Cultural Engagement and Recruitment of American Indian Males into Computer Science through Computational Linguistics

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The Tribal Colleges and Universities Program includes a focus on increasing the instructional capacity of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) in the sciences, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Desired impacts include attracting more indigenous students and minority male students into programs of study in these fields, thereby addressing underrepresentation on two fronts. The goal of this project is to enhance the understanding of computational linguistics while also increasing the number of declared computer science majors among American Indian males at the participating institutions. The Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network will investigate the effects of collaborative computational linguistics research projects on the recruitment and retention of American Indian males into computer science. Under the proposed activity, QEM will recruit five-person teams (one computer science faculty member and four male computer science students) from six tribal colleges with existing computer science or information technology programs. QEM will host a two-day training and leadership development workshop, during which participating teams will learn basic theory and applications of computational linguistics to indigenous languages. At the workshop, students will collaborate and decide on projects to undertake upon return to their respective campuses. To increase collaboration during the academic year, the cohort of schools will include pairs of tribal colleges whose founding tribes speak each of three languages (Algonquian language family, Navajo language, Sioux language). Participating teams will share their research results, project benefits, and lessons learned at a follow-up workshop, where they also will discuss dissemination, recruitment, and sustainability strategies to expand interest among American Indian males in computational linguistics and computer science overall.