Earth Partnership Indigenous Arts and Sciences (IAS): Centering Indigenous Land-based Learning in Youth and Family Engagement

Proportionally, Native Americans earn fewer undergraduate and advanced degrees in science and engineering than any American minoritized group, and they have the fewest doctoral scientists and engineers in the workforce. One contributing factor is the way STEM is typically taught, which can create a disconnect between home and school cultures, and a clash between identities and worldviews. This project proposes to build on a longstanding collaboration between Tribal and university partners in Wisconsin. The project addresses a need identified by Tribal partners: improving pathways for Native learners to enter Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields and careers to ultimately support the protection of land and water, as well as sustain Indigenous culture, in their regional communities. The partnership will address this disconnect by developing an intergenerational land-based learning plan that will combine Indigenous culture with STEM knowledge and land and water conservation activity. This plan will have components that engage (1) youth ages 12-18 in year-long experiential STEM learning experiences, (2) adult relatives in reclaiming connections to their culture and building an understanding of how their culture intersects with western STEM, and (3) families in seasonal shared learning experiences, like maple sugar making, wild rice harvesting, ice fishing, and foraging. The research will address the questions (1) What is a model of Tribal-university partnership for community land-based learning, that connects TEK and STEM for land stewardship? (2) How do Indigenous language revitalization and cultural revitalization (and the stewardship instructions that they contain) inform land-based learning? (3) How does Indigenous STEM learning engage communities in land and water stewardship, and what are the roles of Tribal members and university allies in supporting this process? (4) What is the readiness, experience, and capacity of Tribal and university project partners to design and implement Tribally-Driven Participatory Research (TDPR) effectively, and what research methods and culturally specific methods are being developed via TDPR? The Intellectual Merit of this project lies in its use of Tribally-Driven Participatory Research to make contributions to creating and studying a culturally-sustaining STEM pedagogy that honors and upholds Tribal sovereignty across a number of project elements (e.g., building capacity, data sovereignty, and centering Indigenous leadership). This work will add to the body of literature on how to integrate "Western" science and Indigenous perspectives in informal STEM learning experiences, with a goal of both conveying STEM content and upholding and affirming local Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). The Broader Impacts of this project lie in its potential to encourage Native youth to pursue STEM careers that can benefit the resource and environmental management of their own communities, the preparation it gives to adults and families for supporting their youth in pursuing STEM education and careers, the community-based activities that encourage Tribal partners to conserve and restore natural environments in alignment with Tribal priorities, and the way the project can serve as a model for how to establish or repair relationships between universities and Tribes who occupy the same regions. This Integrating Research and Practice project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing multiple pathways for broadening access to and engagement in STEM learning experiences. 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.