Bringing The Amazon Rainforest To The Classroom (Green Teacher Webinar)

In honor of Earth Day, Green Teacher & Amazon Aid Foundation are bringing the wonder of the rainforest to the classroom. In this special series, we will unite art and science in engaging sessions that aim to educate students about the Amazon rainforest and its impact on the global environment.

Amazon Aid and their extraordinary community of experts will stimulate young minds in a series of interdisciplinary lessons that develop a rich understanding of the Amazon rainforest while supporting various learning styles, promoting literacy, and fostering critical thinking skills. Lesson plans support existing mandated curricular requirements, providing teachers with an innovative approach to fulfill their districts’ standards-based goals.

The Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point, beyond which it will lose the ability to sustain itself. To save it, we need all hands on deck. We hope you will join us for this unique opportunity to learn about the wonders of the Amazon and the solutions needed to protect it.

Attendees will have free access to Amazon Aid’s award-winning documentary film River of Gold along with a diverse suite of standards-aligned lesson plans that complement the film and are built to engage students in learning and problem solving, from the rainforest to their own backyard.

Presenters:

Miles Silman is a professor of Biology at Wake Forest University and is the Director of the Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. His primary interests are community composition and dynamics of Andean and Amazonian tree communities in both space and time. The lab’s current research focuses on combining modern- and paleoecology to understand tree distributions and plant-climate relationships in the Andes and Amazon. The work is focused on the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes and the adjacent Amazonian plain, with a particular emphasis in distributions along environmental gradients, be they in space or time, and includes both empirical work and modeling. Our main study site now is a three-km altitudinal transect from tree line to the Amazon plain in SE Peru, and we have 27 years of experience in the western Amazon and Andes.

Christina T Miller is the lead consultant of Amazon Aid’s Cleaner Gold Network and a sustainable jewelry specialist who encourages leadership in positive social change and environmental protection. First trained as an artist, she brings creative problem solving to her work on gold supply chains, jewelry, and community organizing for Amazon Aid Foundation. Miller is the founder and lead consultant of Christina T. Miller Sustainable Jewelry Consulting. The company provides strategy, guidance, and education on responsible sourcing and sustainability for the jewelry industry, including jewelry brands and not-for-profits. As co-founder and former director of Ethical Metalsmiths, Miller worked to create a community of individuals committed to responsible materials sourcing by raising awareness of problems needing attention and working to address them. In 2018 she co-launched Better Without Mercury / Mejor Sin Mercurio, a mercury cleanup and site restoration project at the Gualconda gold mine in Colombia with the mine manager, Rolberto Alvarez. Miller holds an MFA in jewelry and metalsmithing from East Carolina University.

Jon Cox is president of the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER Foundation, aceer.org) and an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Delaware. He serves as a Board Member of the Dorobo Fund for Tanzania, is a 2014 National Geographic Explorer, and Full Fellow of the Explorers Club. Cox has directed twenty-three photographic study abroad programs across the globe including destinations to Antarctica, Vietnam, Cambodia, Tanzania, Australia, Tasmania, Argentina, and Peru. He co-authored a book titled, Ancestral Lands of the Ese’Eja: The True People, and co-created a traveling exhibition to accompany this project titled, The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread that toured across the United States. Cox also co-authored Hadzabe, By the Light of a Million Fires with an accompanying traveling exhibition titled, Hadzabe: Roots of Equality. Cox is currently working with the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware on a cultural mapping and land restoration project supported by the Delaware Humanities, University of Delaware, and the National Geographic Society. His ongoing project titled ARRIVALS: What’s Left Behind, What Lies Ahead, is a collaborative multidisciplinary project recording and disseminating the stories of refugees and immigrants that are living in Idaho and the Native Americans that have been displaced from their ancestral lands. Cox’s most recent work funded by the National Institute of Health titled, PhotoVoices in Healthcare: Connecting through Photography aims to train health care clinicians in Malaysia through photographic story sharing. Cox will begin a collaborative project documenting the Prairie Pothole Region in North Dakota and surrounding Indigenous communities in summer 2022. This project is supported by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation.