Calvin to Offer Free Educational Sessions About Petra

January 11, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Like the silver screen's Indiana Jones, local archaeologist Neal Bierling is
also a school teacher.

So the upcoming Petra: Lost City of Stone exhibition, scheduled for April to
August 2005 at Calvin College, is exciting to him on a number of levels, one of
which is the opportunity it will provide for education for local educators and
students.

And to help local teachers learn more about Petra: Lost City of Stone,
Bierling has scheduled five educators' sessions in January and February, where
he will explain how teachers and their students can benefit from the exhibit at
Calvin.

"We want teachers," he says, "to know how they can bring their classes to
Petra and how they can bring Petra to their classroom. We want educators and
their students to be able to fully experience Petra."
 
The free educators' sessions are scheduled for January 15, 22 and 29 as well
as February 5 and 12. Each session will be the same, so local teachers need
only attend one. Teachers need to pre-register by calling (616) 526-7800.

Bierling, a Calvin College graduate who has worked for years as an
archaeologist at Petra, Jordan, says that the 90-minute sessions will do two
things. First, teachers will learn more about the actual Petra: Lost City of
Stone exhibition coming to Calvin in April 2005. That exhibit will sprawl over
7,000 square feet of the Prince Conference Center at Calvin (a building that
will be significantly renovated as it moves from a conference center to a
museum-quality facility) and will feature 200 exceptional objects, including
stone sculptures and reliefs, ceramics, metalwork, artworks in various media
and other priceless artifacts. All are on loan from collections in Jordan and
throughout Europe, and many are on display in the United States for the first
time in history.

Second, the sessions will educate teachers about the many educational
resources available and a soon-to-be released virtual reality tour of the city
of Petra in Jordan. Both resources, Bierling says, will offer much to area
teachers.

The website, for example, includes educators' guides, activities such as
sifting screens, shoebox archaeology and papyrus making, as well as all kinds
of inside insights into the world of archaeology. All of the lesson plans and
activities include documentation as to how the lesson or activity meets the
Michigan curriculum standards.

The virtual reality tour is being produced by Phoenix Data Systems, a company
run by Neal Bierling and his son Joel. The amazing tour includes satellite maps
of Jordan and allows the user to explore Petra, the ancient city of the
Nabataeans, via Phoenix Data Systems' PanoReality.com technology with over 600
fully interactive photographs providing a full 360 by 360 degree field of
view.

The sessions also will allow teachers to learn more about continuing education
units (CEUs) available via the Petra exhibition, including through planned
lectures, a special four-week Calvin history course on Petra and more. "Petra
is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for local teachers and school children,"
says Bierling. "We want to be sure that we do everything we can to help people
understand the exhibition and how they can plug into it."

The exhibition is organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and American Museum
of Natural History, New York under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania
Al-Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, with air transportation
generously provided by Royal Jordanian.

To register for the educators' sessions, call (616) 526-7800 option #5.
 
See www.calvin.edu/petra for more details.

-end-
Received on Tue Jan 11 16:14:02 2005