Conference: NSF INCLUDES: Gathering to Create Culturally Relevant Biomimicry Pathways to STEM for Indigenous Students

Indigenous students and Native ways of learning and knowing are vastly underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields. To address this challenge, we propose an in-person gathering to gain an understanding across disciplines and worldviews. The purpose of this proposed gathering is to further the INCLUDES Initiative goal of catalyzing the STEM enterprise to be more inclusive by exploring culturally relevant biomimicry pathways to encourage more Indigenous students into STEM fields. We see this gathering as phase one of a multi-year collaboration that builds synergies between biomimicry, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and Indigenous communities. Low enrollment by Indigenous students in STEM is attributed to STEM’s exclusive roots in Western science with little acknowledgment of Indigenous ways of knowing, along with limited curricular linkages to their lived experiences. To address this low representation, we postulate that biomimicry, an emerging STEM discipline of emulating nature to create sustainable designs, could attract Indigenous students. Biomimicry recognizes multiple scientific roots, many shared with Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of Indigenous peoples, of having a deep respect and relationship with nature. We propose a gathering where biomimicry acts as a bridge between Western and Indigenous knowledges, providing a pathway to broaden academic understanding of what constitutes valid science, thus engaging more Indigenous students in a wider array of STEM fields and becoming more inclusive and holistic. The gathering is based on an ethical framework of knowledge co-production built on reciprocity and relationality with an Indigenous-led planning committee and a focus on place-based knowledge of a desert ecosystem. Our aim is to expand solutions to environmental problems and healing ecosystems through two-eyed seeing –an approach of viewing the world through an Indigenous lens with one eye while the other eye sees through a Western lens, creating a more holistic and inclusive vision. This project is funded by NSF’s Eddie Bernice Johnson Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) Initiative, which seeks to motivate and accelerate collaborative infrastructure building to advance and sustain systemic change to broaden participation in STEM at scale. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.