Northwest Education: Discoveries in Learning
Summer 2003
WOODBURN, Oregon—When David Ellingson teaches his Lewis and Clark class at Woodburn High School, students encounter the intrigue of international politics, the down and dirty of reality TV, and images of Superman.
Canadian by birth, Ellingson never heard of the Corps of Discovery until becoming certified as a history and science teacher in the United States seven years ago. And it is the same story for most of his students. Half are Latino and another 15 percent are Russian, young people who have never heard of these early American heroes.
The semester-long elective course begins with the primordial Pacific Northwest, then the Native people of the region, and moves on to explore the question: Why did the rest of the world become so interested in the geography between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean? Class discussions range from making comparisons between the history of the Lewis and Clark expedition and history that is being made today in the Middle East, to studying the scientific basis for contemporary issues, such as water rights, energy conservation, and salmon.
Before the semester is finished, students will have experienced some of the same demands and discoveries documented by the Corps 200 years ago. For instance, they found the plant, shooting star, still growing along the Columbia River at the very spot where Meriwether Lewis first described it for botanists.
Word has spread about this elective course that juniors and seniors can take either for history or science credit, whichever they need to graduate. One parent quizzically called the school to ask if his student could enroll in the "Superman class," thinking the course theme was built around Lois and Clark.
Student Stacey May agrees that members of the Corps of Discovery were superheroes who took "one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." Though, she says, their task was even more daunting than NASA's first moonwalk 30 years ago. Schoolmate Michael Hemshorn says, "People like Lewis and Clark lay their life on the line for the good of their country, and without them the world would certainly be a different place."
This view is shared by Senator Robert Byrd, a Democrat from West Virginia who sponsored the Teaching American History Grant Program. The "sage of the Senate" believes American history should be taught as a separate course of study. Students in Woodburn say they appreciate the chance to spend more time on just one historical event rather than skimming rapidly across centuries and decades of people and events that shaped our world and nation.
For Ellingson, Canadian history books covering this period focused on Alexander Mackenzie, the Hudson's Bay explorer who made the first transcontinental land voyage more than 10 years before Lewis and Clark. Coming west along the Fraser River instead of the Columbia, it was Mackenzie's report that prompted Jefferson to try once again to find the mythical Northwest Passage after three prior attempts failed to get paddles into the Missouri.
About the same time, Ellingson tells students, Russians were pushing south into present-day Alaska and British Columbia. Spaniards were making gains from the south, and indeed tried to intercept the Corps of Discovery three different times to stop American incursions west from the Mississippi River. It was also Spanish-heritage horses that enabled the expedition to cross the Rockies and Bitterroots, another connection today's Hispanic students have to early U.S. history.
"What surprised me the most about the story," says Eleazar Puente, himself Latino, "was how they were able to accomplish what they wanted with people whose language they did not know." For him, it was an early example of how bridges between cultures are successfully built.
Seeing how their ancestors helped shape early American history, many of Ellingson's multicultural students discover this is a class that speaks directly to them. Ellingson regularly draws parallels to current events, such as how today's European American encounters with Middle East tribes and ethnic groups are similar to, yet different from, the 50-plus tribes Lewis and Clark met. Observing that international trade in pelts and furs was the motivation for seeking the Northwest Passage centuries ago, Ellingson points to exports of wheat, fruit, Nike sneakers, and Boeing airplanes as today's examples of how international commerce is still a driving force in the Northwest economy.
Like many of today's hobby astronomers, botanists, and microbiologists, Lewis and Clark were the first to document important species new to Western science. Professional scientists still use them as benchmarks and marker species today. The Corps of Discovery documented 300 plants and animals that experts on the East Coast or Europe had never seen. Corps members kept daily weather descriptions even after the thermometers broke and temperatures couldn't be monitored. While recording latitude was relatively easy, measuring longitude was more problematic since the captains often forgot to wind up the clock in the chronometer. Moreover, never-ending clouds in the Northwest blocked out the noonday sun and evening star readings.
The expedition came equipped with the best scientific instruments of the time, however. Thanks to military experience, Clark had learned surveying skills and Lewis spent several weeks in Philadelphia taking crash courses in science from a leading botanist, navigation expert, and medical doctor, among others. Both Lewis and Clark were experienced outdoorsmen and Lewis's mother was a skilled herbalist. The captains' first-aid box was filled with potions and powders that would be banned today; the two accepted treatments for serious illnesses were purgatives laced with mercury and bloodletting—both used liberally. High school health, PE, and nutrition coursework today address issues that were also serious problems for the expedition: how diet affects performance, how to safely lift and carry heavy loads, how bacteria cause food to spoil, how infectious disease spreads.
—Larry McClure
Ellingson exemplifies the energy and enthusiasm that teachers often show after they see how deep and wide the Lewis and Clark story really is. Already a busy dad with three elementary-age kids and a full load of high school biology classes, creating an entirely new course without a readymade curriculum would scare off most teachers and administrators. With the full support of Principal Laura Lanka, however, Ellingson launched the new class in January 2002, barely keeping ahead of the students with his own independent reading and research. Calling on help from Oregon members of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Ellingson found people willing to suggest ideas, share materials, and open doors.
"Before this class I knew who Lewis and Clark were, but I didn't really know what significance they had to this country and to history," said Puente, a senior. "Reading their journals was a big part in this class, and I learned many things that way."
As at Stevenson High School (see related story), Ellingson asked his students this year to prove what they'd learned by preparing children's books on the Corps of Discovery and then reading their stories to elementary school students. Michael Hemshorn, who graduates this spring, says the best part of this research and writing project was being viewed as an expert on Lewis and Clark in the eyes of the younger kids. "It was fun being able to answer their questions," says Hemshorn. He says he would like to study biology and history in college.
Right from the beginning, students go on field trips and camping expeditions, important supplements to classroom and laboratory work. Students conduct studies along the Columbia River Gorge, at Fort Clatsop, and nearby historic sites at St. Paul (a little-known grave site of a French-Canadian boatman hired to bring the Corps of Discovery's keelboat and first scientific collections back to Jefferson from present-day North Dakota), a natural history museum at Mt. Angel Seminary, as well as local seed processing plants and the city's waste recovery center.
Ellingson believes both science and history instruction can be enhanced with hands-on learning experiences. Despite the fact that most of the young women and men in that first class had never camped out in their lives, on a spring day in 2002, they loaded into a school bus with teachers and parent volunteers, bound to learn how to cook over open fires and spend a cold, windy night in the Columbia River Gorge. The next morning, before returning to town, they traveled to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center in The Dalles to hear famed Lewis and Clark archaeologist Ken Karsmizki describe his quests.
Says Stacey May: "I liked staying overnight at Memaloose State Park and the history behind the island out in the middle of the river. The most interesting part was the guest speaker who answered many questions about how they know if the sites are really in the right location. I kept thinking about that later when Mr. Ellingson said we were standing at one of their camping spots."
Ellingson begins his class by looking at the Northwest in the millennia before Native people appeared. Evidence of prehistoric Willamette Valley cultures is a stone's throw from Ellingson's classroom and archaeological research is old news on this campus. Students examine the impact of the Missoula flood on the Columbia and Willamette river system and pose questions about early peoples in their own valley region, still a rich and diverse farming area. A human hair dating back 10,000 years is one of the artifacts uncovered at the high school dig site. Volunteer archaeologists from Portland and the Willamette often join the students on research projects.
Students then examine Thomas Jefferson's detailed set of instructions to Lewis—a letter 16 pages long describing what the officers were to watch for, measure, and write down in daily journals. The instructions are comparable to the education standards students today are expected to meet in order to graduate. Jefferson's mission statement became the final test for Lewis and Clark just as Oregon's Certificates of Initial and Advanced Mastery are the way students are proving they can meet society's expectations in this century.
Ellingson's syllabus for the class aligns with Oregon standards for history and science, and students rarely see the difference as they blend research with hands-on experience. The journals kept by Lewis and Clark are the one constant reading and research tool, supplemented by Paul Russell Cutright's Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, a step-by-step record of the expedition's biological discoveries for Western science. Before semester ends, students will learn and apply the same botanical preservation and classification skills that Lewis and Clark used—often finding those same plants still growing in the Willamette Valley and along the Columbia River today.
During the final weeks of the course, Ellingson introduces post-Lewis and Clark issues that have emerged during the subsequent 200 years: decline of the fur trade and westward expansion, tribal dispersion, the reservation system, treaties still in force, extinction of species, damming of rivers, declines in salmon runs—but always pushing students to examine each issue from all points of view before coming to their own individual conclusions.
Stevenson and Woodburn high schools are examples of two settings where teachers are breaking away from traditional instruction about Lewis and Clark. For decades, the history of Lewis and Clark has been the domain of fourth-grade or middle school teachers. But high school teachers are also engaging their older students in the rich learning opportunities that are present in the Lewis and Clark stories.
Indeed, the fact that there are multiple stories surrounding the historical event of the Corps of Discovery is a theme of study at Stevenson High School in Washington (see related story) and Woodburn High School in Oregon. Teachers at these schools point out that the 50 or more Native tribes that encountered Lewis and Clark and the other Corps members weren't waiting around for someone to "discover" them. They had been living successfully in complex, self-sustaining societies for millennia before the introduction of white settlers and their diseases. In fact, the Columbia and Willamette rivers were heavily-traveled waterways for Native people. Today's State Highway 14 that leads to Stevenson and Interstate 5 to Woodburn trace overland trails used by Chinook and Kalapooya Indians.
Both high schools are also demonstrating the power of studying American history through experiential learning. They've created entire courses based on the study of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and many features of these courses align with those recommended by national planners for the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. The planners suggest that schools help students see the multiple stories of this historic event in four dimensions:
Ask any student in a Lewis and Clark course at Stevenson or Woodburn what he or she likes most, and it's likely to be the hands-on activities, teamwork, accountability for results, and indepth exposure to meaningful knowledge. Students in both schools say they appreciate not being in "just another class with lectures and videos," though they also see how such basic skills as reading, writing, and computation were essential to expedition members' daily survival. Being able to "live" history by seeing the actual places where events occurred—thus, getting a personal taste of what it might have been like—is a powerful way to learn about their nation's history, they say.
—Larry McClure
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