EPSCoR helps OneTree continue collaborations, education

Artist and guest instructor Margo Klass, left, and North Pole Middle School math teacher Diane Day share a teachable moment at a birch book-making workshop, an extension of the OneTree teacher training course.

When OneTree got its start in the summer of 2009 in the woods near Fairbanks no one could have predicted the number of people who would be touched by it and the ways that outreach would occur.

“It’s become a beautiful collaboration,” said OneTree coordinator Jan Dawe.

Now, thanks to a $30,000 grant from EPSCoR, the project will reach even more students and teachers. The integrative faculty development grant makes it possible for OneTree to work with classrooms showing what tree rings reveal about tree anatomy and climate. This spring Dawe and her colleagues will reach out to fourteen classrooms with the project’s new focus area.

Since its inception OneTree has been engaging K-12 students in science and art. The concept was that one birch tree cut down in July 2009 would be used for instruction, as well as art and craft creations. Subsequently, seventeen more trees were added. Hundreds of students and dozens of teachers in the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District have participated in OneTree.

The students explore plant anatomy and physiology, the scientific process, and annual events in a birch tree’s life through experiments dealing with budburst, growth rate, and germination. On the art side, artists and K-12 students take the materials from the tree to create leaf rubbings, prints, sculptures, weavings, ledgers, books, containers, musical instruments, and more. These creations will be exhibited to the public throughout the month of April at the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center and the Well Street Art Co.

Jan Dawe at a OneTree hands-on workshop.

A key component of the project has been the monthly workshops for teachers that Dawe and guest instructors have been leading. A recent one featured book-making by Fairbanks artist Margo Klass. She is the lead curator for the OneTree art exhibit that will be at Well Street Art Co., where each of the eighteen trees will be represented by its own book.

Art teachers are involved in other ways, creating art projects around the theme of OneTree. They even held an exhibit of their own individual OneTree projects at teh Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitors Center in August 2010. The show was curated by Karen Stomberg, the school district's art coordinator and director of its art center.

Pearl Creek and Woodriver Elementary Schools have an artist-in-residence, Jesse Hensel, OneTree's lead art educator. In May he will be working at Talkeetna Elementary School, where teacher Karen Mannix has single-handedly started a full OneTree project.

At the Watershed School in Fairbanks, sixth graders mentored second graders in taking leaf measurements as part of Generation OneTree, an intensive experiment led by Zac Meyers, OneTree's lead science educator.

One teacher who has taken OneTree to heart in extraordinary ways is Chris Pastro, language arts and extended learning program teacher at Randy Smith Middle School. She has been instrumental in implementing OneTree into her classroom since the beginning and remains dedicated to all aspects of the project.

It seems the options that OneTree provides are endless, or as Dawe says, “They are open ended.”

That OneTree is “kind of a crazy idea” Dawe doesn’t hesitate to admit.

“All we’re trying to do is connect people to the forest resource base. Then all these people came up with all these ideas."

Dawe explained the unusual approach OneTree brings about:

Usually (outside of OneTree), a woodworker starts out with an idea, and looks for just the right piece of wood (in a wood pile or lumber yard) of a certain size and quality for a project he or she has in mind. But for someone who agreed to make a OneTree book for the exhibit, you may not get assigned a tree that has that quality of wood. Instead, you get whatever material is available from that tree (could be bark, branches, seeds, and/or wood) and you have to figure out what you can make from what that tree provides you.

This difference in approach has totally changed the project that a couple of artists had in mind. Both of these artists say they are much more excited about the project the tree suggested to them, then the original one they were thinking they would make, before they saw their tree. OneTree didn't set out with this as an objective of the project, but it's a nifty outcome--that the limited raw material has forced some artists to re-imagine what they wanted to create, and that they prefer that re-imagined project to the one they originally envisioned!

“The community has really embraced OneTree and made it its own,” Dawe said.

OneTree is part of SNRAS’s Forest Sciences department, where Dr. Dawe is an adjunct professor. It is also sponsored by UAF's Wood Utilization Research and Forest Products programs.

(Photos courtesy of Tanya Mendelowitz)