AKSEA program fosters educational collaborations

When it comes to crafting educational resources, four heads are better than one.

That’s the idea behind the Alaska Knowledge, Science, and Education Alliance (AKSEA), which just concluded its first year. Through AKSEA, four-person groups of teachers, scientists and local knowledge holders have spent the last school year crafting K–12 school curricula about marine phenomena.

“AKSEA brings scientists who are currently working in the field and local traditional knowledge experts  into the classroom,” said Alaska Sea Grant Marine Education Specialist Leigh Lubin, who is co-leading the program. “It’s a very place-based approach.”

AKSEA is modeled after similar efforts by Sea Grant programs in other states, Lubin said, with the notable addition in Alaska of a local knowledge component. One major goal of the program is to facilitate greater connections between teachers, working scientists, and Elders and other local knowledge holders—three groups that have a great deal to learn from each other but who don’t often interact. 

“We want teachers to feel comfortable getting input from Elders or from scientists,” Lubin said. “It increases teachers’ knowledge of subject matter, and then both the scientists and the Elders can learn more about pedagogy and that can help them both in communicating their own expertise.”

AKSEA is run by the Community Organized Restoration and Learning (CORaL) Network, a group of Alaska educational and science organizations of which Alaska Sea Grant is a member. The CORaL Network is funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, and AKSEA prioritizes recruiting participants from the oil spill region.

Applications opened  in spring 2025 for the program, which began in October of that year. Participants were sorted into three groups, each consisting of two teachers, one academic expert and one local knowledge-holder. The teams met via Zoom throughout the school year to each craft two to five days of school lessons on a marine-related “anchoring phenomenon”—an engaging real-world event or a meaningful design problem for students to investigate.

The three teams came up with very different lesson plans. One group’s curriculum, “Growing up Sockeye,” takes the life cycle of the salmon as the basis for nine lessons aimed primarily at fourth-grade students. The team created workbooks for both students and teachers that blend scientific knowledge about salmon with formline salmon imagery based in Indigenous culture.

“Our goal was to deepen student understanding by focusing on this driving question,” said group member Carrie Stander, a teacher at Valdez Elementary School. “What changes can we observe in a sockeye salmon across its life cycle, and how do these contribute to the survival of each individual fish and of the species as a whole?”

A second group created a three- to six-day set of high school-level lessons based around the Pacific Ocean heatwave of 2014–16, commonly referred to as “The Blob.” Using the observations of an Elder from the village of Old Harbor as a jumping-off point, the group crafted lessons that examine the chemical, physical and ecological impacts of the Blob to the food web. Students taking the course build their own food web and watch how different environmental factors affect it, and take part in a “cod simulation” exercise in which they experience the many ways that a cod can perish at the hands of predators, infections and other misfortunes. They also learn how to analyze and graph data, using a dataset of a Blob-related mass die-off of common murres.

“All of this demonstrates the key learning concept that it’s not one single thing that drives ecological change, and that’s what we hoped for the children to understand through this unit,” said group member Bailey O’Reilly, a teacher at Kodiak High School.

The third group created a set of lessons for high-schoolers focused on how environmental change impacts subsistence resources, and how communities can adapt to those impacts. The lessons weave together Western science with Alutiiq principles that encourage working in harmony with nature. 

Some of the AKSEA lessons have already been piloted in the individual teachers’ classrooms, and Lubin said once they’re finalized this summer they’ll be made available online for general use on the Alaska Waters and CORaL Network websites. The program is actively recruiting participants—especially Elders and local knowledge holders—for its next cohort.