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What is the ORIAS Speakers Bureau?
The ORIAS Speakers Bureau is a cohort of graduate students who offer 45-minute presentations specifically geared to students from middle school to community college. Each talk models important Common Core Social Studies skills, such as analysis of texts and use of evidence to build an argument. Many talks include content that dovetails with History Social-Science Content Standards, while all talks offer opportunities for inquiry-based student engagement, as outlined in the new History-Social Science Framework. Most presentations are also appropriate for more than one grade level or subject, because they address broad questions while focusing on specific events and topics.
Presentations
Climate Change and Decision-Making: how do we plan for an unpredictable future?
Speaker: Christianne Aikins
We often hear in the news how the climate is changing, but what does that really mean for individual people's lives? One of the biggest challenges associated with climate change is actually increased climate variability. If you are a farmer, perhaps you can plan for a wetter climate, but how do you plan for a growing season that has both droughts and floods? This is why increased climate variability is such a problem. Drawing from her experience working in places like Afghanistan, Peru, and Laos on climate adaptation, the speaker will engage students in an interactive game to help them imagine how different communities, including their own, perceive and try to plan for climate risk. How does a community in the mountains compare to an island one, or a rich versus a poor community? The similarities and differences between these groups can be surprising. Through this talk, students will gain a better understanding of the effects of climate change.
About the Speaker
Christianne is a development professional from Canada, currently pursuing a Masters in Sustainable Development at UC Berkeley. Her research on river fish in Trinidad and nesting birds in western Canada during her B.Sc. at McGill University exposed her to the fascinating (and frustrating) complexities of the relationship between humans and the environment. After graduating, this interest led Christianne to Afghanistan, where she focused on environmental education and disaster risk reduction with the UN Environmental Programme. She then worked with the APEC Climate Center in South Korea, implementing agriculture climate adaptation projects and teaching diverse groups about climate risk across the Asia-Pacific Region.
Suggested Audiences
Age: 6th – 12th grade and community college
Preparation: The speaker will provide the teacher with a short vocabulary list for the students to learn in preparation for her talk. The list will be accompanied by an answer sheet for teachers and a set of video resources for students.
Courses: World History, Human Geography, Economics, any
science course addressing the causes and effects of climate change
Sustainable Development: Challenges of Engineering Solutions to Problems of Poverty Using Human Waste
Speaker: Soliver Chè Fusi
Something is only considered waste if you waste it. So, is urine waste? In the context of both “developed” countries like the US where we have flush toilets and in “developing” countries like Kenya, where millions still practice open defecation, we waste the valuable nutrients found in urine. These nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, are the primary components of most commercial fertilizers. How might we change our systems to treat our “waste” as the valuable material it is? And even if we can engineer a less wasteful process, are there still reasons why people might be reluctant to adopt the solutions proposed by engineers, either in the US or in less affluent countries like Kenya?
This talk uses a case study to introduce students to the methods development engineers use to attempt to solve problems of poverty. The focus is an exploration of the nitrogen cycle – particularly as it relates to human waste. Students are then invited to step outside the traditional engineering process to propose other factors that might affect people’s willingness or ability to adopt new technologies, including cultural and social norms. Through this process, the speaker invites students to wrestle with questions she, herself, is still working to understand: What are the most appropriate applications and limitations of engineered systems to solve problems of poverty?
About the Speaker
Soliver’s theories about the unsustainable approaches to development engineering are rooted in her immigration to the states from Central Africa at an early age. Her home country of Cameroon is defined as insufficient and incapable of self-lead progress – that is, it is defined as a “developing country”. Her concerns about certain approaches to engineered solutions caused her to shift from her undergraduate studies in chemical engineering, a field that often defines ‘sustainability’ from a very narrow, technical framework, into environmental engineering in her current PhD program. Her ideas continue to be refined by the civil war currently going on back home, between French and English Cameroon. The war increases her awareness of external factors that hinder a country's ability to sustainably develop and pushes her to challenge the mainstream definitions of “progress,” “sustainability,” and “development.”
Suggested Audiences
Age: 7th – 12th grade and community college
Preparation: No preparation is necessary, but students would benefit from prior exposure to the nitrogen cycle and information about how and why the world currently produces so much nitrogen fertilizer. The speaker can provide a short list of links to videos and/or articles.
Courses: Engineering, Global Studies, Human Geography, Economics, Environmental Science, any other science course addressing the causes and effects of climate change
Global Vikings: the untold history of the world's greatest travelers, from North America to the Arab World
Speaker: Sara Ann Knutson
The people from Scandinavia known as "Vikings" were infamous male raiders, pirates, and pillagers-- or so popular culture has led us to believe. But who were these people in reality? And what can the untold history of the Vikings and their global travels teach us about our own world today?
Students will explore the travels of the Scandinavian Vikings, from their settlements in North America, to the migrations of Vikings down the Volga River in modern-day Russia, to evidence of the Vikings riding camels to trade with Arab merchants in Baghdad and throughout the Abbasid Caliphate. This presentation also includes an investigation into the work of modern-day archaeologists, what they do, how they gather and interpret evidence to understand the past, and why their work matters.
Through this experience, students will explore how the past can help us better understand issues that affect our own lives, including race and ethnicity, social networks, human migrations and migrant narratives, and modern appropriations (and misuses) of history.
This presentation has great flexibility to address different levels of students, beginning with exploring what material objects can tell us about the world and the people who created them, the impressive and little known global connections between Vikings and the Abbasid Caliphate, to increasingly complex concepts of how history can be (and has been) distorted and appropriated for different social and political agendas.
About the Speaker
Sara Ann grew up in Michigan and has lived in three countries abroad during her adult life. First trained in History at the University of Michigan, she became an archaeologist to study the travels of the Scandinavian Vikings and the people (from at least four continents!) that they interacted with. She holds an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge and is currently working on her PhD in Anthropology at UC Berkeley. When she is not conducting research and teaching, Sara Ann enjoys learning languages, public speaking, traveling to new countries, training for the next big triathlon race, and sharing her passion for the global history of cultural interactions with communities around the world.
Suggested Audiences
Age: 6th – 12th grade and community college
Preparation: There is no preparation necessary, though the talk will be more meaningful to students who have studied one or more of the following: the spread of Islam and the Abbasid caliphate, Medieval Europe, the European colonization of North America.
Courses: World History, Human Geography, Global Studies
Archaeology and the Landscape: examining the past to protect our future
Speaker: Anna Nielsen
How can knowledge of the past help us understand and prevent water-related natural disasters today?
The Japanese archipelago, with its rugged landscape of mountains and rivers, is prone to many unexpected catastrophes involving water, including floods, typhoons, and tsunamis. On the other side of the world in the ancient city of Petra, Jordan, water plays an equally critical role in the desert setting. In these two seemingly opposite environmental contexts, ancient cultures developed complex societies and the mechanisms to prevent or mitigate natural disasters that threatened them.
Archaeologists use both traditional and cutting-edge techniques to peer into the past and explore unsolved mysteries. This talk invites students to consider several questions: How did ancient people develop new technologies to control water and build the first “kingdoms” in the Japanese archipelago or the elaborate rock-cut cities of Petra? In what ways can we see traces of the past in the modern landscapes of Japan and Jordan? How can we apply what we learn to environments we see around the world or at home in California? And most importantly, how can knowledge of the past help us understand and prevent water-related natural disasters today? Students will be invited to analyze images and share their observations and deductions. They’ll also come away with an understanding of how archaeology can be used to address climate change and other issues.
About the Speaker
Anna Nielsen is a PhD student studying Japanese archaeology at UC Berkeley. Ever since she was a child, she planned to become an archaeologist, but she first became interested in Japan as a high school student when she saw the effects of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami disaster. The question “What can I do to help?” started her on a journey that would take her to several new countries, immerse her in Japanese language, and make her feel profoundly grateful that she is lucky enough to study one of the coolest subjects in the world.
Suggested Audiences
Age: 6th – 12th grade and community college
Preparation: Preparation is not necessary, but students of all ages might benefit from some brief contextual information. This would include a brief description of the Kofun period and a few minutes of class time looking at a map to understand where Japan is located and some of the characteristics of its physical geography. See Asia for Educators for a geography lesson you might use for this purpose.
Courses: World History, Human Geography, Environmental Science
Agroecology in the Arctic: how ecology, technology, and social action cultivates food sovereignty
Speaker: Mindy Price
“You are what you eat,” we’ve long been told. Politicized foodies increasingly implore us: “Vote with your fork.” But what kinds of food and agriculture methods should we vote for? This talk explores the journey of the global food system from farm to table. Students will learn about ecology, technology, and the socio-economic context of farming under a climate change scenario and consider how different groups of people unequally access, produce, and consume food. The speaker will unpack the concepts of agroecology, food sovereignty, and hunger. Using a case study from her ethnographic research in Canada’s Northwest Territories, she will show how agroecology empowers individuals to not only grow food in the challenging and rapidly changing environment of the Arctic, but also to resist the global corporate food regime and develop food sovereignty.
About the Speaker
Daughter of fifth generation farmers on her maternal side, Mindy is a rural sociologist studying agrarian change in northern Canada with a specific focus on indigenous food sovereignty and sustainable subarctic/arctic agriculture. Her doctoral research is based on on-going ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted in the Northwest Territories. Her previous work considered women’s empowerment and nutrition in livestock systems in East Africa, and she has also studied local food systems in the southeastern US.
Suggested Audiences
Age: 9th – 12th grade and community college. Middle school is possible, but students would need preparation in terms of vocabulary. This talk would work particularly well at a middle school with a garden program.
Preparation: The teacher may want to request a vocabulary list to help prepare students ahead of time.
Courses: Biology, World History, Human Geography, Ethnic Studies, Government, Environmental Science. This talk would be especially relevant for students who are learning about the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, the nitrogen cycle, or climate change.
How Mud, Trash, and Poop Reveal Ancient Climate Changes
Speaker: AJ White
Understanding climate change that occurred hundreds to thousands of years ago is difficult, so scientists turn to some unusual, and sometimes stinky, places to get paleoclimatic data. Feel how mud contains valuable information about former rainfall, evaporation, and temperature conditions at both the macroscopic and microscopic levels. See how trash left by ancient people lets archaeologists discover the impact of humans on the environment. Finally, smell how poop molecules can tie paleoclimatic and archaeological data together to assess the impact of climate change on civilizations of the past.
About the Speaker
AJ was particularly impacted by the book "Everybody Poops" in the early 1990s and found an academic release for his interests during his master's work in geology at Long Beach State assessing the use of fecal molecules as indicators of population change. He continues his research in the Anthropology Department at UC Berkeley with an emphasis on how fecal molecules can unite paleoenvironmental and archaeological data to more effectively understand the complex relationship of humans and the environment.
Suggested Audiences
Age: 6th – 12th grade and community college
Preparation: No preparation is needed ahead of time.
Courses: World History, Human Geography, Environmental Science, Chemistry, Earth Science, Biology