Northwest Education: Discoveries in Learning
Summer 2003
THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE, Montana—They're called the Missouri Breaks: deep incisions formed by the retreat of the glaciers and the waters of the Missouri River watershed. Here, you can see sculpted cliffs of variegated browns, sandstone spires, and rocky shorelines that awed even the intrepid Lewis and Clark.
If you're near the breaks in springtime and can make your way across the stubble of winter wheat that disguises a thick carpet of mud, you've a thrill in store. Only at the instant you reach its precipice do you realize you've arrived at one of the breaks, where the ground plunges below to the river or to one of its tributaries. Here, just outside Denton—east of Great Falls—the exhilarating abyss is courtesy of Arrow Creek, a Missouri River tributary.
"Upside-down mountains" is how Ken Mapston describes the breaks to an astonished visitor. An artist, lifelong resident of the region, and recently retired vocational agriculture teacher at the Denton School, Mapston speaks knowledgeably about the natural and cultural history of this landscape.
Pointing north to a distant range, Mapston says these are the Bears Paw Mountains where Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe surrendered to the U.S. Army in 1877. Nodding east toward the rolling plains, he says this is where Indian tribes from all over the region—Nez Perce, Kootenai, Salish, Cheyenne, Sioux, Assiniboine, Peigan Blackfeet—would come together seasonally to hunt buffalo.
The river breaks that cleave these ancient hunting grounds inspired Meriwether Lewis to write that they were "seens of visionary inchantment." Both Lewis and William Clark would name tributaries—the Judith and Marias rivers—after favorite cousins.
But Lewis also deemed this territory the "Deserts of America," doubting whether "any part can ever be Settled, as it is deficent in water, Timber & too Steep to be tilled."
He couldn't have been more wrong. Today, from the air, one can see that the Montana plains are a Mondrian canvas of winter wheat, barley, and hay fields. The soil is the richest of clay loam. Thousands of miles of irrigation ditches funnel water from the rivers to the crops. Anheuser-Busch is a big buyer around here. And Angus and Hereford cattle, instead of the vast herds of buffalo and elk of Lewis and Clark's time, now graze on the grasslands.
"Things have changed," says Mapston, "very much."
Nevertheless, this stretch of the Lewis and Clark trail—perhaps 300 miles from the Yellowstone to the Marias—is the least changed of the entire route. Tourist guidebooks still warn travelers that it's difficult to visit the Missouri Breaks. There are few roads and the hiking is tough. For residents, isolation is both a blessing and a challenge. For Ken Mapston and his wife, Cindy, an elementary teacher at the Denton School, it's a 90-mile drive to go grocery shopping in Great Falls.
The Denton School, a K-12 building with 131 students, is part of the Golden Triangle Cooperative. About 35 rural school districts, arrayed across 40,000 square miles in north central Montana, pool resources and expertise to address curriculum, assessment, and professional development needs of the 50 member schools.
Four years ago, Cindy Mapston joined five other teachers from the cooperative in a project that has led them along their own journeys of discovery. On a winter day when foul weather had closed the airports, the six teachers met for the first time as they climbed into a van and set out down the highway for Moscow, Idaho. There they would meet other teachers from schools spanning the length of the Lewis and Clark trail, from St. Louis to Astoria, for the kick-off of the Lewis and Clark Rediscovery Project. The road trip sealed a bond among these rural Montana teachers. By the time they pulled into Moscow, they knew they were embarking on friendships as well as professional growth.
The five-year project, a federally funded Technology Innovation Challenge Grant, aims to help teachers master technology and foster its use in teaching and learning. Using the impetus of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, teachers and their students examine life along the historic and present-day Lewis and Clark trail, using technology to study local segments of the trail as they were 200 years ago and as they are today.
It's now spring of the fourth year of the grant, and Cindy Mapston's fifth-graders at the Denton School are looking backward, into history. They've been trying to solve the problem Meriwether Lewis had in putting together his collapsible "iron boat." The men of the Corps of Discovery had hauled the iron frame all the way from Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to the Great Falls of the Missouri in Montana. The idea was to assemble it after they'd portaged 18 miles around the five great "cataracts" of the river and transfer their supplies from the heavy wooden canoes into the lighter weight iron-frame boat. But they couldn't concoct a reliable sealant from materials on hand to keep the elk-and-buffalo skin boat from taking on water. With great disappointment, Lewis abandoned it, instructing his men to bury it along with other "trivial articles." Never again mentioned or found, the iron boat has inspired mystery and speculation.
And it has inspired Mapston and her students to collapse time by taking on the personae of Corps of Discovery members, investigate why the boat failed, and design and build a better one.
Crowded into the computer lab this morning are "York," "Charbonneau," "John Ordway," "Patrick Gass," and other Corps members dressed in fur and peaked hats and "buckskin" coats.
"George Drewyer" (aka Karyn) slides into a chair at one of the tables to put finishing touches to her team's blueprint, though their model boat is already finished. The Endurance, a handsome keelboat, rests on the tabletop, its sails in seemingly full blow.
Other team members gather at computers, preparing PowerPoint presentations that will display digital photos of their models and enumerate the innovative features of their boats. Anticipation is high, as they'll soon be meeting Meriwether Lewis and President Thomas Jefferson (their costumed teachers) who will hear them out as they attempt to convince the men that their boat is of superior design for the river expedition.
But this morning, there's a hitch in the plan. Frustration is rising at one of the computer terminals, and Mapston goes to give aid. Two Corps members are struggling to save an image to their PowerPoint file.
"Images do that, they're huge," says Mapston reassuringly. "That's why saving to the server is best. Where are the two best places to save?"
In unison, "William Clark" and "George Shannon" (Megan and Tylyn) reply, "To the server and to the disk." But the disk is full and the school's server is down, so Mapston has them save their image to the desktop for the time being.
"Hopefully tomorrow the server will be up," she tells the girls.
In the resourceful spirit of the original Corps, the students leave the computers for the day and go back to their classroom to implement Plan B: testing the buoyancy of their model boats and practicing their oral presentations.
Being resourceful is the only way to get by for teachers and students at small schools with few resources and isolated by great distances. Cindy Mapston spends long nights writing grant proposals to such funders as Albertson's Foundation and the federal Rural Education Achievement Program. Grants have enabled her to expand her school's resources. She's become the educational technology expert in her building by default and determination, and, as a participant in the Rediscovery Project, she facilitates online teacher training programs that help other Montana teachers become more skilled users of technology.
She's also participating in another major project with other teachers in the Golden Triangle Cooperative, which has won a coveted Teaching American History Grant. The grant aims to raise teachers' knowledge of the nation's history and sharpen their skills in presenting it to students. Much of what the teachers have learned through the Rediscovery Project, they'll apply to the objectives of this new grant.
For the Rediscovery Project, Mapston has created a WebQuest of her iron boat curriculum for grades 5-12 that's aligned to the curriculum standards of the Golden Triangle Cooperative and includes an assessment rubric. WebQuests are inquiry-oriented learning activities that draw on the resources of the World Wide Web (http://webquest.sdsu.edu/).
In the "Iron Boat Quest," (www.gtccmt.org/webquests/cindy/teacher_page.html), students learn all they can about Lewis's iron boat and theorize about why it failed. To test their theories, they build models of the iron frame using materials found in 1805. They create model boats of their own design and test their seaworthiness in a nearby pond. They form "boat manufacturing companies" and prepare sales presentations, advertising campaigns, and mock patent applications to market their boats.
Throughout, they're learning history, math, science, technology, language arts, fine arts, and wood- and metalworking. They research books and online sources, interview experts, visit museums, and do plenty of hands-on activities. This project-based learning approach also hones life skills, says Mapston, such as critical and independent thinking.
There's quite a bit of thinking going on right now, as a matter of fact, as team members huddle conspiratorially in the far corners of the classroom. With whispered urgency, they're preparing their presentation strategies while being careful not to give away any trade secrets.
Josh, as Charbonneau, closely questions his mates about the features of their boat: "Mr. Clark, does this boat have any upgrades from the previous iron boat?"
Clark/Megan: "This one's bigger. And if the middle part breaks, you can take out the middle part and hook the other two parts together. And you can break it down into a lot of little pieces if you have to cross the mountains."
Charbonneau/Josh: "What happens if you come in touch with the French or Spanish armies?"
York/Robert: "The cannons are super-graded so they can do lots of damage."
Charbonneau/Josh: "How many gifts will you be able to store for the Indians?"
York/Robert: "Two hundred packs of beads, and they love metal knives so we're going to pack 20 of them."
In the five years of the project, Mapston's seen her students' standardized test scores go up, particularly in math, science, and history. And she's seeing something else, too.
"I'm not just teaching them American history, but to work cooperatively—citizenship, cooperation, kindness, things they'll need to know when they go beyond Denton School," she says. Learning in this active, cooperative, and cross-disciplinary way allows even her special-needs students to excel alongside their classmates. And every student's resilience and persistence have been tested by unexpected obstacles.
Now, as seasoned problem solvers, they know to always have a Plan B. For example, if their model boat had failed its test-launch, "team members had a plan for how to make their presentations even if their boat sunk," says Mapston, "and that was to say how they solved it."
If delving into the lives, hardships, and triumphs of the Corps of Discovery has taught them nothing else, they've learned this: "They know there are a lot of ups and downs in life," Mapston says.
On their eastward journey home, Lewis and a scouting party passed near today's community of Fairfield. They hoped to follow the Marias River to the 50th parallel, effectively extending U.S. territory. Along the way, they came upon a stunning sight: an immense number of buffalo blanketing the plains.
"I sincerely belief that there were not less than 10 thousand buffaloe within a circle of 2 miles," wrote Lewis. They immediately killed one particularly fat bovine and made a dinner of it beside Medicine River.
Today, the Medicine is known as the Sun River. Girdled by dams, it's the primary font for waters that flow through some 60,000 miles of irrigation ditches. The waters feed 91,000 acres of wheat, oat, barley, alfalfa, silage, and pasture along the river and its tributaries.
In the farming town of Fairfield, Charlie Brown teaches history at the high school and is a member of the Lewis and Clark Honor Guard, a group of men who do historical research and reenactments of the Corps of Discovery. Brown's chosen Corps member is Joseph Fields, an expert hunter who accompanied Lewis up the Marias. Today, dressed in full Honor Guard regalia, he is showing visitors some of the high technology the Corps members used in their expedition: chronometer, sextant, rifle, and gunpowder horn and tamp. Looking on are two of his students, Chase and Brian, seniors who fully expect to be using 21st century technology in their chosen careers. Chase is going into farming; Brian into the military.
The students have gotten a solid introduction to computer technology in Brown's history class. Like some other students in the Rediscovery Project, Chase and Brian created a WebQuest for their classmates to embark on, but they diverged sharply from the Lewis and Clark trail. Instead, they explored a very different U.S. military undertaking—in Vietnam.
They created a virtual tour through modern Vietnam, from the war to today. In the WebQuest, students explore nine cities—from the port city of Ben Tre, through Ho Chi Minh, to Halong Bay—gathering photos and data depicting the effect of the war on the communities and what those cities are like today (http://gtccmt.org/webquests/chuck-students/Brian-Chase_files/frame.htm).
As they talk about their project, it so happens that today, March 19, is the first day of the war in Iraq. The students pause for a moment, considering these disparate U.S. military expeditions into "Indian Country," Vietnam, and Iraq.
"It does have a parallel, not perfectly parallel, but there is one," says Brian, who is already a reservist in a military press camp. On weekend duty, he's learning broadcast journalism, using state-of-the-art digital technology.
Though spread over 200 years, each of these three missions had to contend with the reality of geography and physics. "Just the technology's changed is about what it comes down to," says Brian. "Nowadays, we aren't going in so blindsided, because we have satellites and everything; we know what's out there. It's not like Lewis and Clark, they had no idea what to expect."
Except, says Jeredene Mayfield, coordinator for the Golden Triangle's Rediscovery Project who's visiting today, "if Lewis and Clark had listened to the Indians they'd have known exactly what to expect. The Indians tried to tell them everything. Ultimately, everything that the Indians did tell them turned out to be true."
This raises the question: What's the role of technology in human relations?
"Face-to-face contact is really good, because you can correspond your ideas and talk things out," says Brian. "But with technology, being able to communicate over the Internet, with video equipment, whatnot, it makes it nice because there's some things that you can show easier on a video."
Charlie Brown says the Internet has been indispensable to teachers involved in the project. "That's how we were able to communicate, the six members of our Rediscovery Project. We used the Internet, we used ICQ.com, we used Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Chat, listservs. We're hundreds of miles apart and we're in better communication than some people in the same building. We were on the Internet every Wednesday night," says Brown.
"We just set aside that time in our lives," says Mayfield, "to ask questions and sometimes we just needed to tell a joke."
"Or vent," Brown adds.
"Yeah, or vent," says Mayfield with a laugh.
Chase observes, "It makes the world a smaller place," but he's not convinced that's always a good thing. Closing the distance among people around the globe through technology can also close the differences that make a culture distinct, he says.
Yet, as a future farmer, Chase is eager to use technology to help make his farm efficient and environmentally sound. These days, he says, farmers can use satellite imaging to locate and identify species of weeds, for example, enabling them to treat precise areas with limited amounts of herbicide.
Becoming aware of the potential uses and misuses of technology may be one of the most valuable aspects of bringing technology into the classroom. Brown has seen the benefits to his students every year of the Rediscovery Project, but, as an historical reenactor, he also knows the power of real-time, hands-on learning.
"As a reenactor, I'm able to bring firsthand research to the students as far as what Lewis and Clark were all about," he says. "I can actually show them the dress, the guns, the other accoutrements that they had with them. It brings the history to life for the kids."
Two weeks after their feast of buffalo on the Medicine River, Lewis and his party forayed to the end of the Marias and up its tributary, Cut Bank Creek. By now convinced that neither river reached the 50th parallel, he, nonetheless, tried for two days to make celestial observations using a chronometer and sextant to fix his location, but clouds foiled his efforts. He named the spot Camp Disappointment.
Today, middle school students from the towns of Cut Bank and Shelby have had better luck taking scientific readings along Cut Bank Creek. They wade into the cold waters to measure temperature, turbidity, and levels of oxygen, nitrogen, alkalinity, and pH. Pulling nets through the currents, they scoop out macroinvertebrates—the midge larva, mayfly and damsel nymphs, and myriad others—and place them in plastic tubs where they are classified and counted.
It's a global effort, all this data gathering. And the sixth-grade students of Mark Ayers at Cut Bank Middle School and Tammerah Robertson at Meadowlark School in Shelby are rightly proud of their contributions to science.
They're following protocols set out by Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE). GLOBE is a worldwide program in which students from 95 countries collect data on the atmosphere, lakes and streams, soil, plants, and animals and submit them to a database where the findings are analyzed by scientists around the world (www.globe.gov/).
But here, along the eastern edge of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, what students really want to know is: Is the creek healthy? Has it been degraded since Lewis and Clark passed through here 200 years ago? They know that the macroinvertebrates are the "canaries" of the stream, that their numbers and variety are a good indication of whether the waters are healthy or polluted.
"We report data to GLOBE, but we also want to know, what does that mean to us, in Cut Bank, Montana?" says Ayers, who teaches science and technology. "They need to know what the results mean. How does that fit into our ecosystem?"
Even before signing on with the GLOBE project, students had grown to know their creek and its critters pretty well through Team Trout, a unit Ayers has taught for several years. They start the unit by taking a look at the tiny, wriggly creatures that inhabit the currents and provide nourishment to the trout in the creek.
"Most kids have never looked at macroinvertebrates, so it just grabs their interest," says Ayers. "Now that we have them hooked, so to speak, we teach them how to identify them. Then we count them. Once you count them and figure out how many species, what does that mean to this stream?"
His students have learned to classify the creatures into three types according to their sensitivity to pollution: Red Bug (sensitive), Blue Bug (somewhat tolerant), Brown Bug (highly tolerant).
"That seems to help them to understand what it means to find that macroinvertebrate. GLOBE just teaches you: This is a mayfly. This is a stonefly. Names are one thing, but our kids can go out and say, hey, that's a Red Bug. They know it's sensitive to pollution, so that's a good one to find. If you find lots of Reds, it means the stream is fairly healthy."
So, when the class first started collecting data for GLOBE, they were already expert in identifying and counting macroinvertebrates. And they go even farther, moving on to identify the bigger critters: fish. They learn to identify fish and their varied adaptations and habitat. Each year, the high point of the unit is tying flies and goin' fishin'.
"It's a great way to teach how animals have adapted to the environment," says Ayers.
The technology training he's gotten as part of the Rediscovery Project fits neatly into the GLOBE work, says Ayers. "It's kept me fired up and going with GLOBE. Basically it's given me resources, connections, and knowledge to be a better science and computer teacher. It's been awesome. The only reason I teach computers is because of the information that I've learned in the Rediscovery Project," he says.
Cut Bank and Shelby students now hang some pretty impressive techie skills from their technological "tool belts." They're mastering Inspiration, Picture It, VR Works, Internet, CD-ROMs, digital cameras, clinometers, even global positioning system (GPS) instruments.
And they're famous, sort of. A public TV and radio series on educational technology, called PT3 Now (www.pt3now.org/), taped Ayers's and Robertson's students one cold, bright day as they fanned out across the creek collecting data for GLOBE. The video shows students as they hold their scientific instruments under the water and up into the atmosphere—measuring, counting, analyzing. Their faces are rosy, yet furrowed with the concentration of scientists.
Back in Shelby, Robertson's students also keep close tabs on the atmosphere. They've set up their weather station in the front yard of the local judge's house—pretty much dissuading any ne'er-do-wells from messing with it. Every day, they troop across the street to read their instruments and record air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, cloud cover, and precipitation, and to chart daylight and darkness.
All this measuring and recording is fun, says Justin, a student at Shelby, but looking closely at how the world works—uncovering its secrets—can also be a little unnerving. "I've always wondered if the earth hadn't been invented," he muses, "what would be here? It just feels weird. It kind of scares me."
It was probably a bit scary, too, for some young man in the Corps of Discovery who, leaving familiarity far behind, faced what was unknown to him with only his courage, skill, and technology of the day.
A day's horse ride from Camp Disappointment, Lewis and his men had their only fatal clash with Indians. In a dawn skirmish over horses and guns, Corps members killed two Blackfeet men. Lewis's party quickly struck camp and set out by horseback across the prairie, making a beeline for their rendezvous with Clark and the others at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
In their hasty retreat, Lewis's scouting party rode past what is today the town of Conrad. At Utterback Middle School in Conrad, Jennifer Schlepp is preparing for her class of eighth-graders to arrive for the afternoon's integrated technology class. A math and science teacher, Schlepp, like some of her partners in the Rediscovery Project, has grown into the role of technology teacher as her own skills developed through her work in the project.
Today, she's honed a principle that guides her teaching of technology through project-based learning: "learn to use, then use to learn." At each grade level, students extend their burgeoning technology skills by working on projects that culminate with public presentations.
"Everything we do in technology class is presentation based," says Schlepp.
The progression goes something like this: In sixth grade, students learn the basics of Word and Inspiration, a concept mapping program (www.inspiration.com/). Then, in seventh grade, they expand their proficiency in Word and Inspiration and add to their repertoire ArcView, an interactive mapping software program (www.esri.com/software/arcview/). In eighth grade, they expand their proficiency further in Word, Inspiration, and ArcView, and add the presentation software program PowerPoint.
With each step in the progression, they're sharing their work with other classmates by using the classroom's SmartBoard, an interactive whiteboard that can be linked to a computer. The screen of the SmartBoard is sensitive to touch, so kids can "click" on Web links as they present their material at the front of the room, or even write on the screen with special styluses.
This year's eighth-graders have undertaken a WebQuest that Schlepp has created for them called "MemberQuest" (www.gtccmt.org/webquests/jen/top.htm). The activity is aligned with the learning objectives of the Golden Triangle Cooperative and Montana's state standards.
"You are the captains of the Corps of Discovery," reads the introduction. "President Jefferson has asked for a report of the members you chose to make the trip. What kind of people did you choose? What expertise do they have for the journey into the unknown?"
To learn all they can about the men and woman of the Corps of Discovery, Schlepp and her students traveled to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, about 80 miles away. There, they interviewed historians and reenactors of the Corps members and took digital photos of the lifelike exhibits and dioramas. They gathered information and images on the weapons, food, clothing, transportation, cartography, and ethnography of the period. All of this went into their multimedia presentations.
Students are also learning to use ArcView, a mapping tool that would have made Lewis and Clark dance around the campfire if they'd had it. ArcView is a visualization software program that turns data into powerful geographic displays. Students can delve into the deepest of databases and come up with all manner of information that can be mapped geographically.
In Conrad, these eighth-grade digital explorers want to know: What did the Corpsmen do for entertainment when they camped along the trail? Which tribes did they encounter, and where? Did their diet change along the route?
"We simply divided the trail by the number of students in the class," says Schlepp. Students queried a database of the expedition's Montana campsites, created by Robert Bergantino for the University of Montana (for more information about this database, contact him at BBergantino@mtech.edu). They each chose a different segment of the Montana trail to study, such as from April 7 to June 2, 1805—both as it was when Lewis and Clark passed through and how it is today.
Then they queried databases containing the original journal entries, such as these caches of all-things-Lewis-and-Clark: Public Broadcasting System's www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/ and University of Nebraska at Lincoln's http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/.
Selecting journal passages dated when Corps members were on a particular segment of the trail, students read gripping passages about the expedition's often hair-raising experiences in Montana. Charging grizzly bears, spine-tingling precipices, boat-smashing waterfalls, and other omnipresent challenges faced by the Corps of Discovery make for some of the best adventure travel writing any middle school kid could want.
Each student brings his or her research together with illustrations from their own digital photographs and images pulled from a Lewis and Clark CD-ROM produced for the Rediscovery Project. Then, they present their geographical and illustrated displays—constructed with ArcView, Inspiration, PowerPoint, and Word—on the SmartBoard to a rapt audience of their classmates.
In the second half of the term, they study the same segment of the trail as it is today, 200 years later. Using the same technology, as well as Picture It! and Photoshop, they build a "travel brochure" of the area. Not only do they present their travelogues digitally on the SmartBoard, but they create graphically rich paper brochures that test the limits of their digital publishing skills. These inviting paper brochures are displayed now on the classroom wall, colorful artifacts of these students' digital journeys into American history.
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