Wendy Gorton 

(USA) - Teacher Explorer, Team Member

Wendy is a 4th grade teacher at Hancock Park Elementary in Los Angeles. 

Science and social studies come to life in her classroom, and reading and writing and math are integrated in the larger concepts that are found with those core subjects, such as "Systems." Students maintain class wildlife, create living displays of social studies such as a mission, and participate in numerous service-learning opportunities, such as educating and raising money and awareness for the endangered Channel Island Fox. Wendy tries to couch everything in a real-world context; rather than learn how to use latitude and longitude in a book, students are using handheld GPSes Wendy purchased from a Toshiba America grant to plug in coordinates of a radio-tracked Island Fox that the class have adopted, and then students relay their plotted points back to the National Park service, performing a service to them and also creating knowledge of coordinates and absolute location all at the same time.

Since Wendy became a teacher, she has been scoured the web and science conferences for opportunities to bring the curriculum to life, ways that, as a teacher, she can bridge the standards to a real-life experience for students. Wendy remembers as a child having science and social studies concepts being very out-of-context, and she was never able to anchor those concepts to something authentic, to something worth doing for the students.  Some experiences that directly related to being a Teacher Explorer include Wendy's expeditions with Earthwatch and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Teacher at Sea program. She is in the midst of posting a virtual field trip she created for the latter online for teachers worldwide to use, tying in her field research to curricular standards. Wendy also was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow during the summer of 2007 at an archaeological camp in Wisconsin, and she documented her journey there with real archaeologists and she is now getting ready to begin a unit of study utilzing her authentic experience as an archaeologist as the base. These experiences have prepared Wendy for the documentation she will do as a Teacher Explorer, capturing audio, video, and still footage and writing lesson plans related to the daily travels.

Wendy loves to ski and snowboard and she surfs and mountain bikes competitively. She loves to camp, hike, and backpack extensively and enjoy almost any sport. She thrives in the unknown, and love meeting new people and being put in new situations. "I think it began my freshman year in college when I signed up for a volunteer trip to Costa Rica with 30 undergrads I didn't know, and we roughed it in the jungle for a week documenting howler monkey locations. Since then, you might say I've had a taste of adventure that is hard to quench, but teaching is a field where I can find these opportunities and share them with my students. This experience, combined with my other expeditions, have taught me to be patient and to be very flexible and tolerant of different personalities, and I welcome the harsh conditions and stress that the GoNorth! experience will bring!"

To send Wendy a note of encouragement or to just to say "Hello" while she is on the expedition. Click here >>