Abstract
This study centers on ways in which American Indian and Alaska Native students and their teachers in selected communities made use of local wisdom and heritage ethnomathematics and ethnoscience practices in STEM education. It analyzes a representative sample of individual student interviews on science instruction—18 from the sites in Alaska and 18 from the sites in the Southwest. This sample includes the range of grade levels involved in the research and fairly balanced a mix of males and females. The full interviews tapped students’ attitudes toward science, their perspectives on STEM instruction in their own classrooms, and their perceptions of links between STEM instruction and knowledge and practice situated within their cultural communities. Through this iterative process, we identified response patterns that could be characterized as themes or issues that can inform future efforts to design STEM instruction in Indigenous contexts. What is learned should point to the kind of preparation teachers need to design and implement STEM instruction in such settings.
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Acknowledgments
The preparation of this paper was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation to WestEd (NSF-DRL-0529639). The findings and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency. We also acknowledge the wisdom and guidance of the classroom teacher participants, elders, educators, and other stakeholders: Dorothea Adams, Dora Andrew-Ihrke, Sperry Ash, Benjamin Atencio, Steve Babcock, Raymond Barnhardt, Loren Begay, Carol Brewer, Pauline Chinn, Anya Dozier-Enos, Brenda Drader, Claireen Espinoza, Charleen Fisher, Eugenia Grammer, Linda Green, Sarah James, Alberta Jones, Brenda Jones, Loretta Jones, A. Oscar Kawagley, Patricia Kessler, Eleanor Laughlin, Louise Lockard, Rosemarie Lujan, Angela Lunda, Dawn Marias-Quamahongnewa, Marie Marias, Marie Martinez, Tina Martinez, Kathleen Meckel, Sheryl Meieroto, Nola Miller, Dolly Narnajo, Rose Naranjo, Lydia Nelson, Bryan Neubert, Carmen Oelkers, Elizabeth Parent, Rosalinda Quintanar, Robin Rota, Danielle Richards, David Sanchez, Joy Simon, Bob Sloyka, Mark Sorensen, Randy Thorne, Tom Tomas, Vikki Tomas, Jennifer Thompson, Caroline Tritt-Frank, Marilyn Trujillo, Gilbert Trumbul, Eve Tuck, Frankie Urquhart, Sandra Wilson, and Evelyn Yanez.
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Nelson-Barber, S., Trumbull, E., Sexton, U., Johnson, Z. (2023). Indigenous Rural Students’ Attitudes and Perceptions About Ethnoscience in STEM Instruction. In: Chinn, P.W.U., Nelson-Barber, S. (eds) Indigenous STEM Education. Sociocultural Explorations of Science Education, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30451-4_13
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