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While no teacher is
required to borrow material from Carnegie Museum of Natural History, nearly
400 innovative teachers each year know how to enliven their lessons with
everything from bird eggs to moose antlers. A fourth grade teacher will borrow a stack of touchable pelts
for his lesson about frontier fur trade, and a middle school writing
teacher will challenge teams of seventh graders to compose a full page of
adjectives describing the bird and mammal taxidermy mounts displayed in her
classroom.
Pat McShea with a pair of Moose antlers. Behind him are a few of the more than
200 boxes of natural history materials that are borrowed by educators.
Such
resourceful educators come from more than 150 western Pennsylvania
schools--a public, private, and parochial cross-section that includes
everything from pre-schools with fewer than twenty students, to high schools
with enrollments beyond 2,000.
All these
unique materials are borrowed from the Educational Loan Collection, a
century-old outreach program with an inventory of more than 10,000
objects. As coordinator for this
unusual enterprise, I match the available materials with a teacher's needs,
and try to help every borrower understand the museum and the role of
scientific collections.
Ideally, loan
materials are will enhance a future class visit to the museum. Students touring Alcoa Foundation Hall
of North American Indians, for example, are likely to understand a museum
Docent’s explanation of the Arapaho world view, as depicted in the pattern
of a parfletch, if they’ve first
examined one of these stiff, buffalo hide pouches in their own
classroom. During the school year
borrowed items, whether fossils, minerals, bear skulls, or sets of wetland
birds, or poisonous plants, symbolize the vast, systematically arranged,
research collections that the museum holds in public trust. Learning from these borrowed museum
materials is a gradual process, but teachers regularly report how much
natural history their students learn.
One teacher noted recently that a sixth grader described the
portable display of "Common Local Beetles" with scientific
objectivity, as “a record of co-inhabitants of Pittsburgh.”
For more information, call
622-3292.
Photo Credit: Melinda
McNaugher
Fall
Colors Across North American
Photography
by Anthony Cook
Natural
History Gallery
September
29, 2001 to January 12, 2002
Fall colors are like the bouquet a magician pulls
out of his sleeve and presents with a flourish to an expectant and amazed
audience…. They materialize like
magic where the week before there had been only green.
--Anne Zwinger
Author, painter,
conservationist and perhaps most of all, photographer, Anthony E. Cook has
spent the last four fall seasons travelling and hiking through the color
belt in the 30 to 70-degree latitude range that flows from Alaska and
Canada down to the American south.
The result is his Fall Colors
Across North America, a brilliant presentation of the power of abstract
designs and shapes that expands our appreciation of landscapes
In the latest issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine
(October, 2001), feature writer James Lawrence said of Cook, "Nature photographers rise to
prominence as do artists in every medium by giving us unique yet somehow
universal evocations of our own experience of the world. Anthony Eaton Cook intends to carve his
own niche into the photographic landscape by presenting us with a familiar
subject dripping chroma of North America's fall colors in a fresh and
thoughtful style. We have all seen
fall colors. We may never have felt
them quite like this."
Cook's ability is to
somehow isolate a unique element within the landscape that arouses strong
emotions from the viewers. His
approach might be to focus upon a graphic pattern or shape, highlighted by
interesting light, or by the power of a simple composition.
Says Lawrence,
"Cook's introspection into his own pre-visualization process" is
seen in his language, peppered with phrases like "dynamic positioning
of subjects," "shapes and patterns, and the "push and
pull" of contrasting elements.
It is a language that derives naturally from a lifelong study and
interest in painting, and his close relationship with a celebrated wildlife
painter Robert Bateman.
Anthony Cook's
photography has been published extensively throughout the world, and he is
the author or of the best-selling photo-essay book The Cook Forest--an Island in Time (Falcon Press). The exhibition Fall colors Across America will tour North America beginning
this fall, and will close in 2005 at the American Museum of Natural history
in New York.
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