My lesson, Yup’ik Song, Dance and Story, looks specifically at Alaska Cultural Standard E. Making local knowledge relevant on a global scale is truly where my interest in music education lies. In my lesson plan, students take a modern approach to passing on cultural knowledge by creating digital soundtracks to characters of the quliraq (Yup’ik legend) the Hungry Giant of the Tundra. Through indigenous ways of teaching and learning such as; group work, indirect teaching and storytelling, students will develop the skills and techniques needed to create their own way of sharing a Yup’ik legend with younger students. In short, the project is designed for high school students to make a music resource for elementary school classrooms. At the deepest level, this lesson is about song and dance which are universal human activities that express emotions and tell stories.
I have attached a pdf teacher version in the UdB unit format and a pdf version of my student oriented chapter:
My lesson looks at the effects Earth’s axial tilt has on the planetary and local scales.
My lesson plan integrates cultural standards D and E. Specifically D2 and E1 and E3.
Curriculum standard D. 2. engages students in the construction of new knowledge and understandings that contribute to an ever-expanding view of the world.
In the lesson plan the students contemplate the effects of a different axial tilt of the earth. They are challenged to use the knowledge the have and make hypotheses.
Curriculum standard E. 1. encourages students to consider the inter-relationship between their local circumstances and the global community;
3. prepares students to “think globally, act locally.”
In this unit the students discuss the global causes of seasons and relate them to the local level. They also touch on the possible effects changes at the global level will have on their town.
For this lesson plan, it was tough for me to decide on one particular issue. I primarily chose “history of education in western Alaska” and spent many hours researching the project, but that seemed too broad. As I got very far into the “introduction” assignment, I realized I still had a long ways to go. So I looked back at what I had, and saw that I had mostly wrote about the oral tradition among the Yup’ik culture. I decided to simplify my topic to “Yup’ik oral tradition”. Throughout my life, I was pretty much lectured by my grandpa so I was sort of able to relate to this project. This lesson can fit in multiple standards, but its mostly fits with standard A.
Even though I grew up in a small Yup’ik community, I learned a lot more than I expected. I had no idea that an average of five seal skins were used to build a single kayak. I had no idea that men lived in a qasgi until they died. I had no idea that story knives were solely utilized for girls. I feel like I have learned a lot more during my research with this project than I have learned my entire life. Maybe it’s because this is the first time that I am focusing on a place I grew up during school. Most of my school years were tremendously focused on things that had nothing to do with the Yup’ik region. Maybe there were a few but they did not allow going in depth.
I’m very grateful that I was given the opportunity to learn more about the Yup’ik culture. This lesson plan was a perfect task to give me more confidence about going into a Yup’ik village. I will not know how it is to prepare to be in a classroom until I am in it, but this gave me a great idea. If plan A was too broad or did not work, this was a perfect exercise to go beyond my comfort zone. I had to stay up late a few times to really dig deep. Even though I had a macbook for the past two years, I was technologically challenged since I regularly only used my macbook for internet or word. If I am struggling with a project during class, I now know what it feels like to be forced to choose a different route than your original plan.
And here is a the lesson as seen in iBook. Although unable to use the links or features, this allows you to view the pictures and see the lesson in a different look/format:
Alaska in 1867- photo credit attached to lesson plan.
The overview of this lesson is as follows:
Students will investigate the forced relocation of peoples from the Aleutian Islands to Southeast Alaska during World War 2. This lesson will fit within a larger unit of WWII or an Alaska History class- deepening awareness of the history of movement of people and present day movements of people. Migration, globalization, war, subsistence lifestyle, civil rights and social justice issues are amongst the many lessons that in a larger unit can be obtained.
Reflecting on the creation and completion of this particular lesson (which is really a few days of a much larger unit), it is a good start to a much larger unit required in order for me to get what I hope to accomplish– accomplished. To be honest, I don’t love the final piece- and ‘wish I had more time.’ But I think that is part of the learning process… I do like the Cultural Standards I believe that this lesson hopes to embed within it. I think that it is most closely aligned with pieces of Alaska Cultural Standards ‘B’, ‘D’ and ‘E.’
B2: “provides students with an understanding of the dynamics of cultural systems as they change over time, and as they are impacted by external forces.”
A key piece of the lesson is looking at the impact of WWII on the people of the Aleutians- being forced to leave their homes and live in internment camps for some years in Southeast Alaska. And then upon their return home, what had changed and how that change has impacted the peoples of the Aleutians. This lesson looks at how a culture is impacted by an external force.. and how that force has changed the culture.
D1: “draws parallels between knowledge derived from oral tradition and that derived from books.”
Some of the lesson is student research based– looking at books and reading online written materials. Some of the lesson is listening to Elder stories, both recorded and in person. The assessment of knowledge gained comes in the form of both sharing (both written and orally) with the class ‘things learned’ from the written materials as well as ‘things learned’ from the oral tradition.
E: “A culturally-responsive curriculum situates local knowledge and actions in a global context.”
At the very beginning of this lesson, we look at gapminder.org, to see trends of years and places around the world where populations have changed. We also create a word wall of ‘why people move’- on a global scale. But this lesson also looks inward and utilizes students’ local knowledge. A key piece of this lesson is the creation of maps by the students. For this activity, they are to look at change/movement in their own lives as well as that of their ancestors and communities. In this way, we are connecting local to global.
I look forward to looking at other student lesson plans and then adapting mine for use in the future.
I batted around the idea of making this a map building exercise where kids when create a poster of how they would get somewhere to acquire a given good. It was suggested that it could be turned into a game with a board, rules and such. I debated whether I should take the leap of developing guidelines, rules, a board and what not. I mentioned to my mom that I was thinking about maybe creating a board game as a lesson plan. She quickly dug out a rather large envelope with big red print that read: the ALASKA game which was created by Capital School back in 1972. It looked like a fun project and you could see the children’s input clearly in the action cards. With the Alaska game as a rough blue print to structure my game, I literally traced the outline of the game board onto my own poster board and began tinkering and playing with my map. I also made a MyMap to help guide me and future players.
Culturally-knowledgeable students demonstrate an awareness and appreciation of the relationships and processes of interaction of all elements in the world around them.
The traditional values that are at the root of the gameplay are inspired from a traditional Yup’ik tall called “The Eye of the Needle” found in Father Michael Olesksa’s book Another Culture/Another World. In the story, a maurluq (grandmother) sends her tutgarluq(grandson) out on his first hunt. She asks him to return as soon as he has his first animal. Like many Yup’ik stories, the boy does not listen to his grandma and problems begin to mount. In the end, Maurluq saves the boy who has been transformed into a grotesque giant. A central message of the story– to listen to your elders with respect, share all food no matter how little, and respect the animals that have given themselves to you- became a key aspect to the game play and helped shape the rules and theme to the game itself. For example, players must make sure they reserve 2/3 of their catch for Maurluq and keep 1/3 for trading later in the game. Follow link below to view the full list of rules:
I have slowly started to incorporate the Yup’ik language. In the rule book, I reference Maurluq as grandma once, then continue to refer to her in Yup’ik. Keeping words alive through use on an everyday level is key to building solid Cultural Standards. We should not simplify with translations back to English every time a Yup’ik word is seen. I have set the game in pre-contact Alaska to focus on the trade routes that the indigenous people created. After all, English was not spoken anywhere in the world for much of the time period this game takes place.
The process of this lesson plan has been very exciting. While sharing my lesson plan with a few cohorts, they have made some very interesting suggestions for future versions of this game that could also be linked to different lessons. The possibilities are vast. I also asked a team member to play an early version of the game to see how it would flow. The work in progress approach helped structure the game after just a few hands. We had a few rounds gathering resources on the hunt and slowly exploring the map. On his last roll, he decided to visit his father’s visit because he missed him. The game should retain some of this loose structure where players are traversing over the country and exploring waterways of their choosing. And though it does take place potentially thousands of years ago, I did not get bogged down with the details of images I used in MyMaps.
Part of the game, is seeing how it evolves. As a lesson, where can we see our class go with this? What would the group like to add that was missing? What time periods can we incorporate to bring to light an ever-changing cultural landscape? What resources were not included that should be? Who knows perhaps as a class they could create the next big role playing board/game or online gaming craze? Looking back at the Capital School’s big “the Alaska Game”, I see that it is more than possible.
As I reflect on the lesson plan that I have created, I think that the most important thing I am trying to address is Cultural Standard for Curriculum E.1, which reads, “encourages students to consider the inter-relationship between their local circumstances and the global community.”
The most basic portion of my lesson is to get my students, who are all formally members of the same religion and who share in a very homogeneous culture, to understand that other people who share their religion do not necessarily share their culture, including their specific religious culture. I think on many levels they are already aware of their cultural distinctness already. For instance, when I or other kassaqs visit the village, nobody expects us to speak Yup’ik or know local table manners. On other levels, they may be somewhat blind to their own culture, because they look out at the other from within, not necessarily seeing themselves. So for instance, when they talk to kassaqs subtly with their eyebrows or hear a kassaq speaking loudly, they may mistake the person for obtuse or rude, when in fact he or she simply doesn’t know what Fr. Oleksa so eloquently called “the rules of the game.”
When Orthodox people come in from outside, as I did in January when I visited, they very often are coached in how to adapt themselves to the rules of the local religious culture, and so I suspect differences that would otherwise become obvious are muted. There are exceptions to this, like, for instance, a few years ago when Fr. John Erickson, the respected former dean of St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, came to give some lectures. When he saw certain women standing outside the sanctuary where he was about to give his talk, he asked them to come in. When they refused and continued to try to listen from the doorway, he was told that this was due to the fact that they were menstruating. Understanding this, Fr. Erickson began to try to theologically convince them that it was okay for them to enter the sanctuary for the lesson. They laughed at him, thinking his request absurd to the point of being comical. Needless to say, he lost the argument.
It is my hope, through the cultural component of my lesson, to begin to help address the very basic issue of “not all Orthodox people do it the same way,” and that a lot of this can be understood in terms of culture. But I’m not completely convinced my strategy is a winning one. I remember my fiancee telling me about arguing with some of her high school students about the existence of abortion. No, I didn’t type that wrong; I’m not talking about the ethics of abortion, I’m talking about the existence of abortion. When my fiancee asked one of her classes to compare general Republican and Democrat positions on a number of issues, including abortion, there were several who were unaware that it even existed. One boy, one of the better students at the high school, challenged her directly, assuming that she was simply making up the worst possible thing she could think of and trying to tease the class with it. He simply could not wrap his mind around it. It made no sense. It was completely beyond his cultural frame of reference. “Babies are good. Everyone wants babies.” What happens when you have a baby you feel like you don’t want or can’t take care of? “Well, you find someone else who wants one and give it to them.” And that is simply how it is done in the village.
Religiously, my fiancee has encountered such cultural difficulties any number of times. Once, when she was taking a group of students to Hawaii on a grant, they met an Orthodox priest in an airport. He was dressed in a Western suit and clerical collar, as opposed to a more traditional Orthodox priestly garb, but my fiancee knew him and knew he was a priest. She went and received his blessing, which shocked and scandalized her students. She was eventually able to convince them that he was Orthodox even though (to them) he didn’t “look Orthodox.”
Later on that vacation, the students went into deep culture shock over things like restaurant menus (they had never eaten in restaurants before) and elevator buttons (they had never seen such things).
Therefore, I am a little concerned that my lesson may be over-ambitious, at least in terms of the embedded videos that I was thinking about using. The Greek Orthodox parish video from New Jersey concerns me the most, actually.
As I think about it, I’m beginning to have doubts that the students would even be willing to recognize these church people as actually being Orthodox. If students at the high school fought with my fiancee over a Roman collar, will they fight with me over all of the manifold, manifold Americanisms in the religious culture of this community that “prove” that clearly they are not Orthodox?
Angie asked me to try to write some things that might strike students as different and embed them within the lesson, and I came up with 14 just off the top of my head:
1) the use of instrumentation to accompany church singing (not traditionally practiced in Orthodox countries)
2) the presence of pews in the worship space (something not practiced in traditional Orthodoxy and not practiced in Yup’ik Orthodox Churches – they get in the way of traditional worship movements like prostrations)
3) the mixing of men and women freely in the worship space
4) the fact that the women are not wearing head coverings (which would indicate in Yup’ik Orthodox churches that they were not Orthodox, but means nothing in most East Coast American Orthodox congregations)
5) the fact that the senior priests are not wearing hats for this rite
6) the presence of stained glass windows in the building’s structure (not a part of Orthodox architecture in traditional countries and not a part of Yup’ik Orthodox church architecture)
7) the use of the censor by a subdeacon during the procession (a traditional Greek practice that is not a part of Yup’ik tradition)
8) the general posture of worshipers, which is free and shifting
9) the fact that the priest explicitly permits kneeling instead of full prostration (as is done by most Orthodox during this rite)
10) the use of the Greek language in the service
11) the generally different (non-Russian-influenced) character of the music
12) the pillar-style altar table (a Greek style not built in Western Alaska)
13) the fact that one priest who can clearly grow a beard is cleanshaven and another has only a mustache (culturally, Yup’ik priests tend to grow as much facial hair as they can, following an older Russian practice)
14) the fact that the priests don’t prostrate before the cross, but rather only bow (in a Yup’ik context, both the priests and the congregation would have made full prostrations)
So the question is, do these things become teaching moments about “culturally Americanized Greeks who are truly also Orthodox” and who can serve as a basis for expanding the horizons of the class, or are they really just a waste of time? Certainly, the answer that I’m looking for is a culturally responsive one. How do I use the culture that they have now (without in any way judging it) to try to bring them to an expanded view of the world? How do you get kids to follow you outside of the confines of their own minds and (indeed) the confines of their own culture? I guess the answer is, first of all, to try to teach them that you love them and that they can trust you and that you’re worth trusting. Only then, maybe, will they let me help them “consider the inter-relationship between their local circumstances and the global community.”
Finding Folklore is a technology focused music lesson. The goal is to connect students with their local community by conducting an interview. The interviews will be digital recordings of audio, or written accounts. These documents will then be posted on-line to be shared with the world. It is an intense project where the students will pick their interviewees, collect the interviews, document them accordingly, and then preserve them on-line. The project will be concluded with student reflections and (hopefully) a chance to share the recordings with the local community.
This lesson correlates with an interactive iBook (see PDF version below) for the students to learn about the Yup’ik, and their efforts to preserve their language and culture through radio, video, and audio. This will help students obtain an understanding of the value of oral history while providing them an example of that process. This iBook also outlines the possible projects the students will partake.
Curriculum Standards
I feel my lesson best fits the Cultural Curriculum Standard C, focusing on number 6:
“Makes appropriate use of modern tools and technology to help document and transmit traditional cultural knowledge.”
I feel this way because I am inviting students to use technology to collect local oral history and then share it on-line. This creates a new strain of place based history, while also teaching students communication skills, recording and note taking skills, and technology skills to share their creations on-line.
Lesson Materials and Supplementary Documents
The Lesson Plan
This is the primary material for the process of teaching this lesson. It contains an overview of rubrics, expectations, lesson pacing, and more. Enjoy!
These are early drafts of documents for the students to interact with to generate interviewees, questions, and more. These will help guide the students through the long term project and provide adequate ways to grade and monitor student involvement and understanding.
The iBook utilizes a series of on-line resources to help students learn – for those that can’t use iBooks, these links proved the information linked in the lesson so that it can be taught effectively. The PDF of the iBook (see above) roughly shows how these materials are presented!
