Teaching Arctic Environments: An Introduction
Welcome to Teaching Arctic Environments (or TAE for short)!
Although we have only just officially gone live, this project has been ongoing since July 2023. During the summer of last year we were awarded a Scottish Government Arctic Connections Fund to jump-start this collaborative initiative between the Universities of Aberdeen, Washington, and Manitoba. Or more specifically, between Isabelle Gapp, Nadine Fabbi, and Jonathan Peyton.
Since then, we hosted a workshop at the University of Aberdeen in early November ‘23, bringing together scholars within art history, anthropology, archaeology, and museum studies to discuss some of the incredible Arctic objects held within the University of Aberdeen Museum & Special Collections. Several of these will be central to future educational boxes and we hope to soon be able to share a number of 3D object scans commissioned as part of the TAE project.
In late February 2024, the co-leads re-convened in Seattle for a two-day workshop hosted by the University of Washington. Here, we were able to share more about the project alongside a draft version of this website. Our participants, including many of our first contributors, shared with us an object—visual, material, or literary—that they thought would be a great subject for their “educational box”. Having seen these ideas evolve into what you can now find on our website has been a lot of fun!
Now, we are finally able to share with you the first eight educational boxes forming part of Series One of Teaching Arctic Environments (with more forthcoming in the Autumn ‘24). You might also notice that certain boxes are still being worked on, these will be complete very soon. There are no strict parameters for how these boxes might be used. You might assign only the recording, or only the essay, or both? Further recommended reading or viewing will always be found at the bottom of each essay to direct students and/or educators to more expansive work on the same or related topics. The first set of the TAE boxes have already been used to shape a course at the University of Washington, and we’re planning to develop an additional page on this website where syllabi examples might be accessed and adapted.
As you will read elsewhere on this website, TAE is intended to be developed iteratively, there is no deadline nor defined end-point. Rather our hope is that as the available resources grow and develop that they will in-turn seed further ideas and contributions.
We are already looking forward to the next year ahead, having received funding through an internal UIPPSF grant at the University of Manitoba, and Isabelle will be travelling to Nuuk, Greenland in October 2024 to work with Dr Penny How (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) on a series of “boxes” to be developed by and alongside Nuuk-based artists, curators, and researchers. This extension of the project, Voices on Ice, is kindly supported by NERC UK Arctic Office.
And on that note, thank you for taking the time to pay us a visit and we hope these resources prove useful if not inspiring!
Isabelle and Jonathan