High School Alaska Studies Semester Unit 3 Materials & Problem Solving Booklet

Unit 3 — Governance, Sovereignty & Statehood

Dear friend,

Unit 3 is where Alaska Studies gets real.

This materials set is about governance—not as a diagram or a vocabulary list, but as something people live inside every day. It’s about how decisions actually get made in Alaska when authority overlaps, when timelines are tight, when land matters, and when no option is clean.

In this unit, students work through four future-focused problem-solving scenarios set between 2032 and 2046. Each one is grounded in Alaska’s reality: subsistence and salmon management, borough formation, ANCSA and land stewardship, and energy infrastructure decisions that cut across tribal, local, state, federal, and corporate systems.

These aren’t debate prompts.

They aren’t opinion exercises.

And they definitely aren’t “gotcha” civics.

Instead, students are guided through a full, structured problem-solving process—the same kind of disciplined reasoning used in real policy and planning work. They identify challenges, define an underlying problem, generate and evaluate multiple solutions using clear criteria, develop a realistic SMART civic goal, and reflect honestly on impacts and consequences.

What I love about this unit is that it refuses to lie to students.

It doesn’t pretend governance is simple.

It doesn’t flatten Indigenous sovereignty into a sidebar.

It doesn’t reward loud certainty over careful thinking.

It teaches students how to think clearly when things are complex—and how to act responsibly without pretending they can “fix everything.”

Inside this set, you’ll find:

• four detailed, Alaska-specific future scenarios
• a scaffolded problem-solving structure that supports real civic reasoning
• portfolio-ready materials that work for written, visual, or multimodal responses
• teacher guidance focused on facilitation, systems thinking, and respectful disagreement

This unit isn’t about picking sides.

It’s about learning how decisions get made—and what it costs when they’re made poorly.

If you’re teaching Alaska Studies, civics, or any course that takes young people seriously as future community members, this unit is for you.