AMIDST: Attracting Minorities to Geosciences through Involved Digital Story Telling

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The Attracting Minorities to Geosciences through Involved Digital Story Telling (AMIDST) is helping Native Alaskan students in Grades 3 through 5 develop an understanding of the dynamic relationships among scientific, cultural, social and personal perspectives by connecting observations of nature to a local or traditional story that explains a natural event. This project is integrating place-based geoscience education with culturally sensitive digital story-telling and aims to promote interest in the geosciences among Alaska's native and rural communities. The project provides an opportunity for a teacher, two Native elders/community members, and 20 Native Alaskan and minority students from Petersburg, Alaska and a similarly constituted group from Nome, Alaska to closely interact with scientists and education technology experts, to learn about local geoscience phenomena. Participants learn the concepts behind, and steps required to create, an engaging story. Students connect their observations of the landscape feature to their own experiences. The overarching goal is to enable students to learn about geosciences through experience and be active creators of geoscience content material rather than passive recipients of content knowledge. The children's narratives, along with their field photos and/or illustrations and research data, are being captured in digital format and posted on a dedicated website, which will form a legacy of contributions by Alaska's children to the International Polar Year (IPY).