Need
Imagine disembarking a small floatplane within an Alaskan
game sanctuary and standing about 100 feet from a brown bear
mother and her cub. Now imagine having this experience as
a fourteen-year-old and having the opportunity to tell museum
visitors from around the world about your experience. That
is just what Evan Smith did in the summer before his sophomore
year. The trip to the McNeil State Game Sanctuary was one
of several once-in-a-lifetime experiences arranged for high
school students who participate in the Pratt Museum’s
summer internship program.
The summer internship program is one way that
the museum addresses the national need to provide students
with national history and science education and provide job
opportunities for local teens. It also helps build the staff
capacity of the museum to meet the needs of seasonal visitors.
Each summer the population of Homer, Alaska—a
town of 5,000 year-round residents—swells with visitors
from the “lower 48” and from around the world.
As the only natural history museum in the 25,600-square-mile
area of the Kenai Peninsula, the Pratt Museum experiences
a jump in visitorship in the warmer months. During this peak
period the museum puts four to six high school students to
work as interpreters in the exhibit galleries, as mentors
to younger participants in the museum’s other summer
programs, and as researchers on field research projects.
This intense training for high school students
is just one way the Pratt Museum encourages a lifelong understanding
and exploration of the natural environment and human experience
associated with its special place, the Kachemak Bay in Alaska.
Goals
The goal of the Pratt’s summer internship program is
to use the museum as a resource for teaching natural history
concepts and ethical behavior while providing hands-on learning
experience in science, culture, and humanities, as well as
practical life skills such as researching and public speaking.
Through the program, the museum also hopes to
deepen its connection to its community, provide meaningful
learning experiences, and cultivate young friends and supporters
who will feel comfortable using the museum throughout their
lives.
The program began 13 years ago, when the museum
initiated a five-year marine science program with Homer High
School. It was a collaboration that involved students, parents,
scientists, educators, staff from many public agencies, community
members, and museum staff. The effort used as a focus some
recently salvaged skeletal remains of a beached sperm whale.
With a foundation grant, the museum created a project for
students to research, document, preserve, reassemble (or articulate),
and display the whale skeleton while learning about ocean
conservation.
Since then, the summer internship program has
exposed high school students to some of the museum’s
most exciting community collaborations and field research
activities while enabling them to experience many facets of
museum work. The students have assisted with the museum’s
special speakers series, worked on the development of exhibits,
prepared artwork and copy for identification cards used in
galleries and the botanical garden, tested education resource
kits, conducted user surveys, given tours of the museum’s
downtown forest trail, developed an outdoor art exhibit, helped
artists with the installation of their pieces, and even served
as hosts during exhibit openings.
Strategy
Lois Bettini, Pratt Director of Education, and Gale Parsons,
Exhibits Director and Cultural Liaison, strive to make the
museum a place of learning and of fun. The interns are required
to work 20 hours a week (earning eight dollars an hour), yet
they usually end up spending additional time at the museum,
either volunteering or hanging around with friends. The internships
are open to all sophomores, juniors, and seniors regardless
of academic abilities.
The summer internship program serves the town’s
single high school, with a student population of approximately
475, as well as the rural and remote schools in the surrounding
Kachemak Bay region, which may have as few as three high school
students. The program is also available to the region’s
significant number of home-schooled and alternative high school
students, who are frequent users of the museum’s resources.
All interested students in the region are encouraged to participate.
Through a required special project, each intern
is encouraged to individualize his or her experience by exploring
areas of personal interest. Because the museum is a cultural
and fine arts center, as well as natural history institution,
there is a broad spectrum of possibilities, something for
every learning style. Sometimes students prepare artwork,
write a research paper, or help design exhibits.
No matter their special interest, interns must
be enthusiastic about science and natural history, willing
to communicate with museum visitors, willing to use video
and computer technology, be able to participate in fieldtrips,
and have an interest in bears.
One of the museum’s most popular attractions
is a live Bear Cam that has been on and offline over the years,
depending on funding and other factors. Visitors can manipulate
a joystick to train a remote camera on brown bears that congregate
at the falls on McNeil River each summer to catch salmon.
The study of bear behavior is more than an abstract scientific
pursuit. People sometimes encounter black bears in and around
Homer, and bear safety (and human safety around bears) is
a priority for the tourism industry as well as the museum.
Results
Student Evan Smith found it hard to articulate just how powerful
his experience with the bears was. He said, “You just
see things that you never could possibly imagine until you
actually go do it.” But Smith, now a junior at Yale
University, has no trouble sharing his knowledge of bear biology
and behavior. He can describe how bears have become habituated
to human presence in the park, explain the code of behavior
required for a safe bear encounter, and even share hair-raising
stories of experiences biologists have had with alpha male
bears. He thoroughly enjoyed his time discussing bears with
groups of museum visitors, saying the experience taught him
how to speak to people from all walks of life. These are skills
he used in college interviews, as captain of Yale’s
water polo team, and at his summer job working with hundreds
of tourists who go charter fishing in Homer.
Brie Miles-Brache, on the other hand, did not
quickly embrace the public speaking aspects of her two internships
at the museum. Yet, as she learned about the Native Alaskan
Tribes and became proficient at leading tours through the
museum’s exhibit on the tribes, her speaking skills
greatly improved. She became involved with the museum through
its program for middle-schoolers and continued on for two
high school summer internships. Now a freshman at Guilford
College in North Carolina, Miles-Brache fondly remembers how
as an intern she shared her knowledge with the middle school
students.
Travis Hines is a pre-med freshman at Montana
State University. In addition to preparing for a two-week
archeological dig, he helped articulate skeletons of a black
bear and a walrus. These activities paid direct dividends
for his college biology class. His experience deepened his
respect for the museum, which, he said, has amazing resources
and is an awesome place for learning.
Katrina Dupree traveled from Seward and stayed with her grandparents
in Homer to participate in her internship. The field experience
during her internship was an archeological dig on an island
in Aialik Bay, part of a four-year project with the National
Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution's Arctic Studies
Center. Special permission for the dig was obtained from Native
Alaskans in the villages of Nanwalek, Port Graham, and Seldovia,
and Native Alaskans participated on site and as part of the
project’s oral history component.
As members of the Native Alaskan Trabal community,
Dupree and her mother experienced the fieldtrip together.
Working alongside archeology graduate students and Dr. Aron
Crowell of the Arctic Studies Center, Dupree and her mother
unearthed Russian coins, beads, shells, and other artifacts.
The dig gave Dupree valuable life lessons from her mom and
a deeper connection to her grandmother, who told Dupree of
fishing expeditions that Dupree’s great-great grandfather
made to Aialik Bay. As a result of the experience, the Homer
High School senior said she has changed her lifelong career
goal. Once she longed to be a physician; now she hopes to
enroll at University of Alaska Anchorage to study archeology.
Approximately 30 students have been through the small, but
intense program since 1995. In return for the significant
investment the Pratt museum makes each year on its interns,
Bettini and Parsons said the museum reaps rewards aplenty |
