Tells the author's story of how she and her husband ventured to Alaska during the Depression to teach and work with the Eskimos

Just as the Alaska spawning salmon swim upstream, so did this single woman swim against the current of a society that expected her to fit the mold of wife and mother. When this rite of passage eluded Anna Bortel, she did not bemoan her singlehood. Instead, in 1954, this young school teacher drove up the Alaska-Canada Highway from Ohio to Valdez, where snow was measured in feet and an Easter Egg hunt unheard of. Her curiosity wasn't quelled. She pushed further north to an Athabascan village along the Yukon River. Drafty Quonset huts with freezing oil lines at 50 below zero added to her teaching rigors. Discouraged? Yes. Daunted? No. You'll smile, laugh, and shake your head in amazement as you read these heartwarming, inspiring, and captivating stories of teaching in the Territory of Alaska. www.prescriptionforadventure.com

Drawing upon diverse and specific examples of self-study, described here by the practitioners themselves, this unique book formulates a methodological framework for self-study in education. This collection brings together a diverse and international range of self-studies carried out in teacher education, each of which has a different perspective to offer on issues of method and methodology, including: * memory work * fictional practice * collaborative autobiography * auto-ethnography * phenomenology * image-based approaches. Such ethical issues likely to arise from self-study as informed consent, self-disclosure and crises of representation are also explored with depth and clarity. As method takes centre stage in educational and social scientific research, and self-study becomes a key tool for research, training, practice and professional development in education, Just Who Do We Think We Are? provides an invaluable resource for anyone undertaking this form of practitioner research.

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests. She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuit and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind. Jane Jacobs, Hannah's great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece's remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly. It is more than an adventure story: it is a powerful work of women's history that provides important—and, at times, unsettling—insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settlers’ behaviour toward native communities at the turn of the century.

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests. She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind. Jane Jacobs, Hannah's great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece's remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly. It is more than an adventure story: it is a powerful work of women's history that provides important--and, at times, unsettling--insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settler's behavior toward native communities at the turn of the century. "An unforgettable...story of a remarkable woman who lived a heroic life."--The New York Times