Lead
Dog Librarian on the Trail Lead
Dog Librarian on the Trail Deborah Svenson
I am sitting
in a dog sled on a sunny 20-degree day in downtown
Anchorage, Alaska. On the starting line of the 1999 Iditarod, the announcer
calls out my name and says "and she is a librarian at Forestwood Middle
School in Flower Mound, Texas, and has come to Alaska with her reading teachers
to bring the excitement of the Iditarod back to the students in Texas."
The countdown begins "5, 4, 3, 2, 1. . . Go!" the green light
flashes, and I am off on the greatest adventure of my life.
Along the route of the Iditarod are thousands of cheering fans bundled up in colorful parkas waving signs and banners. I am riding with Harald Tunheim, a teacher from Norway, who is racing in his first Iditarod. In one hand I hold the sled's ice hook and in the other hand, I am waving a large Norwegian flag. Soon we leave the crowds behind and the dogs pull the sled along winding trails where the only the sounds are the rhythmic padding of paws on the snow and Harald's gentle voice talking to his team. I can't believe that four days ago I stepped off a plane from Dallas.
How did a Texas librarian,
two seventh-grade reading teachers,
and a school district webmaster
end up in Alaska for the Iditarod?
The answer is collaboration. Until this Alaskan journey, most of my teacher collaborations involved supplying material for short classroom units, pushing a library cart full of reserved books, and e-mailing useful web sites. I knew I could do much more, and I was ready to try something more challenging. Little did I know that I would end up in a dog sled with a handsome Norwegian musher.
When I became the new librarian at Forestwood Middle School library, I had big plans for all kinds of collaborative projects, but I quickly learned that collaboration needs to come in small steps. It takes time for the teachers to know and to trust the librarian. I made an effort to get out of the library every day to see what my teachers were doing in their classrooms, and I ate lunch in the teacher's lounge several times a week so I could talk with as many faculty members as possible.
From my travels around the school, I knew that the seventh-grade classes read Woodsong by Gary Paulsen and did a unit on the Iditarod in February and March. Mrs. Amy Elliott and Mrs. Lori McKinney, the seventh-grade reading teachers, had wonderful room displays and lesson plans, but they wanted some new ideas for their Woodsong unit. I explained how we could use the Internet to follow the race and talk to other students in Alaska.
When the 1998 race started our computers were on the Iditarod web site for hourly updates, and students followed their musher's progress along the trail. At the end of the unit, Mrs. McKinney and Mrs. Elliott were sitting in the library with me and I said, "This was a great project - it couldn't get any better unless we traveled to Alaska." We all laughed - then we looked at each other and said "Why not? Let's go to the Iditarod." Our Iditarod Dream was born.
I became the Lead Dog for our Iditarod project, and it was my job to figure out how we could get to Alaska in 1999. The first thing I did was what librarians love to do - research. I found out all I could about the Iditarod and Anchorage. I contacted an Iditarod musher, Dewey Halverson, who made school visits with his sled dog, and I arranged for him to visit our school. I used LM_NET to contact other school librarians in Alaska for practical information about what to wear, what to bring, and where to go. Living in Texas did not prepare our team for temperatures of 20 below zero.
I also searched the Internet and professional journals for grants that might provide funds for travel to Alaska and multimedia equipment. Initially our Iditarod plans were vague, but as I wrote the grants, I discovered that grant writing required specifics and focused information. Those applications helped me develop a three-point plan:
Our team did not get many of the grants I applied for - no one wanted to fund our travel to Alaska. We used frequent flyer miles and reduced rate fares for our transportation costs and shared a discounted hotel room. Luckily I did get several small grants that allowed us to buy a digital camera and some videoconferencing equipment. I needed more information on how to set up a videoconference, so I asked our district webmaster, Barbara Friedman, if she could answer some of my questions and set up training for the three of us. She did something even better - she offered to go with us to Alaska and be the "techno-dog" on our team. When Barbara became the fourth member of our team, I felt that we had a perfect mix of skills and leadership abilities to make the trip to Alaska a success.
While Barbara and I were working on the web site, Lori and Amy wrote lesson
plans, put together books of student work, and planned our promotional campaign.
Our next step was to convince our principal, Gary Goldsmith, that we should
go to Alaska. We put together a large notebook with the title "Iditarod
Dreams." It included all the lesson plans, student work samples, e-mail
correspondence with Alaskan teachers, copies of our web site, a list of proposed
Internet activities - it was an impressive collaborative effort. After his initial
shock at our idea, "but you will miss Open House. . .," Mr. Goldsmith
became our champion and took the material to the Lewisville School District
administrators. Our attention to detail paid off and the district gave approval
for our trip. No school funds were used, but the district
did supply substitutes while we were
in Alaska.
Promotion and publicity were important for the success of our trip. We were known as "Team Forestwood" and to build support for our trip, Lori made buttons with a Team Forestwood logo created by Barbara. Amy designed T-shirts for our team, found a faculty member who could get the shirts printed, and sold them to most of the teachers. I contacted local newspapers, television stations, the Sons of Norway, the Norwegian consulate, and e-mailed everyone I knew to tell them about our trip to Alaska. I wrote an article for the school PTA newsletter, wrote to the Iditarod committee, and contacted the newly selected Iditarod Teacher on the Trail. I spent hours on the phone and on web sites gathering information, securing reservations, and making contacts with people in Anchorage.
While on the Iditarod web site, I read about the Idita-Rider Auction. Anyone could bid to ride with a musher for the first day of the race. It sounded interesting, so I looked over the list of racers and noticed a man from Norway named Harald Tunheim. He was a teacher at a high school in the village of Alta, 240 miles north of the Arctic Circle. I was a teacher and my family is Norwegian, so I decided to place a bid on Harald. It would be my once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the Iditarod from the inside. If I rode the trail, I would have much more to tell my students than if I just watched the race along the fence. I would also be able to supply passes for my team members to meet the Iditarod mushers, veterinarians, celebrities, and volunteers who were a part of the race. I did win my bid for Harald on January 29th, and I e-mailed him to introduce Team Forestwood and to offer our help.
In Norway, Harald Tunheim had put together his own group called "Team Tunheim Media," made up of three former students. These students volunteered to fly to Alaska two months early to help their teacher achieve his dream of racing in the Iditarod. The boys of Team Tunheim Media set up a web site, and we linked our site to their web page. We began to share ideas and pictures with our Norwegian counterparts, and soon we had a great collaborative effort between the two teams. Our art students made two large banners for Harald which were carried from Anchorage to Nome, and Harald's students sent him a beautiful appliquéd banner. When we unfurled the Norwegian banner someone had written the message "Fight for Your Right to Party" right in the middle. We knew the Beastie Boys were alive and well in Norway! Once we posted our web site and e-mail address, teachers and students from around the world contacted us. Our Iditarod project quickly became an international collaboration.
Suddenly it was March 2, and we were at the DFW Airport with a Channel 5 NBC TV reporter filming our departure. We took off for Alaska in shock - we had really done it! All that hard work, hours on the Internet, and hundreds of phone calls had paid off - we were going to the Iditarod. We had to face the reality of spending a week together, making all the technology work, and gathering as much information as possible for our students. Now we were actually in Alaska, packed into a small hotel room with mountains of luggage and equipment. How were we going to get along with each other? What if we had conflicts and problems?
In Alaska we learned that collaboration between teachers and librarians is like running a successful dog sled team. You need a strong leader and team members who pull their own weight. Each member of the team has a role to play. Sometimes those roles shift and change, but the whole team has to pull together to win the race. In his book, Alaska Dog Mushing Guide, Ron Wendt says, "Once the dog team is trained and they all work together then the fun begins."
The fun never stopped for Team Forestwood on our Iditarod adventure. Each day we would say, "it can't get any better than this," but the next day would be even more exciting. We met the famous Iditarod winners we'd read about like Jeff King, Martin Buser, Rick Swenson, Doug Swingley, DeeDee Jonrowe, and Susan Butcher. We mingled with a few celebrities who were also Iditarod fans including Amy's "new best friend" Susan Lucci. We shared lesson ideas with teachers who were finalists for the Teacher on the Trail program. We learned about the care of sled dogs from the dedicated veterinarians who volunteered their time to insure that the dogs were happy and healthy. And most of all, we became friends with "our" musher, Harald Tunheim, his beautiful dog team, and his dedicated students Paul, Tor Helge, and Sveinung (Team Tunheim Media).
Our web site (http://www.lisd.net/special/alaska) details our daily activities while we were in Alaska, but behind the scenes it took an amazing amount of work to accomplish our goals. First of all it was cold and we had to wear and manipulate unfamiliar layers of clothing, hats, and boots. I was never without two cameras, a little tape recorder, a notebook, reference books, maps, extra clothing, and a supply of snacks. Physically it was exhausting moving around from place to place. We traveled on city buses to save money and found that bus drivers and passengers were great tour guides offering unique information about Alaska. Everyone we met in Anchorage was helpful and friendly. We got up early every morning and spent the entire day sightseeing or traveling with the Iditarod mushers. At night we came back to write in our journals, work on digital pictures for the web site, and plan for the next day. We had very little time to sleep or eat on this trip.
Without Barbara Friedman, our webmaster, it would have been extremely difficult for me to do all the work on the web site and set up the video conference. Barbara, who calls me the "idea hamster," took my wild ideas and made them work with the available technology. She designed the web site and did research to find out the best way to set up a videoconference. The most difficult part of our plan was the live video conference with our students back in Texas. We used Microsoft NetMeeting and a little webcam. Barbara worked with our network administrators on the technical aspects of the videoconference and loaded the software we would need on my computers. We practiced several conferences before we left for Alaska and thought everything was working well.
After we arrived in Anchorage, we found out that Channel 5 News was going to film our video conference at Forestwood. Suddenly, I had a panic attack - what if it didn't work, and our project fell apart right there on national television! The day before the conference we had arranged with the Regal Alaskan Hotel to use one of their meeting rooms. The room had great light and a stuffed moose as a backdrop. Thirty minutes before the conference was to start (at 6:30 a.m. Anchorage time), we were informed that we couldn't use the room. We raced back to our crowded hotel room, pushed everything on the floor, hung up the banner our art students had painted, borrowed some shop lights from the maintenance man and tried out the camera. The new camera wouldn't work, and it was five minutes until airtime. Luckily we had Barbara who never lost her composure or her ability to solve computer problems. She found the other web cam, changed the software, and we were "Live from Alaska" with 30 seconds to spare. The conference worked out well with good sound and pictures. Our students asked thoughtful questions, and we could see the smiling faces of our administrators in the background. We were proud of ourselves and our school district.
Working on the Iditarod project allowed - or some would say "forced"the reading teachers, Amy and Lori, to learn new technology skills. They had an inside view of the frustrations and difficulties that come with using computers and multimedia. They shared our joy when the technology worked, and they saw the chaos and panic when things didn't go as planned. Being together 24 hours a day forged a bond among team members, and this trip gave the teachers a new understanding of what it means to be a librarian in this digital age.
Once the videoconference was over we could concentrate on our web site. Our Sony Mavica and our Kodak digital cameras worked beautifully. We used Paint Shop Pro as the imaging software to get the pictures ready for the web page. Our constant refrain was, "we'll put you on our web site. . ." While it was easy to take all those great digital pictures, getting them corrected and sized for the Internet took a lot of time - more time than we had in Alaska. Barbara and I are still trying to add pictures to our web page to fulfill all the promises we made to our new friends in Alaska.
Our week in Alaska ended with two exciting days of the Iditarod Race - the start in Anchorage and the restart at Wasilla. We said good-bye to Harald and the team as they raced off towards Nome, then we boarded our train for the trip back to Anchorage and the plane ride to Texas.
We arrived in Dallas on March 8 just as Gary Paulsen, the author of Woodsong, was appearing at a local bookstore. We raced home to unload our Alaskan baggage and take a short nap. We had left Anchorage at 1:20 a.m. and arrived in Texas at 12:30 p.m. Getting to meet Gary Paulsen was the perfect ending to our Iditarod adventure. His book inspired our teachers to make the journey to Alaska, and now we were getting to tell him about our experiences at the Iditarod. He graciously signed our books, posed for pictures, and listened to our stories. We came back home thrilled and exhausted. Coming back to the real world was not easy because the Iditarod was still going on. We were so excited that Harald was racing in 5th place keeping up with all the Iditarod champions. We wanted to be back in Nome to watch the mushers cross the finish line. The boys of Team Tunheim Media sent us e-mails from the Iditarod trail. They did a terrific job of sending pictures and details about every day of the race. If we couldn't be there, at least the e-mails brought us closer to the racers.
Harald eventually came in 19th which meant he did receive enough prize money to get back home to Norway. He was voted Rookie of the Year by the Iditarod Committee, and was featured on cable television on the USA Iditarod special. He returned to Norway in good health and in good spirits. I am sure, if he can find the financing, he will return for another Iditarod Race. Team Forestwood's new motto is: Next Year Nome.
When the race ended, Team Forestwood put together a Power Point presentation and a collection of Iditarod books, dog booties, and photographs to show our students and teachers. We presented our program to the Sons of Norway to thank them for their support. They had supplied us with gifts and Norwegian flags for Harald's team. We will continue to visit local elementary schools to talk about our Iditarod adventures.
It took a lot of work to travel to the Iditarod. I had to collaborate with my teachers, with our technology department, and our school district to make this trip to Alaska possible. I am positive that any school librarian can put together a major collaborative journey with the proper planning, promotion, equipment, and support. I believe educators need to get out of the classroom to experience what Amy Elliott calls "a slice of life." When our reading teachers returned to the classroom, they had firsthand knowledge of Alaska and the Iditarod. They brought a sense of enthusiasm and excitement back to the classroom. Their students were thrilled with the stories, pictures, and videos that the teachers presented to them. Both teachers are revising and adding to their Iditarod unit for next year with the materials they brought back from Alaska.
Librarians and teachers have the ability to make dreams come true when they work together on challenging and unique school projects. Students benefit when teachers bring the real world back to the classroom. I saw a banner at the Iditarod that read, "If you can dream it, you can do it. . .," and that is how our trip to Alaska became a reality - we had a dream and we did it.
Since I've had some time to rest and reflect on our trip to Alaska, I have a few suggestions for school librarians who would like to plan a major collaborative project with their teachers:
I think our school should have a big collaborative project every year. I have
asked for suggestions from the teachers. Who knows, next year we may
be heading to Williamsburg, or Boston,
or . . .? All it takes is a dream and
a librarian.
Deborah
Svenson, librarian, Forestwood Middle School, is already at work planning her
next adventure to Birmingham, Alabama, to trace the path of civil rights worker
in the 1960s. Deborah is shown at right with author Gary Paulsen at a bookstore
back in Plano.
