The Yangtze River flows from the heart of China like an artery, pumping lifeblood in the form of fertile land, trade routes and commercial opportunity to the millions who inhabit its shores.

In the coming months, that river – and the lessons it can teach about culture, economics, geography, ecology and history – will flow through classrooms in eastern Maine thanks to the Yangtze Remembered conference at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, which 20 area educators attended on Thursday and Friday.

The conference, presented in partnership with Primary Source, the Bangor Public Library and the Five College Center for East Asian Studies, centered on Linda Butler’s photography exhibit “Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake,” which captures scenes of everyday life along the river before and after the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

Butler is an Ohio-based artist who has spent time in Maine photographing the Shaker village in New Gloucester. On Friday, she gave an in-depth gallery talk about the Yangtze body of work and the questions it raises about governmental power, the environment and human rights.

“I went to China in the fall of 2000 … and I was very intrigued by what I saw going on along the shores of the river. The river was truly a highway, and it had been for thousands of years – it was the main road,” she told the group. “Over the course of three years of watching, the society had changed to a road economy.”

Those changes were driven by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power project, according to the International Rivers Network. The transformation of valley into reservoir has caused a mass migration to newly built cities on higher ground. After Butler’s talk, teachers used those changes as the basis for one of several curriculum-building exercises.

Each chose a card at random and walked throughout the galleries, searching for one work that best embodied the category – economics, ecology, artistic vision, geography and culture – on the card. They studied the images intently, taking notes before breaking off into small groups to discuss how they would use the photographs as a launch pad for discussion.

Mary Rees-Nutter, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade social studies at Deer Isle-Stonington Elementary School, drew a “culture” card, and chose an image of simply packaged noodles with a rickshaw in the background as a way to engage her students.

“How do these things influence how they really live?” she told her group. “They might see the technology of transportation, they might see the basket, they might see people walking in the background, or see the condition of the road.”

Kal Elmore, a Bangor High School art teacher, responded to the way the noodles in the photograph were packaged.

“It’s a great photo,” Elmore remarked. “It tells a big story.”

“I think my kids would react to the fact that they aren’t totally packaged,” Carolyn Locke, an English and social studies teacher at Mount View High School, said. “When they see noodles, they might think lo mein, but with food, they’d eventually make the whole agricultural connection.”

Those cross-curricular connections are exactly what UMMA’s education coordinator Gina Platt had in mind when she started planning the conference more than a year ago. Though the museum’s educational outreach has historically centered on art for art’s sake, Platt has plans to expand the reach of existing programs.

“In a lot of ways, this ties into the Museums by Mail program [which sends artwork and complementary lesson plans to schools throughout the state],” Platt said. “We’re going to build upon it and really change a few things, develop more thorough lesson plans that would appeal not just to art teachers.”

When the museum booked the exhibit more than a year ago, Platt sought out Ryan Bradeen of Primary Source, which works to help teachers create curriculum with an international focus through seminars, summer courses and study tours. A growing number of teachers in the area have taken part in Asian-focused programs through Primary Source and its affiliates.

“There are similar organizations around the country and we work together,” Bradeen said Friday. “There is a movement to encourage stronger international, global education in American schools. We recognize that Americans really need to know, with ever more pressing urgency, how to engage with countries outside the United States.”

Through that partnership, Platt was able to connect with a panel of Maine-based experts in Asian culture. Thursday’s program featured a talk by Bob Sargent of Sedgwick, a former diplomat who organized an April exhibit of his father’s historical photographs of interior China at the Bangor Public Library. Margaret Maurer-Fazio, an associate dean and economics professor at Bates, also spoke Thursday. She has a research background in Chinese labor market developments and incorporates Asian economic studies into her curriculum. Friday afternoon, a lecture by Bowdoin professor Nancy Riley, a sociologist who has researched family, gender and population in China, rounded out the mix.

In addition, the conference featured a panel of local educators who traveled to China – including a tour of the Yangtze – last summer during a trip organized by the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia. William Murphy, who teaches advanced placement global studies and advanced placement American experience at Belfast High School, was in that group.

“When I came back from China, I was so invigorated intellectually by the experience … I wanted to relate everything to China – how can I relate “Beowulf” to China? Or the Puritans?” he asked, jokingly, over lunch on Friday. “I had to get a grip on myself, because it was all I wanted to talk about. I have continued my study of China and incorporated it [where it’s appropriate], but for me, right now, it’s a personal intellectual passion.”

During a quiet moment on Friday, Butler sat on Hannibal Hamlin’s sofa under the rotunda of the Bangor Public Library and reflected on her own intellectual passion for the Yangtze River. When she thinks about the future, her outlook is mixed: During her six trips to the region, the resilience and thirst for knowledge of the people she met inspired hope. But widespread corruption, industrial pollution and a lack of freedom of the press temper her optimism.

Much of what drew her to the Three Gorges will be covered by water when the reservoir reaches its full depth in 2008. Some of what she loved will live on in her work. The rest is a bit less tangible.

“I think the photos captured the river,” she said, pensively. “The movement is something I have to remember – the crowd of people around it. The conversations with people, the actual humans I met, that, one has to carry in one’s soul, one’s memory.”

Resources for educators

“Yangtze Remembered: The River Beneath the Lake,” photographs by Linda Butler, through June 30, University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St., Bangor, www.umma.umaine.edu.

Primary Source, Maine program office: 47 Main St., Suite 210, Bangor, 942-7146, maine@primarysource.org.

Five College Center for East Asian Studies: Smith College, Northampton, Mass., (413) 585-3751, www.smith.edu/fcceas/.

National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, (through Five College Center for East Asian Studies), www.NCTAsia.org