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DAY 1 LESSON
PLANS
- Introduce Alaska and its Native peoples to students, if they are not
already familiar with the information. Review the five Alaska Native
groups depicted on the map and pronounce their names.
- Introduce the topic of leadership. Ask students for names of leaders
in their schools, communities, state, or nation. How do we know who
our leaders are? Does leadership show up most prominently during times
of trouble or widespread disagreement? Can a person be a leader if he
or she does not have a formal title? Ask for examples.
- Explore the idea that in different settings, different attributes
could be prized in a leader. If students have studied Shakespeare, for
instance, they could consider Coriolanus as an example of a war leader
who could not make the transition into a statesman. Draw other examples
from current books read or movies seen. Talk about real-life examples
when being a leader in one arena did or did not prepare a person for
other leadership roles. Examples to consider might be Ulysses S. Grant
or Dwight D. Eisenhower.
- Discuss the proposition that different cultures prize different attributes
in their leaders. For instance, honor was a paramount attribute among
the Japanese Samurai. Wisdom and patience in an Indian leader like Gandhi.
Helping others is essential in Quaker groups. Hard work is prized in
other societies. And so on. Explain that Alaska's indigenous populations
were so diverse that each of the five major cultural groups prized different
attributes. Students will be investigating those characteristics in
their readings.
- Finally, consider different ways of leading, from parental fiat to
political dictatorship to leading by consensus.
- Divide the class into three groups. Each group will be reading about
a different leader in Alaska's history: Ekeuhnick,
an Inupiaq leader who lived in the distant time before calendars were
kept; Apanuugpak,
a legendary Yup'ik war leader who probably lived in the sixteenth, seventeenth,
or eighteenth centuries, and Elizabeth
Peratrovich, a Tlingit woman of the twentieth century.
- Each group enters the web site and finds the information on its particular
leader. After reading the information, students complete the attached
Student Worksheet that
asked them to:
a.Identify the leader's cultural group and geographic location.
b.Explain what this leader did that was remembered by posterity.
c.Explain how this leader's cultural background was expressed through
the leadership role.
d.List the era or years when this leader lived.
- Working within the three groups, students prepare a class presentation
that includes:
a. Geographic and cultural information about the leader
b. A dramatization of the leader's story
DAY 2 LESSON
PLANS
- Students present their dramatic enactments.
- Discuss, compare, and contrast the leaders, using the following criteria:
- How do we know about these leaders? How do we know about the deeds
of contemporary leaders? What are the limitations of the different ways
of learning about leaders? (Consider, for instance, written biography,
oral tradition, written documents written by the individuals, belongings
now in museums that belonged to the leader, memoirs.)
- What is prized within the cultures about each leader?
- Could any of the individuals have been leaders in the situations that
the other two people found themselves in? That is, how would Ekeuhnick
have done before the Alaska Territorial Legislature? Would Elizabeth
Peratrovich have been a good war leader? Was Apanuugpak the right
person to lead his people to a new way of life during the time of climate
change in northern Alaska?
- Would any of the individuals be considered leaders in the students'
own communities today?
- In class discussion, students react to the three leaders: in what
way are students like or different from their leaders discussed? What
do they admire about the leaders? Are there characteristics that they
do not admire?
- Enrichment: have students explore Hawaii's
and Massachusetts' leaders by
looking at the lessons from those locations on the web site.
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