Welcome to “What’s Going On in This Alaska Graph?”
WGOITAG is a service that the Juneau STEM Coalition is creating with and for Alaska educators and community members. Our goal is to provide strategies and Alaska-based graphs that will be engaging and relevant to students and stimulate them to think and feel deeply, and to communicate clearly. We mimic heavily and gratefully both the NYTimes “What’s Going On in This Graph?” framework and Jenna Laib’s “Slow Reveal Graphs.”
The Why
We believe that these strategies and graphs make it easy to spread stimulating, relevant, and creative data interactions throughout our schools – all ages and subjects. These strategies are truly accessible to all students and help us all move from “What’s the answer?” to “What do you see?” and “What could it mean? What’s your evidence?”
At its most basic, data = information collected through information. Data interpretation has been critical to survival and enjoying life for forever. People have been successfully collecting and interpreting data for tens of thousands of years, long before computers or even written numbers. As educators, we need to provide the opportunities and support for students to become competent and confident as they also learn to collect, analyze and interpret data – in all its forms.
As Alaskans, we’ve all seen that Alaska (and Hawaii and Puerto Rico, etc.) is too frequently not included on maps “of” the United States. As Alaskans, we are also aware of how vast and varied our state is – geographically and culturally – and, simultaneously, how little we often know about it and our fellow Alaskans.
We hope that this project begins to address several of these challenges and brings us all together to support both data literacy and a deeper understanding of our state and ourselves.
The Structure
- The first and third Fridays of each month, we’ll post a new graph by 5 pm. During each following week, we invite classes to share their observations, wonderings, connections, and catchy titles with other classrooms across the state (or anywhere else.) The second and fourth Fridays, we’ll post “reveals” that give more background for the content and explain the statistics.
- Graphs will be offered as google slides with accompanying questions, in order to be easily used in classrooms. Graphs will be set up so that teachers can use either the NYTimes “What’s Going On in This Graph?” question sequence (notice, wonder, connection to community, catchy tilted) or the “Slow Reveal” strategy (labels and headings are gradually revealed).
We invite you to visit the NYTimes website for excellent webinars and articles about best practices and how to integrate the strategy into classrooms. Similarly, the SlowRevealGraphs website also has superb examples and resources for how and why to use that strategy.
We welcome your questions, suggestions, input and help. Use the google form to make a submission of a specific graph or to recommend a topic. Or, just email us at juneaustemcoalition@gmail.com.