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Calendar in the Sky Webinar #5
You are invited to join a free Calendar in the Sky webinar on Friday, October 26, 2012, at 11am PT/12pm MT/1pm CT/2pm ET.
Title: Living Maya Time / Viviendo el tiempo maya
Presenter: Isabel Hawkins, The Exploratorium & Maria O. Avila Vera, Maya Elder
Date: Friday, October 26, 2012
Time: 11am PT/12pm MT/1pm CT/2pm ET
Duration: 90 minutes
Format: Online Webinar (60 min presentation with 30 min discussion period)
Registration: Please register for this webinar at https://cc.readytalk.com/r/3b1jnw4tqknd
DESCRIPTION:
Living Maya Time / Viviendo el tiempo maya: A Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Website on the Maya Calendar and the Year 2012. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has developed Living Maya Time – Viviendo el tiempo maya – a bilingual website dedicated to highlighting Maya culture and dispelling doomsday myths about the end of the Maya calendar in 2012. The website will launch on Nov. 1, 2012, the first day of Native American Heritage Month and fifty days before the Maya Long Count calendar completes a 5,125-year cycle on December 21, 2012. During the webinar the website producer, Exploratorium astronomer Isabel Hawkins, in collaboration with Yucatec Maya elder Maria Avila Vera, will showcase several resources of the website for informal educators and middle school teachers. The presentation will focus on the Maya people's contemporary knowledge of the movements of the Sun and the stars, and how the Maya still use a sophisticated calendar system based on astronomical observations to organize their lives in concert with the cycles of the cosmos. The presenters will share contemporary Maya cultural practices and their connection to the Sun and the agricultural cycle of corn. The webinar will showcase the voice of the Maya, captured in the bilingual website through a series of videotaped opinions on the meaning of the year 2012. The presenters will also showcase several interactive tools contained in the Living Maya Time website, including Maya math, a Maya calendar converter, and a hieroglyph revealing tool. [The project received support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, which is administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.]
PRESENTER BIOS:
Isabel Hawkins, Ph.D., is a bilingual and bicultural native of Córdoba, Argentina. Dr. Hawkins received her Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1986. She worked for 20 years at the University of California at Berkeley on several NASA satellite projects, and as the Director of Science Education at the Space Sciences Laboratory. Currently, she is Astronomer & Project Director at the San Francisco Exploratorium. Dr. Hawkins produced the bilingual (English and Spanish) website “Living Maya Time: Sun, Corn, and the Calendar” for the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian with launch date November 1, 2012. The website features the astronomical foundations of the Maya calendar. Her work focuses on broadening access to science and enhancing participation by all communities through the appreciation of the cultural roots of science.
María O. Ávila Vera is a Maya elder born in Xul and raised in Peto, Yucatán, México. She is a steward of the traditions of her ancestors using her life experience and native language, Yucatec Maya. Mother of eleven children, she shares her time between Petaluma, CA, and Mérida, Yucatán. She actively researches the knowledge of the Maya by capturing the oral tradition of her people and sharing native knowledge with her family, her friends, and her community. Over the past six years, she has collaborated with the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in México, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory’s Center for Science Education, as well as the Cosmic Serpent and Native Universe projects funded by the National Science Foundation. She is a member of the elder advisory council of the Indigenous Education Institute, Friday Harbor, WA. Doña Maria Ávila Vera serves as a bridge between native and western ways of knowing in museums, the classroom, and community settings.
ABOUT CALENDAR IN THE SKY:
Calendar in the Sky is a NASA-funded project led by UC Berkeley to engage the American public, particularly Latino audiences, in NASA science (space exploration, astronomy, planetary and Earth sciences, etc.) via the broad interest in Maya culture. We are conducting a series of webinars for educators on NASA science and Maya astronomy. Following the webinars, attendees will be given access to private discussion boards on the project website (www.calendarinthesky.org) where they can discuss the webinar topics and exchange ideas and resources for educational programming with colleagues. The webinars will be recorded and archived on the website. This will be the third webinar in the series.
Please pass this message on to any colleagues you think would be interested in attending.
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Nancy Alima Ali
Coordinator of Education Programs
Center for Science Education
Space Sciences Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley
7 Gauss Way, MC 7450
Berkeley, CA 94720-7450
Phone: 510-643-0012
Fax: 510-643-5660
[log in to unmask]
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu
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