Using Photographs to Document Change

Engage

20 minutes

Remind students of the activity comparing photos of Alaska glaciers. Discuss the types of changes they were able to observe by looking at the photos. Tell students they will try to use local photos to document change.

Display the photos collected from the interviews. Ask the students to analyze the photos for landscape and/or vegetation scenes or backgrounds.

If there is not a good supply of photos, students can ask family and relatives for old photos. If there is a local newspaper, museum, or agency that might have old photos, students can try to obtain more from one of these sources. Alaska’s Digital Archives may also have historic photos of your community and surrounding areas.

Explore

60-90 minutes 

Enlist volunteers to assist with the field portion of this activity. Students will need to go to the area where the photo was taken and try to determine exactly where the photographer was standing when they took the photo. Students can take a photo in the same place or as close as possible. If cameras are not available, students can make a sketch or drawing of the area in the photo. Date and location of each site should be recorded.

Explain

30-60 minutes

Print all photos taken by the students. Place the new photos side by side with the old photos, and ask students to analyze them for changes, using the Photo Comparison Worksheet , similar to the one used in Investigation 2. This worksheet is a Venn diagram. Explain that students should complete the section at the top, then list the common features of each photo in the middle, and note the differences in each of corresponding sections. Finally, they should note the major changes at the bottom of the page. For each photo, they should determine what caused the change.

For example, in some photos, the only change might be that the trees and bushes are larger and/or taller. The reason is that they grew over time. If a change shows a river with a different path, erosion or a flood might be the cause of the change. Caution students not to automatically conclude that any of the changes are due to a changing climate. This may be a good opportunity to review the earlier discussion about how weather is different than climate.

Elaborate

30 minutes

Ask students to choose a set of photos. If there are not enough photo sets for each student to have one, group students in pairs.

Ask them to predict how a photo taken in the same location 50 years from now might look. Ask them to either sketch this future scene, or describe it in detail on paper. They must state possible reasons for the changes.

Evaluate

If your photos revealed significant changes, you might share these with the community, allowing students to describe the process, and the possible reasons for the changes.

Ask students to respond to the following questions in their science notebooks:

• What changes in our local environment have taken place over the last 50 years?

• How are these changes affecting our local environment?

• How do changes in our physical environment affect our ecosystems?