Salish Sea Studies offers engaged and experiential learning opportunities. The activities here have been designed by educators for use in a variety of classes. You are welcome to adopt and adapt these activities to your learning environment.
The lesson introduces students to archaeology as a way of knowing the “deep history” of the Salish Sea and presents a brief review of the archaeology of the region. We also discuss the importance of this history to modern peoples today, including the necessity for archaeologists to collaborate with Indigenous communities.
The exercise is aimed to help students explain the basic chronology of culture history in the Salish Sea and identify important local archaeological sites and/or traditional cultural places on both sides of the international border.
A field trip to a local museum allows students to interact with and learn from material items from the Salish Sea and also encourages students to think about the ethics of museum representation and Indigenous collaboration.
Students will engage their Salish Sea learning from different disciplinary perspectives through engaging with maps at a series of stations at the Map Collection.
This (virtual) lab component for the Introduction to the Salish Sea course supports students' engagement in independent experiential learning using walks, reading, podcasts, recorded lectures, and tracing local ecology.
How do we connect stories of people to place? The objective of this three-part project is to make the connection between the forced removal of Bellingham’s Punjabi community in 1907 to the history of Bellingham’s contested waterfront.
After going through a timeline that covers the arrival of newcomers in the past three centuries, students journal their reflections on how colonialism shapes the past, present, and future. In the second video, students learn about concepts such as moving into a place, arrivants, guests, and write a 3-5 sentence positionality biography.
Students find their place in the timescale of human experience in the Salish Sea, learn about map resources including native land.ca, and use maps to identify the Indigenous nations that are connected to the watershed where they live.
