from our visit with Dr. Cypher. 

I am looking forward to next year and implementing the Compass at the beginning of the year to establish a habit of using the tool for all our topics.