How to use this experience in the classroom

Initial thoughts on how to use what we are learning in our classroom next year:

I am constantly thinking about how to share this incredible experience with our students next year. I can picture the simple hooks like having a picture of Baby Sam on my screen saver knowing that a baby elephant picture is a great way to get them to look at the board. But, in all seriousness, how can we use our experience and the intensive work and conservation model of Think Elephants International to inspirer our students to take on a species of their choice to advocate for.

As of right now, we are imagining that we will start off the year by explaining the basic biology of Asian Elephants. Their role in their larger ecosystem, threats to their survival, and conservation efforts. Ideally our students would then choose an animal that is a threatened keystone species that they track throughout the year. I am imagining that when we go over the eight characteristics of life, students will go into detail about how there chosen species meets each of these criteria. When we discuss human genetics, students can compare and contrast the number of chromosomes, inherited and acquired traits and whether their species is domestic, captive or wild.

I can envision anatomical comparison as well during our human body systems unit. Reproduction comparisons would be fascinating, as well as parenting styles of their species, but then maybe they can pick one other system to compare and contrast. For example it might be more appropriate for a student focusing on a daulphin to compare their brains and cognition to humans, while a student focusing on a shark might want to compare and contrast the skeletal or respiratory systems.

Right now, we are just in the dreaming stage. Something I, Karon, am very good at. Fortunately Connie does a great job of turning my lofty brainstorms into a meaningful project, and Kim, the other part of our department, is outstanding at word smithing and formatting all of the task in a way that parents and students know what it is we are trying to communicate.

Who Does This Kind of Thing?

Who does this kind of thing?

Research Assistant Profile -Elise Gilchrist
One of the numerous things I am gleaning from this expedition is the quality of people I am surrounded by each day. Currently, there are four primary groups (a fifth one will hopefully come before we depart.).
1). The Research assistants (RA's.) There are currently four recent college graduates in this role for Think Elephants International (TEI)
2). The Earthwatch volunteers: there are seven of us who have chosen consciously to participate in two weeks of science service leaning projects
3) The Mahouts and Thai staff at TEI. We have already been fortunate enough to have a wonderful class on Thai culture, language and Buddhist basics. We also get to see the Mahouts with their elephants.
4) The elephants themselves
5). We should by the end of the program get to meet Josh Plotnick who is the lead researcher.
As a teacher, I am constantly looking at my experiences here with a slant of "what would my students want to know about this" or "how can I transfer this skill or concept to my classroom". One thing that keeps coming up for me is how fascinating the company is here. Everyone here has such depth to their life and a willingness to explore, learn and act that I have found myself longing to share these folks with my readers.
Our goal is to profile as many of the participants and staff as possible. So, like all great journeys a starting point had to be picked. That point happens to be the RA Elise Gillchrist
from Connecticut, USA. Her 
undergraduate degree is from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. 
Her degree is in  Animal Behavior. 
Additional Schooling includes a semester abroad through the School for Field Studies

A summary of her of abroad experience includes 3 months spent in the Caribbean on Turks and Caicos with a focus on marine resource management. Two of these months were spent taking academic classes in the morning, with lab practicums in the afternoon doing data collection and experiment design. The last month she was able to pick one of twelve ongoing research projects. She worked on a behavioral project on the spotted eagle rays.

Elise'a Think Elephant International Experience -  Elise moved to Thailand two weeks after graduating from collage last year. She heard about the research through word of mouth and  contacted Dr. Josh Plotnik directly to inquire about working with TEI. The position was not ever posted. Because she has enjoyed the research so much, she has decided to commit to working for TEI for another year.

Why this internship and professional goal?
Elise came into the program recognizing the TEI had a trifold mission. 1) research 2) environmental education and 3) conservation. She wanted to start her career having the opportunity to see how much she liked each facet of science before deciding on an area of focus for graduate school. What she has learned is that she is passionate about conservation work and has learned a tremendous amount about how to apply research findings to conservation efforts.

Advice to students who wish to do this kind of work:
She wishes she had paid a lot more attention to writing skills, techniques and semantics as her work now requires a variety of writing styles for a variety of audience.

Her other hindsight advice was doing more of the "dorky" things while in college. By this she meant going to free lectures, visiting guest speakers cultural programs... She also felt like it was incredibly important to make personal connections with the presenters. Go up and ask them a question, e-mail them your thoughts as well as get to know your professors. The connections and ability to connect with professionals is the key to getting really cool opportunities.

First full day

Where to begin? I have drafted this blog post in my head throughout the day, and each time, there has been a different theme. Yesterday was our first full day of our Earthwatch expedition, and the variety of experiences is making it hard for me to decide what to share with the readers of the blog.
Yet, as i am slowly waking up this Sunday mining in Thailand, there is one key experience that beckons sharing. Before I dive into that, here is a quick overview of the types of things I (Karon) did yesterday.
7:00. Connie and I took a walk through Sub Ruk and dropped off laundry and bought fruit for the groups breakfast.
7:30. At breakfast as a team
8:00 I packed my bag in perpetration for heading up to the research sight.
8:15 my team (3 Earthwatch volunteers and two Think Elephant International research assistants) drove to the elephant camp.
8:30-11:30. We did three different cognition experiments on three different elephants. For each experiment I was able to assist in a different way which helped me to expand my skill set in data collection, and also to see a "group lab" set up as a student. (There will be more about this in future post)
11:45-12:15 we returned to the office and met up with the other volunteers. We watched the first 30 min of the BBC special Super Smart, which showed cognition evidence in a variety of species.
12:30 lunch
1:00-2:00 we all traveled back up to the field sight and did 40 minutes,of behavioral observations. This is where volunteers watch in detail the interaction of three elephants in a large area.
2:00-4:00 we returned to the office and had a class on elephant cognition and a summary of what type of research has already need published about the work done by Think Elephant and what kinds of things they are trying to figure out.
4:00-5:00 we took a walk through town and picked up a few souvenirs.
5:00-6:00 showers, e-mail get ready for dinner
6:00-7:00 we ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the Mekong river and we could see Laos, Burma and China.
7:00-9:00 we drove up to the very nice 5 star resort Anatara and listened to a presentation about marine mosaic ecosystems.
9:30 called it a day
So, as you can guess there was an overwhelming amount of things that were new powerful and intriguing that I wanted to share. But one particular part of my day stood out as worth sharing in detail.
While up at the research site, we worked with three different elephants. Two elephants were part of new studies, but one was being tested on her ability to be presented with two buckets, one with food, the other without. Then the buckets would be pulled away, the lids unfastened, and represented to her. She the. Had to choose which bucket to swipe the lid off to get to the food.
The experiment itself was fairly basic and strait forward, but the elephants personal story is what I found compelling. He name is LeKang, and she has only been at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant preserve for about a year. She was found injured and it is assumed that she was hit by a car. She clearly favorites one leg, has very clumsy dexterity with her trunk and is very skittish and nervousness. In Thailand, it appears that all captive elephants have their own personal Mahots. This is a person (typically male) who is the elephants trainer and keeper. Mahots are becoming a rarity as the demand for captive elephants as workers has decreased due to logging banns. Elephants are also costly complicated animals to keep. So, a Mahot has a big decision to make when it purchases an elephant, because they need to earn a living with the elephant in order to maintain it and sport their own family.
Yet, despite all of that, LeKang's Mahot took her, and over the past year has patiently and lovingly worked with her. She sweetly causal ambled to the sight. Her Mahot did not carry any tools to manage her, but his voice and presence. When she got to her spot, he reassured her then moved off to the side. As we worked with her for the trials, I could see his glee and pride when she made the correct choice.
What struck me was that here was this elephant and her Mahot, and they were reinventing themselves outside of the norm and taking a huge risk. The goal with LeKang is to have her confident enough to do presentations for school and tourist groups so that they can see elephant cognition up close. Because of her injuries she is not able to do treks, but this program has found a way to use this elephant in a way that she brings value to her species, her Mahot, and hopeful to herself.

Yet Another Amazing Day

We've had yet another amazing day of learning. This morning our group was divided into two teams. Karon's group was in the field doing behavior test trials while my group was involved in data entry in the office. In the afternoon, we we're able to participate in behavioral observations. Afterwards, we had fun giving the elephants a bath to cool off!  Tonight we went to an amazing place- the Anantara Hotel - to hear Elise present a talk on "Keeping our Planet Blue". I think you'll agree with me that this was one swanky joint!  

The Back Story, compelling questions, and methodology

Nothing says riveting like power points, and data sheets right?  Well, for the seven Earthwatch volunteers and research assistants, it really was, keep you on the edge of your seats" riveting.  The primary objective of today was orientation and introduction to the species, the need for conservation, the research aims and educational goals of the program.  We will be diving deeper into all of theses areas this week, but for today we needed to lay a foundation.

As a science teacher, I found the presentation on the biology of elephants to be the area where my brain was most engaged.  In all honesty, in my perpetration for the trip, I researched many things, but the intricacies of asian elephants was low on my list of topics I covered.  From past work and personal experience, I do have detailed knowledge of other species.  As a teacher who has been granted the opportunity to learn (thank you Fund for Teachers) I find myself paying astute attention to both the content as well as how it is being presented and how that style engages those around me.  I imagine that chefs do this by trying to guess flavor combinations.  For me personally, I felt like I could add in the new knowledge about asian elephants in an already established part of my brain that filed information about horses, apes and ravens.

At some point I will probably list the highlights of what we learned, but for know, that feels too cumbersome, due to elephant biology only being a small focus of our orientation today.  I will say that I feel it is important for our students next year to do similar research and present basic information on a species of their choice.  How else can they create a framework to attach future wildlife knowledge gained?

After the biology of elephants, we spent time learning about the human-elephant history of Thailand starting 4,000 years ago, to present conservation, conflict between elephants and human, and pragmatic issues surrounding humans and elephants coexisting in Asia.  The Think Elephant International has a very large educational focus, and it will be writing more about the strategies in the next few days (aka, we have only been introduced.)

We then spent another block of time going over research protocol, and how we as volunteers can assist in data collection that needs many sets of hands, eyes and clip boards.  Because most of the data collection and experiment trials are to be used in future scientific publications, I will be intentionally vague about the details of the methodology and results.  What I can say, is we will come away from this experience with a much grater appreciation for the rigor and logistics of quality experimental design.

Today was not all a "sit and get" experience.  After lunch (which was wonderful as all Thai food is in my opinion) we loaded up in the van and headed up to meet the elephants. We are in a unique part of Thailand next to the Mekong river.  The other side of the river right in town is Laos and when we drove up to the sight we saw the Ruk river and on the other side is Burma.  At the confluence is a large grassland where many of the elephants on the preserve "hang out" before the monsoons flood the valley.

We first went to the large camp and met several of the 25 elephants that live in the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation preserve.  We got to feed one sun flower seeds (Pictures are on Connie's post), and we also got to pet the newest elephant who is only 3 months old.  They are truly magnificent, these elephants are very used to being around humans, but all contact is done with the elephant's Mahout present (you will see a Thai person dressed in blue and these are people who are personally attached to their elephant and they work as a team).

Lots of learning took place today, and lots of questions worth exploring.  It will be interesting to traverse the knowledge spectrum from very detailed data recording to large scale conservation initiatives.

Think Elephants International Pictures.

Our Team

We're about to head off to a meeting but we'll see elephants this afternoon!  We'll meet a three month old baby today and will learn about our role in the research project.