It's Amazing What's Out There

Colleagues have shared many interested resources lately, I decided it was time for a link roundup:

Mike Jetty at the Indian Education Division of the Office of Public Instruction introduced me to “Introducing the First Nations of Montana to the World,” a short eight-minute video created by the Montana Office of Tourism. This is exactly what you need to reintroduce your students to Montana’s tribes. 

“From Superstar to Superfund: The History of a Northwest Montana Aluminum Smelter” is a labor of love and a tremendous resource on the history, politics, and economics of the Columbia Falls Aluminum smelter. 

“The Acoustic Atlas of Yellowstone National Park” is curated by the Montana State University Library and includes more than 2500 recordings of species and environments from throughout the Western United States.   

Elementary school teacher Justin Czarka, who I met when we hosted the NEH Landmarks Workshop “Richest Hills: Mining in the Far West,” shared with me a project he conducted with his elementary students to commemorate the lives of slaves that lived in Hunts Point (a neighborhood in the Bronx, NY) and to definitively locate the Hunts Point Slave Burial Grounds—an unmarked burial ground near their school. The project suggests the potentially transformative power of local history.

I’m a longtime fan of the Stanford History Education Group, so was pleased to learn that they have many new or revamped lesson plans for U.S. and world history. 

Finally, I'm very much enjoying listening to the recordings of talks I missed at the Montana History Conference (darn concurrent sessions)! We put them all on SoundCloud, but I've also gathered the playlist and video presentations on our Montana and The Great War website, where you'll find videos of other presentations as well.

Do you have a favorite website or online resource? Send me the link (bonus points for including a note saying what you like about it.) 

MEA-MFT Is Only a Few Weeks Away

Will I see you at the MEA-MFT Educators Conference in Missoula on Thursday, October 19-20?

I’ll be participating in two sessions on Thursday:

• Montana and the Great War: Bringing It Home, 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM
• Montana History Reborn (a panel discussion organized by Ken Egan), 3:00 PM - 4:50 PM

My colleague Deb Mitchell and I will also be staffing our booth in the exhibit hall, so stop by and say hello and check out our new resources! And if anyone wants to convene for cocktails and conversation, I propose we arrange a meet-up Thursday evening at 5:15 p.m. Anyone know a good place in Missoula to gather for convivial conversation? Email me. 

But back to more formal learning opportunities: I've been perusing the program, and there are a LOT of other sessions I’m interested in attending. Here are a few that caught my eye.

On Thursday

9:00 AM - 9:50 AM, Blackfeet Language and Stories: Maato'ommstatto'osi tells old stories that have been passed down generation to generation by the Piikunnii. Audiences get a taste of how Piikunnii lives once were, how their spirituality and empathy were important, and the joys of humor. He teaches people about Blackfeet people while making the audience feel respected.

10:00 AM - 10:50 AM: Montana's Legal System--What Teachers and Students Should Know: Have you ever wanted to teach your students about Montana's legal system but were afraid to go there? Come learn about legal resources, including free guides, from attorneys and members of the state bar's law-related education committee. Teach students what they should know legal-wise before they turn 18!

12:00 PM - 12:50 PM, A Visit with an 1879 American Fur Company Trader: Portrayal of James Willard Schultz (Apikuni) who wrote extensively regarding his life with the Blackfoot Nation. Schultz would live to see and experience the end of the buffalo days. His stories climax with a visionary gift to be shared with school kids - suggesting positive hope for our future.

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM, Before the Horse: Northern Rockies Lifestyles: Indian people of the Northern Rockies are most often considered part of the American Indian Horse Culture, yet the people existed long before the horse appeared 280 years ago. In those centuries before the horse, when the extensive use of dogs was most prevalent. Listeners will re-think ancient cultures' impact.

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM, Igniting Students' Civic Involvement Through Montana Politics and Government: This session will explore strategies to engage students in civics through conversations about local and state government, politics, and service learning. Siri Smillie, Education Policy Advisor to Gov. Steve Bullock and her former teacher Eileen Sheehy will lead teachers in this interactive session.

1:00 PM - 2:50 PM, The Digital Storywork Partnership: Community Engagement and Social Studies Education: The Digital Storywork Partnership connects youth with community members to conduct research and produce documentary films. The Partnership applies community-centered and culturally revitalizing pedagogy using a framework collaboratively developed with partners. This session will introduce participants to the DSP as a model for youth-led inquiry to enhance social studies education.

2:00 PM - 2:50 PM, Storytelling: Cultural Survival, Indigenous Cultures, and the Importance of Story: Storytelling is integral to education and cultural survival. How does story define community? How does it keep cultures intact? What functions does story serve in shaping our understanding of the world? Sharing stories with a focus on Indigenous American stories and perspectives, we learn our history.

2:00 PM - 3:50 PM, Project-based Learning with Montana National History Day: This section will discuss how to implement Montana National History Day in your classroom by using the project-based learning method and what programs MTNHD can offer you and your students. This is geared for teachers 4-12, deals with Common Core, IEFA and technology education.

4:00 PM - 4:50 PM, Resources to Reach Reluctant Writers from NHD (National History Day): This session is for educators in grades 6-12 to share resources from National History Day to help teachers improve reading and writing in their classrooms.

4:00 PM - 4:50 PM, Find the Clues, Unlock the Learning: Do you enjoy challenges? Breakout Edu is an activity that promotes collaboration, teamwork, problem-solving, higher level thinking skills and more. You will use primary sources, documents and photos to help solve the clues. Come explore a new way to engage your students. Electronic devices encouraged.

On Friday

8:00 AM - 8:50 AM, New Resource for Geography Education: The Giant Map of Montana: The National Geographic State Giant Traveling Map of Montana is a 15x20 foot floor map promotes an interactive geography learning experience for elementary and middle school students. Educators will have the opportunity to engage in lessons using the giant map and learn how to bring the map to their classrooms.

9:00 AM - 9:50 AM, Mapping Censorship: the Montana Banned Books Project: Join us as we share the new interactive online map detailing the history of book challenges in Montana! We’ll share some of the more interesting challenges as well as broader intellectual freedom implications. Participants will learn about the software used and discuss how it could be applied in their classrooms.

9:00 AM - 9:50 AM, Geographic Pedagogy: Droughts, Floods, Resilience, Science and Community Development: This session explores important contemporary dynamics in geographic education and pedagogy, including issues such as drought and flooding in Montana, ecological and human resilience to climate change, and the role of science in community development.

10:00 AM - 10:50 AM, Highways, Treaties, and Poems: Through maps, poems, treaties, and seasonal rounds, teachers will work interactively to discover how the cultural landscape changed in Montana after the Fort Laramie and Hell Gate treaties were established. Suitable for K-12, all subjects, background knowledge building, and integration ideas.

12:00 PM - 12:50 PM, Reaching Reluctant Writers Through Social Studies: Reluctant writers lurk in every classroom. This interactive session will give teachers strategies to help improve student writing in Social Studies classrooms. Gain specific tools to use historical content to improve historical thinking and writing skills.

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM, Teaching Montana Indian History with Primary Sources: This section presents innovative ways of incorporating archival, primary sources into lessons on Montana’s Native American history. Drawing primarily on documents held in the Montana Historical Society archives, I will demonstrate how these primary sources can inform how we teach Montana Indian history topics such as treaties, trade, and sovereignty.

3:00 PM - 3:50 PM, Teaching about Tribal Sovereignty and Federal Indian Policy: This interactive session will provide ideas, resources and strategies for teaching about contemporary American Indian issues. Relevant resources and where to access them will also be shared with participants.

Hope to see you soon!

Montana Authors Project Invites High School Collaborators

Humanities Montana invites schools to participate in our Montana Authors Project, a part of our Montana Center for the Book program. Using images, quotes, and interpretation, literary maps bring favorite novels, stories, poems and personal histories of regional and national importance to life. Each literary map can be used as a virtual tour of an author’s imagination, as well as an actual road map of a literary setting.

Park High students in Livingston recently read Shann Ray’s American Copper, searching for place-based passages and images that might accompany them. After they finished, Humanities Montana staff populated our map with six sites from American Copper using student images and passages.

Students were able to see their hard work come to life in our online literary map and to engage with the text in new ways, connecting it to the real world, imagining it in real space, and learning valuable research and analysis skills as they selected the most relevant passages.

If you are interested in participating in our MAPs project, contact info@humanitiesmontana.org. Staff will visit your classroom for a guest lesson on the MAPs project, stay in communication with you as you work the project into your syllabus, and bring your students’ hard work to life on our Humanities Montana website.

More on Fire

Last week I wrote about finding a teachable moment in this year's awful forest fires.  Some readers responded with suggestions: 

Dalene Normand, of Frenchtown, suggested these fire resources: 

• The Forest Service Fire Lab in Missoula has a Fire Works trunk that educators can use to teach about forest fires    

• Also, there is an IEFA lesson plan: Fire on the Land for middle school age that deals with Native use of fire for land management.  

Suzanne Thomason recommended Boy Wonder and the Big Burns by Chris Petersen.  He is a photographer and relates his experience with his autistic son and the Glacier fires of 2001.  Lots of pictures, a quick read, mostly about the fires with just enough information about autism spectrum disorders tucked in.  Excellent potential for teacher meetings.

Brenda Johnston, who teaches high school English in Browning, described the project her students are doing: "My students have been working on this very thing.  They read an article from the New York Times, which included vocabulary work and literacy skills, ending by writing a summary.  JoAnne Grandstaff then came in and talked with all of the students about fire.  She is a Kickapoo tribal member, and they are the keepers of fire, so she talked about how we show respect for fire.  The kids then read about the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, again practicing comprehension skills. Today I am reading "The Fire Keeper" from Joseph Bruchac's Keepers of the Earth.  We will wrap it up next week with a writing assignment.

Finally, Karen Reinhart, from the Yellowstone Gateway Museum in Livingston invited teachers to bring their students to see their fire exhibit: "On Fire: Structural and Wildland Fire." "The exhibit includes stories of early day firefighting and firefighters, and also the 1988 fires in Yellowstone and the more recent, 2012 Pine Creek Fire. Safety tips, too." For those far from Livingston, she suggested that there may be other museums with resources worth tapping into, "like the smokejumper museum/visitor center in Missoula."

Teaching with Maps and Other Primary Sources

I had an amazing time about a week ago at the workshop "Teaching with Primary Sources: Understanding How Our Past Paints our Future" in Great Falls. 

The good news for you is that presenters Kathy Hoyt and Ruth Ferris will be reprising the workshop October 6-7 at Miles Community College in Miles City, so you too have an opportunity to participate! 

Here were a few of my highlights: 

1. Putting together "map puzzles." Kathy printed some historic maps, including this 1879 map of Montana Territory. She cut them into puzzle pieces and laminated them. Assembling the maps required us to slow down and LOOK--which in turn raised lots of questions.

2. Kathy then gave us clear overheads and had us trace today's reservations from the regular Montana highway map. We put those on top of the 1879 reservations for a hands-on look at the shrinking reservations. 

3. We had time to explore Library of Congress resources. I found this amazing 1851 map, created by Father De Smet, of the Upper Great Plains and Rocky Mountains showing Indian territories as he understood them.

4. I learned a new trick for navigating the Library of Congress's gargantuan collections. Use Google! Search using the key words plus "Library of Congress" to get relevant hits.

5. I was introduced to a new primary source graphic organizer: C.L.U.E., which asks students to "Check it over" (especially looking for author, date, and type of source), "Look at the historical setting (context)," Understand the author's message" (tone and purpose), and Examine closely. (I wish the graphic organizer asked about audience--but otherwise I thought it could be very useful.) 

6. I learned more about Breakout Games. We were faced with a box locked with several locks (a directional lock, a letter lock, a three number lock, and a 4 number lock) and were given a number of clues (including primary sources) relating to homesteading and the novel Hattie Big Sky. We had a great time finding the information we needed to unlock our box. There are online Breakout games too: I haven't seen any on Montana history, but I really enjoyed doing this one on Langston Hughes. One of the creators, Tom Mullaney, designed a template for teachers interested in making their own digital breakouts. If anyone creates a Montana history related digital breakout, let me know! I'd love to check it out.

7. I learned several other simple and effective ways to integrate primary sources--especially in elementary classrooms. Playing "I Spy" for example.

I'll be digesting the two days and working to integrate some of these new practices into future lesson plans. If you can make it to Miles City, I highly recommend signing up for the October workshop. It was well worth the time. Otherwise, try some of the ideas above and let me know how they work with your students.

Can we find a teachable moment through the smoke?

If you are on Facebook, I bet your feed is filled with stories about the fires. Mine is.

These articles brought to mind a post I wrote awhile back about using disasters as a way to engage students in larger questions. 

It also made me wonder if this year’s fire season offers a “teachable moment.” If so, here are some resources for teaching about fire and fire history. Most are taken from the Montana: Stories of the Land Teachers Guide and Companion Website, Chapter 12. 

• Tales of the 1910 Fire is an exhibit, including a first-hand account of the fires by a forest ranger, created by Archives & Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library.
• The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' "Fire of the Land" website is a great resource in itself and includes links to many additional resources.
• The US Forest Service has gathered information on the history of smoke jumping.
• The Great 1910 Fire is a website that has transcribed newspaper articles, lists of fire victims and photographs.
• There's also been much written about the Mann Gulch fire, the most beautiful contribution being Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. US Forest Service History also dedicates a page on its website to the deadly 1949 episode. 

Interested in changes how fire policy has changed since 1910? We created this bibliography for National History Day students, but it’s a good starting point for any researcher.  Other interesting sources include:

• NOVA’s Fire Wars 
• National Park Service Fire Timeline
• “Forest Fire in Washington State”
• Articles in the Missoulian, by Shery Devlin, on the Big Burn. To find these online type “Big Burn of 1910 Sherry Devlin” into the Missoulian’s “Advanced Search.”

Wildfires and the appropriate response to them are also at the center of policy debates. 

• What should the government’s approach be toward fire protection in the Wildland-Urban Interface?
• How do state and federal policies affect fires? (Recently, Senator Daines called for more logging to prevent fires and Senator Tester called for action to slow climate change.)
• What are the budget implications of increasing forest fires and how should we pay for fire fighting?

Consider asking students to research and then write (and/or present) policy briefs to your local legislator and/or county commissioners on one of these issues. (Former middle school teacher Jim Schulz said having students present decision-makers with their research—and proposed solutions—to current problems was the all-time best activity he ever did with his students.)

 
If you do end up exploring fire in a meaningful way in your classroom, I'd love to learn what you did and how it went. And in the meantime, I'm sure you join me in wishing for snow.

Teachers' Choice: Favorite High School Lesson Plans

You've seen the elementary and middle school teachers' responses to the question, “Describe (in brief) the best Montana history or IEFA lesson or project or resource you taught this year--the one you will make time for next year no matter what.” As promised, here are the answers we received from high school teachers to the same question. [I've added links where I could find them and a few comments in brackets.] 

Janessa Parenteau in Froid taught Playing for the World: The 1904 Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School Girls Basketball Team. 

Jane Kolstad, a special education and alternative school teacher in Glasgow, recommends "Counting Coup:  Becoming a Crow Chief on the Reservation and Beyond, by Joe Medicine Crow. She wrote: "I supplement with the lessons from the OPI website.  I also like to do some lessons with the book:  Land of the Nakoda which is in reference to the Assiniboine Indians who are native to this area.  

Betty Bennett, who teaches English in Missoula, wrote, "I use several every year, but I am especially committed to using "Blood on the Marias" at the end of our unit on Fools Crow by James Welch.  It is also a great starting point for additional "history detective" work.  My students are much more interested in novels that are based on historical events."

Power teacher Shelly Vick wrote: "7 Essentials Understandings illustrated on tipis.  Didn't expect it to go well but the students loved it."

Jennifer Ogden, art teacher in Victor, used The Art of Storytelling: Plains Indian Perspectives (a unit on pictographic art).

One teacher wrote: "I took bits and pieces of Native American speeches and then had my students try and match them up with the time period and personality of who said them. It is a fun exercise for my students and it gets them talking about the personalities and culture of Native American society.

One teacher used our "Cavalry on the Frontier footlocker."  [Our footlockers, though designed for 4th grade, are often successfully adapted to high school. More information on the footlocker program here.]

Another teacher said, "The one the kids enjoyed the most was my flint and steel fire starting hands-on lesson."


A principal was proud of his teachers' collaborative project on Glacier National Park: "The English teacher and the art teacher took a field trip to Glacier National Park.  The art side of the project is ledger art and the English side was place-based learning with an emphasis on the Salish perspective." [A good related resource is our hands-on history footlocker--Land of Many Stories: The People and Histories of Glacier National Park. Though designed for fourth grade, it is easily adaptable to upper grades.]

And and another teacher wrote, "Lewis and Clark: Journals on the Yellowstone and visit to forts/confluence."

Several teachers mentioned topics they focused on (The link to resources are mine):

• WWI in Montana 
• The Copper Kings (see Montana: Stories of the Land Chapter 10 and Montana Mosaic, Chapter 1)
• Fur Trade Game (No idea what this is, but I'm intrigued)
• Code Talkers  
• Gold mining in Montana (Lots of resources under Mining History Lesson Plans and Resources and on the Chapter 6 page for Montana: Stories of the Land)
• Chinese in Montana

Last but not least, a teacher wrote that she does a "Sense of Place" unit. It reminded me of the work Montana Heritage Project teachers used to do. I am so glad this type of community studies continues, so I asked her for details. She wrote: 

Students need to have a solid, personal history foundation, before venturing out to impact the world. I have discovered that students know very little about their own family history, and or community present and past. My students know where to get the best $2 fries in town, but have no idea about the soaking pools, museum, Artist Society or local politics. They know nothing, or very little, about the rich history of the valley.

I start with some personal history, such as their first name. Why were they given that name? What does it mean? Are there others in the family with the same name? Learning about their last name also provides a plethora of family history.

Many of our rural kids have stories tied to their land. How long has it been in the family? Homesteaders or a recent purchase…has the land always raised cattle, pigs, wheat or barley? Is there a family cemetery? Where was the nearest school, store or post office. 

I like to have students research the various professions within the family tree. Again, this provides an interesting look at each student’s personal history.

A tour around town (ours is small) where students can discuss, list or write about any knowledge they have about the town, now and in the past. Once that is done I have them talk to family members and or community members to glean their information about town. Sometimes this turns into oral histories for the museum.

Do you have a favorite lesson or resource you'd like to share? It's not too late--let me know what it is and I will share it with the group. Among the suggestions for how to improve Teaching Montana History was to posts more about what teachers were doing (both successes and failures). So email me so we can make that happen!