Attracting Minorities to Geosciences Through Involved Digital Story Telling
About AMIDST

What is AMIDST?

AMIDST: Attracting Minorities to Geosciences through Involved Digital Story Telling is a project funded by the Geoscience Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF), through their program entitled Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in Geosciences (OEDG).

This project is meant to test an innovative idea of integrating place-based geoscience education with culturally sensitive digital story telling, to engage and attract Alaska’s native and rural children from grades 3 through 5 to geosciences.

The Need

Alaska's New Science Performance Standard F1 and corresponding Grade Level Expectations for grades 3-5 requires that

"The student demonstrates 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 (e.g., animal adaptation, weather, rapid changes to Earth’s surface)".

The AMIDST project aims to directly address this requirement.

Salient Points of the Project

  • Teachers, students, scientists, native elders, technology experts, community members work together as a team to share experiences and learn about geoscience concepts and about digital story telling.
  • Geoscience content knowledge, in the topics of climate change and its impact on Alaska’s landscape and communities, is gained through dedicated inquiry-based learning in the classroom and outside in the field.
  • Teachers and students learn concepts of developing a good story and receive training on using computers to create digital stories.
  • Digital story telling also engages students in writing, communication and presentation, as the students build their digital stories around geoscience themes.
  • Knowledge transfer through story telling is part of native Alaska culture. Building around this cultural system can be an effective way of especially involving native and rural Alaskan children.

Timeline

The figure below shows an annual cycle of the AMIDST project:

Figure showing an annual cycle of activities for the AMIDST project