One year ago, these students from this Alaskan high school received lessons of anatomy, live skills, and cultural traditions in one of the most unusual ways.
Some of these lessons apparently included butchering the carcass of a moose. Around 30 students from the Chugiak High School deboned, divided, ground, and packed the moose during a World Discovery Seminar class.
Brian Mason, their teacher, gave the interactive lesson on the moose’s anatomy and taught them how to process around 90 kg of meat. He also hunted for the moose himself.
The school cooked and ate most of the meat and donated the rest.
“We Help Students Become Multifaceted Thinkers”, Claims the School
The school’s program involved 125 students and 4 teachers that enabled learning and activities for making their students multifaceted thinkers.
For the purposes of the seminar, the students did experiential learning when they butchered the moose which Mason delivered on his pickup truck.
For the professor, learning about the anatomy from diagrams and textbooks is doable; however, he believes that getting the hands on an animal is the most important part of the science.
How Did the Professor Catch the Moose?
The professor killed the moose using a Cultural Educational Harvest permit given by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game that allows game kill for educational purposes.
The organization issues up to 40 such permits per year, mostly to schools and villages. Most of them are for killing moose, but also for black bears, deer, and mountain goats, explains Tim Spivey from the organization.
Mason had to shoot a moose without antlers that wasn’t a calf or a cow with a calf. He submitted a report that described the animal and the hunt.
Within 30 days of the hunt, he also had to submit another report with details about the educational or cultural activities that happened with the animal’s carcass.
According to one of the students who participated in the seminar, the program gave a better insight into the subjects they study.
She also added that they do a lot of things with more interaction than other classes and that it’s more fun for learning, rather than just reading it from a paper.
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