Tribal College and University Climate Change Course Series

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The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), which is comprised of 36 tribally-controlled colleges and universities (TCUs) in the United States, in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is developing an Indigenous Geosciences course series that integrates traditional American Indian knowledge and perspectives on climate, weather, and water with state of the art Geoscience tools and practices. The series is focused on climate, weather, and water processes and issues that are particularly relevant to American Indian communities and tribal lands and is expected to provide a foundation for TCU students interested in climate change. The courses are being designed to provide American Indian and other students the opportunity to gain a thorough understanding of the physical, cultural, and technological issues associated with climate change and the mitigation of its effects on the earth and its people. The course series has two components. The first is a semester-long undergraduate climate change science course taught from the perspective of the traditional ecological knowledge held by Native peoples of North America. The second is an Indigenous-based research practicum using Cyberinfrastructure-enabled access to Geosciences data, instrumentation and computing resource that provides an opportunity for Tribal College students to practice state-of-the-art e-Science, in collaboration with elders, community members, and research mentors at NCAR. The project is being evaluated using the NSF-supported Indigenous Framework for STEM evaluation and should result in a program that can be used throughout all TCUs and other institutions of higher education.