Rose Urban Rural Exchange, a cross-cultural exchange program housed by the Alaska Humanities Forum, has launched its redesigned website at roseurbanruralexchange.org.
The new site emphasizes multimedia content and unifies all three Rose Urban Rural Exchange (RURE) programs on a single, comprehensive website for the first time.
Fresh content will be uploaded to roseurbanruralexchange.org weekly in the form of program updates and links to news coverage, along with community profiles, video logs, podcasts and mini-documentaries created by participants in the three core RURE programs.
Those are:
• Sister School Exchange, which pairs classrooms of public middle and high school students in cities such as Anchorage with sister school classes in rural communities throughout the state. Each pairing culminates with a small team of cultural ambassadors traveling to their sister school community, where they live with host families, attend school and steep themselves in local culture.
• Take Wing Alaska, a project to assist rural Alaska Native students transition from village high schools to university and professional training in urban settings.
• Educator Cross Cultural Immersion, which provides an opportunity for urban teachers to attend Alaska Native summer culture camps, where they gain insights into Native ways of teaching, learning and living.
Content feeds on the new RURE homepage link directly to dynamic multimedia pages specific to each of the RURE programs: Destination Log (Sister School Exchange); Flight Prep (Take Wing); and Camp Diary (Educator Cross Cultural Immersion).
Although Flight Prep is currently viewable only by Take Wing participants, Destination Log and Camp Diary are open access.
Content uploaded to the website by program participants is periodically rated by RURE staff members. Top-rated content on Destination Log and Camp Diary is easily accessed by clicking on the “Best Of” link in the menu bar near the top of each page.
Recent uploads to Camp Diary include pictures from last summer of educators berry picking and cleaning salmon as part of Camp Sivunniiqvik, a culture camp near Kotzebue, Alaska, and images of ECCI participants helping to raise a totem pole in Hydaburg, Alaska, the southernmost community on Prince of Wales Island. (See image at bottom of this post.)
High School students from Thorne Bay, another small town on Prince of Wales Island, visited Anchorage last December as part of the Sister School Exchange program in which they were matched with students at Robert Service High School in Anchorage. Thorne Bay was founded in 1960 as a logging camp for the Ketchikan Pulp Company. Its population is around 430, or less than one-third the number of students in grades 9-12 that attend Service.
Short videos documenting the Thorne Bay delegation touring the Port of Anchorage and navigating the People Mover public transportation can be viewed on the Destination Log page by clicking on the name of their school and then on “Areas for Exploration.” (Most short videos uploaded by Sister School Exchange delegations are filed under Areas for Exploration.)
Thorne Bay students also posted a short essay titled “You Might Be From Thorne Bay If…” Excerpts: “If girls compare their pocket knives instead of purses. * If you use your saxophone mouthpiece as a goose call. * If you keep your chainsaw in your vehicle to show it off. * If you name your shotgun. * If the tourists keep asking where the town is. * If your dentist comes on a boat. * If you drive your 4-wheeler to the grocery store. * If you can tell who's coming around the corner by the sound of their car. * If nobody uses last names.”
The Service delegates visited Thorne Bay last November. One day they toured the Tongass National Forest with a U.S. Forest Service ranger who showed them old growth forest as well as current logging operations. The ranger gave a history of the logging industry on Prince of Wales Island and detailed modern logging practices that promote sustainability.
The students later described on camera how their perceptions of logging had shifted. Their discussion points exemplify the overall goal of RURE, which is to strengthen relationships between urban and rural Alaskans by promoting mutual understanding and a statewide sense of community.
“It’s always easy for us in Anchorage to take a stance on logging and be like, “Well, we shouldn’t log because we want to protect the forests,’” says one student. “But when you come here and see how important it is for them to actually make a living and how much we actually need timbers, and the wood that’s produced here, it’s harder to just say, “We should stop logging.”
The video documenting the Service students’ visit to Tongass National Forest and their subsequent discussion of logging can be viewed on the new RURE website here.
