Teaching & Speaking

Winning the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) curriculum design award 3 times

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Popularizing Science, Medicine & Technology Stories

Anne's graduate-level research in the History of Medicine, Science and Technology is frequently featured at Mayo Clinic History of Medicine Society (above), libraries and other community forums.

Teaching Kids’ Science
& Media Labs

Until the digital age, no culture offered children easy access to the tools of knowledge production and dissemination. Even now, the top-down, adult-to-child teaching model prevails.

Not at Story Lab!

Teaching Upside Down
We’ve turned that top-down teaching model on its head. We believe that children possess powerful, insightful and helpful knowledge that adults are too busy to heed, see or honor. And we seek out their exuberantly original work and energy to inform the award-winning curriculum Anne designs.

Rocks and Writing
In Anne's Rock Stories classes and workshops that are a decade-long favorite at the Minnesota Institute of Talented Youth, students in grades 1-4 interrogate Minnesota's very foundation through science labs and workshops using authentic geology specimens, tools and methods. In her Aerobic Newspaper class and workshops, students grades 5-9 report and comment on the world through child-created print and online media.

Everybody learns in Anne's Teaching Up model because everyone communicates and collaborates. All contributions matter in discovery!

Engaging on this meaningful level through 21st century technologies of science and digital media, Anne's students teach adults by producing content in digital and print media on the following topics:

Community news and events
Nature, science, the environment
Health, food, nutrition
Personality profiles--pets, too!
History/Oral histories
Travel guides
Book and movie reviews
Claymations and music
Graphic novels, cartoons, drawings
Editorials

ABOVE Students in Anne's "Chemistry of Taste + Smell" class use nose plugs to isolate taste from olfaction.

ABOVE Students in Anne's "Rock Stories" of Minnesota class test mineral samples, key out fossils and graph results and plan family field trips to study geology.

ABOVE & BELOW In editing workshops, students Teach Up by correcting Anne's work. These pictures show kids editing the prototype of her children's book about living in empathy with all things, "Mira's Big Day of Wonder." They rotated through four themed editing and teaching stations designed to emphasize concepts the main character --Mirabilus Rain McMammal-- embodies: the Empathy Station, Invention Station, History Station, Move Station. Helpfully, they found errors in the secret code worked into the illustrations. Thanks kids! This summer you please edit the revision!

Photo Credit: Minnesota Institute for Talented Youth
ABOVE The fearless journalism students in Anne's Aerobic Newspaper class at the Minnesota Institute for Talented Youth walk two to three hours a day to cover their community beats. They also invent gentle ways to move continuously while writing, drawing, thinking, editing, revising, collaborating with colleagues to improve a story or an illustration. When it rains, we make our own rain gear from plastic bags and duct tape. But first, we have a Rain Gear Fashion Show, pictured above. Then we hit the streets to meet our stories--and our deadlines.
Download and read a PDF issue below of the Cairn Chronicle!

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