Experiential Discoveries in Geoscience Education: The EDGE Program in Alaska

ABSTRACT

Alaska's students directly observe their high-latitude landscape changing in response to both active tectonics and warming temperatures. Alaska's secondary school teachers must increasingly provide Earth systems science education that integrates these personal observations with geospatial datasets and satellite images using Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. Alaskan job opportunities requiring Earth science and GIS training are increasing, yet less than 1% of Alaska's university students choose geoscience-related majors. The EDGE (Experiential Discoveries in Geoscience Education) program provides a year of Earth science college courses, geologic field experiences, GIS instruction, and technical support for groups of Alaskan high and middle school teachers and their students. Since 2005 EDGE has increased the Earth science content knowledge and GIS and computer skills of 34 Alaskan teachers and facilitated the transfer of their knowledge and skills into Alaska's science classrooms. More than 500 middle school students have learned GIS from EDGE teachers and 30 EDGE high school students have conducted original research utilizing GIS related to landscape change and its impacts on their own communities. Long-term EDGE goals include improving student performance on the newly implemented (2007) 10^sup th^ grade standards-based science test scores, recruiting first-generation college students, and increasing the number of Earth science majors in the University of Alaska system. More information on EDGE programs is available at .

INTRODUCTION

Great distances and a harsh climate separate people in Alaska to a far greater extent than in other states. Many Alaskan students grow up in a small village or town that is unconnected to any other community by a road or rail system; even the state capital, Juneau, is accessible only by air or sea. Living in a state that is one-fifth the size of the continental U.S. with a human population of ∼648,818 distributed over 1,518,800 km^sup 2^ (0.43 people/km^sup 2^), many Alaskan students face issues of isolation. Alaskan students are also an ethnically-diverse group composed, from pre-school to grade 12, of approximately 56% Caucasian, 25% Alaska Native, 6% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% Hispanic, and 4% African-American individuals (AK Dept of Ed, 2007a).

Alaska obtains >80% of its annual revenues from petroleum resources. With the rising value of metals, mining companies have tripled their Alaska investments since 2003. These two Earth science industries employ 12 % of the Alaska workforce and utilize GIS to manage their enormous spatial databases. Alaska high school graduates who understand the uses to which spatial data can be put, and who can produce GIS maps from those data, will have an advantage in the geoscience workplace and are more likely to be successful if they go on to the university after high school (Prakash, 2006).

In 2003, U.S. Department of Labor statistics projected a need for 439,000 new workers in geospatial technologies between 2004 and 2014. In Alaska, 683 new state technician and scientist positions that require familiarity with GIS technology will be added to the workforce over the next 10 years at mean wages (in 2007 dollars) of $20/hr (technicians), and $30/hr (scientists) (AK DOL, 2007). Employers will include native corporations, federal and state natural resource agencies, the defense industry, and private industry. These workers will manage AK native land claims, mining claims, fishing leases, petroleum reserves, forest selections, transportation corridors, and government and military projects. They will be involved with land surveying, land development and design, mapping and tax assessment, the defense industry, environmental engineering assessment and management, public safety and welfare, health care, transportation, agriculture, business, natural sciences, facilities management, marine environments, homeland security, and private developments (AK DOL, 2007). The number of Alaska's high school and college graduates currently qualified to do this work is insufficient to meet these workforce demands (Tissier, 2006).

THE DYNAMIC GEOLOGIC SETTING OF THE 49^sup th^ STATE

The world's highest crustal uplift rates of >32 mm/yr are presently occurring along Alaska's Gulf Coast near Yakutat and in Glacier Bay (Larsen et al., 2005). In Alaska's most populous south-central region, which includes Anchorage, the state's largest city, 52% of the state's population lives above an active subduction zone where 1,000 >M 3.5 earthquake events occur each year, events large enough to be noticed by a substantial number of people. Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport directs daily air traffic along flight paths over 70 potentially active volcanoes. Between 1950 and 1990 roughly 50,000 Alaskan glaciers, covering 75,110 km^sup 2^, collectively generated meltwater causing ∼7% of the total global sea level rise (0.14 mm/yr, Arendt et al., 2002). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that the Arctic including Alaska has warmed more than any other place on the planet over the last 50 winters (IPCC, 2007). Across Alaska's Arctic coastal plain, continuous permafrost, stable for over 1,000 years, is undergoing degradation (Jorgenson et al, 2006). A complete loss of Arctic sea ice is projected to occur between 2030 and 2300 (Stroeve et al., 2006). Winter sea-ice loss contributes to increasing coastal erosion from storm surges, threatening the existence of Alaskan villages. Chapin et al. (2005) have connected unprecedented forest disturbances, including unprecedented insect infestations of the boreal forest and increased frequency and intensity of Alaskan and Yukon interior forest fires, to warmer winters and summers. Transformation of Arctic ecosystems is underway.