This course assignment seems especially relevant now that we are living in a pandemic reality and in-person visits with an army of 90 children are unlikely to occur for the next little while. I have identified three virtual connections that I think are relevant to my own practice in a secondary integrated program.
Google Lit Trips
Google Lit Trips is a project that creates and distributes Google Earth projects following the journeys of literary figures. This includes everything from The Odyssey to Anne Frank to Percy Jackson. The projects allow students to explore the real-world places that the books take place in and get a sense of both physical and human geography. This is a good fit for the integration of disciplines that is a pillar of our program of choice.
BC Museum of Anthropology
To begin, the Museum of Anthropology is relatively local and easy to book a field trip for in non-pandemic times. However, there are some advantages to doing research through the MOA online catalogue. Durgun (2021) suggests that online museum collections are an opportunity to build students’ research and curation skills, as well as look critically at bias in museum descriptions. MOA has items from a large number of cultures worldwide, meaning students can find things from very specific regions, and even potentially compare and contrast the items used in daily life for different cultures around the world. This fits nicely into a few curricular areas, including social studies and digital literacy.
The museum also, unsurprisingly, has a large collection of items from First Nations groups across BC. There are, of course, ethical issues that need to be confronted when we are talking about museums and indigenous rights, including repatriation rights, which are challenging but necessary to discuss when engaging with museums.
Discovery Education
Discovery Education has a number of interesting virtual field trips available, mostly in science, but also some in the humanities, such as the Holocaust and Shakespeare. One thing that appealed to me immediately was that the search categories included “collecting and analyzing data” and “argumentation with evidence”, both closely connected with science competencies in the BC curriculum. I also liked the level detail in the teacher guides, with suggested activities, blackline masters, and connections to the US Common Core (which can be used to find connections in the BC curriculum).
One concern I had was that some (not all) of these field trips are made in collaboration with for-profit companies. Can I really trust, for example, a mining company to give me an unbiased, critical look at the mining industry, warts and all? I would definitely recommend looking into these sponsored field trips to identify potential biases before presenting to students.
Sources:
Discovery Education. (2020, May 28). Virtual Field Trips: Interactive Field Trips. Discovery Education. https://www.discoveryeducation.com/community/virtual-field-trips/.
Durgun, P. (2021, February 12). M is for Museums: Teaching with Online Museum Collections. The Alexandria Archive Institute. https://alexandriaarchive.org/2021/01/19/m-is-for-museums-teaching-with-online-museum-collections/.
GLT Global ED. (2021). Welcome to GLT. Google Lit Trips. https://googlelittrips.org/.
Museum of Anthropology. (2021). Collection Online. http://collection-online.moa.ubc.ca/.
Prest, J. (2021, February 6). How To: Google Lit Trips!. YouTube. https://youtu.be/f0UxmoKNvCk.