08 Erik Holland ND Studies, ND Heritage & ND State Museum

Now the biggest and easiest answer is North Dakota Studies it’s uh ND studies govt it’s the State Historical Society’s curriculum built for 4th grade and 8th grade and the Legislature’s mandate is to teach it in 4th grade eighth grade and offer it every other year in high school well the high school text is out of date and we’re in the process of beginning to think about that so we’ll set that aside for right now but the 4th grade and eighth grade have been completely revised and are electronic and completely searchable full lessons full access so Indy Studies gov people living on the land is what the 8th grade one is you click on it there are four units the four units are designed in a way to think like a historian a historian thinks about economics thinks about community thinks about conflict thinks about expressions oh that’s the same themes as our gallery spaces and it’s the same themes as in the native gallery here too only they’re not called out that way so if you were in your North Dakota studies textbook online with your students you can begin to understand the access points ok the objects that are in the images are from the galleries or from our collections another resource that the teachers have access to are called send trunks suitcase exhibits in North Dakota and we may rebrand that someday but they’re available on the North Dakota Studies website teacher resources send and there are these different trunks and there are two by two by two foot trunk with foam rubber layers of objects a book of lesson plans and a bunch of primary source photographs or documents from the archives so you’ve got to demand and three-dimensional objects and lesson connection in a box related to Mandan Hidatsa and Sonic or Dakota or Chippewa and matey or pioneer women any of a whole bunch of different topics those can be checked out from the Historical Society on a two-week or longer flexible basis depending upon how long it’s needed we ship them or they can pick them up they cost twenty five bucks for the two weeks if they pick them up they cost a hundred for us to ship so they’re not cheap we encourage multiple classrooms to go together so or small towns even we’ve got lots of places where three little towns get demand and trunk and it’s out there for a month and a half and that’s cool and it moves around out there and it costs them the hundred bucks and they ship it back at the end of they’re there for the teachers it’s a resource it’s not us making money on the deal but the idea is to put objects in teacher’s hands that are related to the things that they’re teaching so that engages them in that curriculum space the other thing that we’re working on is in each of our galleries there is what is called a learning lab and that learning lab space is designed for educators to take over and use when they’re in our gallery the way I think of a laboratory is a lab person a scientist thinks about something and then they go out in the field and does some research and then they come back in and write up or inform or build their they look at their theory they say this didn’t work they okay you with me so far so if you think about a Learning Lab that way a teacher can build the idea that you’re gonna go do research on Native people in the native peoples gallery and we’ll set it up in the Learning Lab with this is the worksheet that you guys are going to fill out and you come in teacher comes in accesses to the compute puts it up on a smart board in the space in the gallery sends their students out into the field which is the gallery to investigate and come back and engage with the rest of their peers in their research effort in the lab and that can be brought back to the classroom sent to the principal the outcome can be here’s what we did so this justifies the bus coming you know I see lots of ways and that’s very underutilized when the galleries were built I knew that we needed to have an educational space that teachers could use and they hadn’t thought of any classrooms or any anything in the expansion and I got here later in the planning then I could have much change and so these learning labs are a nod to that importance the agency recognizes that this is a huge piece of where we need to go and this is part of what we’re trying to do so I’ve got a person that’s hired to work on how do we know on the smart boards in the Learning Lab so you as a teacher could come up and you would see an archaeology field notebook that’s created for students they can go up and interactively investigate and learn what an archaeologist thinks about this archaeological site so that when they go out into the gallery and understand what they’re seeing it makes sense and tells that story like you are asking me earlier is how do you get from an archaeological site to the real deal well as an interpreter the thing that always happened to me was people would come up to me with a piece of rock and say what is this and I would say let’s investigate it now where would it come from well I know that it came out of a quarry out there so I’m giving them I’d say why would somebody walk 150 miles to go get this kind of rock remember we talked about the rock is predictably break you heard that someplace else what do you think this is it’s a tool that’s what it is or it’s the leftovers from a tool that isn’t there and that’s what the archeologists are looking at they’re looking at the junk they’re looking at stuff that didn’t go in the guy’s pocket or go on the air oh they’re looking at the stuff that’s left behind but if you break off a piece of rock to get to reveal the arrowhead all of those flakes tell a story too and that’s what archeology is about so you can’t have somebody go out and just muck around on an archeological site because it’s gone for forever because every flake and where it is on the site is important and so when an archaeologist is working in the field what they are doing is documenting the stuff without the dirt in between it makes sense I mean so here’s this bead that’s sitting here and there’s another one next to it another one next to it and those three are red and then there’s two blue ones and then there oh it’s a box mmm it’s G it’s a geometric pattern maybe this is a Lakota we just found out a whole bunch just by looking at what was in the ground with the dirt gone but you don’t do that until you get back to the lab so all of that needs to be recorded in such Manute detail that it takes huge amounts of time so it’s very expensive so we don’t do a lot of archaeology anymore it’s not being done the way it was in the 1960 70s it’s being done on a very specific guided way and the way that it’s being guided is through remote sensing and electronic things so we can look through the dirt and see that there’s a disturbance down there and go I wonder what that is and when you open it up it’s a storage pit full of corn that in the 1970s when I was doing archaeology I’d scraped the dirt away until I got down to that cache pit and opened it up it’s full Accord but we could predict it today and know that’s the place to work because there’s information there that can help us and we don’t have to open this huge space so