Cultivating Relationships: Partnering with Teachers and Tribes to Integrate Indigenous and School STEM Knowledge

Teachers rarely come into K-12 classrooms with an understanding of Indigenous peoples, nations, or a sense of how Indigenous peoples practice their ways of knowing in relationship to land and landscapes. This knowledge gap acutely impacts Indigenous youth who experience persistent disparities in educational opportunities, completion outcomes, and STEM representation. To address this knowledge gap, it is imperative to develop teacher professional learning that privileges tribal leadership and Indigenous knowledge in STEM education. This project connects interdisciplinary researchers and experts from four tribal nation partners to develop and implement an in-service teacher professional certificate program that integrates Indigenous Knowledge into STEM teaching. This multi-sited teacher professional development model will enroll K-12 teachers in four different Native-serving regions of the rural West into a 12-month certificate program that combines Indigenous science, Coupled Human and Natural Systems, and Land education concepts into an experiential learning cycle with local and broad study of learning with the Land. Participating teachers will gain critical knowledge to address epistemological diversity and experiential tools central to addressing complex issues of land and lifeway changes in Indigenous and rural communities. The project will add knowledge about the transferability of local epistemologies and practices and national science standards within four specific Indigenous contexts and expand space for tribal-lead professional development to transform teacher classroom practice.

The research will follow a qualitative multi-site case study approach to answer these questions: How do teachers make sense of multiple STEM epistemologies during an Indigenous, place-based, land education certificate program? What types of teacher development activities support the inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies in STEM school-based practices?  In what ways do teachers apply learning from Indigenous STEM into their curricular and pedagogical choices? Three main objectives will support the project’s central research questions: 1) Development of cross-site Partnership Teams to guide design of teacher professional development with unifying and site-specific content; 2) Implementation of site-specific immersive STEM learning opportunities for teachers and a wrap-around professional development certificate program to support pedagogical understanding; 3) Research into the impact of curriculum for teachers, i.e., on trajectories of learning and pedagogical choices in the classroom. Collected data will include pre- and post-surveys, symbol-based reflections, group interviews and talking circles with teachers, and classroom observations of teacher practice. The research will contribute to innovations in teacher education programs and professional practice and create more equitable and inclusive Land-based STEM education models for K-12.