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

在科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域，土著学生和土著学习和认知方式的代表性远远不足。为了应对这一挑战，我们建议面对面的聚会，以获得跨学科和世界观的理解。这次提议的聚会的目的是通过探索与文化相关的仿生学途径来鼓励更多的土著学生进入STEM领域，从而进一步促进INCLUDES计划的目标，即催化STEM企业更具包容性。我们将这次会议视为多年合作的第一阶段，旨在建立仿生学、传统生态知识（TEK）和土著社区之间的协同效应。土著学生在STEM中的低入学率归因于STEM只植根于西方科学，很少承认土著的认识方式，以及与他们生活经历的课程联系有限。为了解决这一低代表性问题，我们假设仿生学，一门新兴的模仿自然创造可持续设计的STEM学科，可以吸引土著学生。仿生学承认多种科学根源，其中许多与土著人民的传统生态知识（TEK）相同，具有对自然的深刻尊重和与自然的关系。我们建议举办一次聚会，仿生学作为西方和土著知识之间的桥梁，为扩大对有效科学的学术理解提供途径，从而吸引更多的土著学生参与更广泛的STEM领域，并变得更具包容性和整体性。会议的基础是知识合作生产的伦理框架，该框架建立在互惠和与土著领导的规划委员会的关系之上，并注重基于地方的沙漠生态系统知识。我们的目标是通过两只眼睛的视角来扩展解决环境问题和修复生态系统的方法——用一只眼睛用土著的视角看世界，而另一只眼睛用西方的视角看世界，创造一个更全面、更包容的视角。该项目由美国国家科学基金会（NSF）的埃迪·伯尼斯·约翰逊（Eddie Bernice Johnson）资助，该计划旨在激励和加速协作基础设施建设，以推进和维持系统性变革，扩大STEM的大规模参与。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.