By Stephanie Israel
Special to the Turnagain Times
The Forest Service hosted Girdwood students in Ms. Schmideke’s sixth grade class for a distance-learning project with 80 middle school students from St. Charles, MO. As part of the National Endowment for the Arts ‘Big Read’ event, the Foundry Arts Centre in St. Charles received funding to host a live video feed between the schools, which the Forest Service facilitated. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literature in American popular culture and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of its citizens.
All participating students read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, the popular novel about a domestic canine turned sled-dog during the Yukon gold-rush days. For the Midwestern students, the chance to talk to students from Alaska provided a real, more in-depth perspective about the nature and culture of the Last Frontier from like-minded individuals.
Using live video technology, students were able to interact with one another despite being nearly 4,000 miles away. A Forest Service naturalist explained the environment of the Chugach National Forest and Alaska before students from each school took turns asking a variety of questions about their differing lifestyles and the book. How do you get to school in the snow? What kind of wildlife do you have in Missouri? What was your favorite chapter in the book and why? Have any of you ever been on a dog-sled? The list went on.
Overall, students on both sides of the great divide learned a little more about the natural and cultural history of their respective geographical locations.
Thanks go to the Foundry Arts Centre and Hollenbeck Middle School in St. Charles, MO, and to Ms. Schmideke’s 6th grade class and the parent volunteers in Girdwood for making this first-time distance learning opportunity a success.