UMaine students’ curriculum design projects highlight past, present of the ‘Everglades of the North’
Two University of Maine undergraduates are designing place-based education materials and K–12 curricula about the Grand Kankakee Marsh in Northern Indiana as part of a National Geographic Society grant.
Mo Weitman and Bell Gellis Morais are working with Katherine Glover, research associate at the Climate Change Institute (CCI) and recipient of a National Geographic Society Early Career Grant, to develop materials that will educate students and teachers about the past and present of an area once referred to as the Everglades of the North.
Weitman and Morais’s curriculum design forms part of the outreach component of Glover’s project, “Biogeography of the Grand Kankakee Marsh, Northern Indiana, U.S. over the past 5,000 years,” which seeks to reconstruct the history of the region and contribute to restoration efforts. The Grand Kankanee Marsh once spanned over 1,000 square miles and was famous for its rich biodiversity before it was irreversibly disturbed by settler resource exploitation, drainage and channelizing in the late 19th century. Today, only about 5% of the original marsh remains.
Weitman, an education and Earth and climate sciences major from Bangor, focused her educational module for high schoolers on glaciers, drawing attention to why they matter and their influence on the land. Indiana has been covered by multiple glaciers in the past; the Last Glacial Maximum led to conditions that eventually formed the Grand Kankakee Marsh. These conditions concluded in a drainage shift, rerouting water from Lake Michigan into the marsh area. Once the drainage shift occurred, the Grand Kankakee Marsh began to retain water faster than the land could remove it.
In Weitman’s lesson plan, students track glaciers’ movements through the land formations left behind; her module invites students to use software like ArcGIS and the CCI’s Climate Reanalyzer to identify landscape features caused by receding glaciers and to make predictions based on climate projections. Through storytelling, the module also illustrates the significance of glacial movement in other senses. As Weitman explains, they leave behind resources for construction.
Read the full story from University of Maine here.