One of our tasks, during the ten day course, was to conduct some sort of inquiry into an area of interest to us. Once the topic was selected, we used various media sources including the internet, community library, university library and personal interviews to find material related to our topic. The topic we chose to pursue Interdisciplinary Teaching and what we have done is an attempt to organize possible resources for a unit on "Unpowered Flight". It is essential to note from the beginning that this is very much a "work in progress" and in no way should it be considered a final or exhaustive source.
In our discussions prior to selecting a topic, seagulls became an obvious choice in this province of Nova Scotia. It was a topic to which we felt students could relate and we thought they would be curious as to how seagulls stayed in the air when not actually using their wings to fly. Through our discussions we realized that students would need an understanding of terms such as airfoil, lift, gravity, thrust, and drag-- the forces affecting flight. We also considered the historical connection between birds and man's desire to fly in the history of flight and going back to the Greek myth of Icarus. During the process of our investigation we, in essence, became learners. Knowing very little about the chosen topic, we actively began our research. For the first couple of days we "surfed the net" in search of web sites on Interdisciplinary Teaching and unpowered flight. This also gave us the opportunity to become somewhat familiar with the experiences our own students might have in a similar inquiry. We had little trouble finding information on interdisciplinary teaching as there is much information readily available on the web. However, when we narrowed our investigation to "unpowered fllight" we did run into some difficulty. Keying in the phrase"unpowered flight" produced few usable results on the internet. Adding the word "bird" to this phrase met with more success. It was then suggested that we try searching other key words and phrases such as "Lilienthal", "how birds fly" and "Silver Dart". More sites were then found. Another resource we used was the Cape Breton Regional Library. Here we searched for suitable books that might be useful to a student on birds, kites, and various other forms of unpowered human flight. The University College of Cape Breton library provided resources that can be accessed through periodicals and CDROM research material and an ERIC search. Thus we learned about a variety of sources that researchers can access to find already recorded material. Another resource was people. Debby Poirier, a teacher friend, loaned us a CD on Alexander Graham Bell's flight experiments. She also showed us a tetrahedron which her father had successfully bid on in an auction in Baddeck, N.S. Debby also shared a photograph of the Silver Dart's first flight while onlookers stood on the ice to witness the event. Her grandmother was one of those onlookers. Our instructor, Judith Newman, helped us learn about the skill involved in hang-gliding, a form of unpowered human flight. Thus we were able to access the powerful research tool of personal experience. Next, after gathering and checking our resources, came the task of organizing our material. Designing a webpage was a novel experience for each member of our group and the process proved to be quite frustrating at times. To gain insight into how a website works, we visited various web pages to familiarize ourselves with their construction. The classroom experience became an apprenticeship of learning; the experts assisting the novices. |