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了解方式的代表性严重不足。为了应对这一挑战，我们建议举行一次面对面的会议，以获得跨学科和世界观的理解。这次拟议聚会的目的是促进包括倡议的目标，即通过探索与文化相关的生物仿生途径，鼓励更多的土著学生进入STEM领域，促进STEM企业变得更具包容性。我们认为这次会议是在生物仿生学、传统生态知识(TEK)和土著社区之间建立协同作用的多年合作的第一阶段。土著学生在STEM的入学率很低，这是因为STEM完全植根于西方科学，几乎不承认土著的认识方式，课程与他们的生活经验的联系也很有限。为了解决这种低代表性的问题，我们假设仿生学，一种新兴的STEM学科，模仿自然创造可持续的设计，可能会吸引土著学生。生物仿生学承认与自然有着深刻的尊重和关系的多重科学根源，其中许多与土著人民的传统生态知识(TEK)相同。我们建议召开一次会议，让仿生学成为西方和本土知识之间的桥梁，提供一条途径，扩大对什么是有效科学的学术理解，从而让更多的土著学生参与到更广泛的STEM领域，并变得更具包容性和整体性。这次会议的基础是建立在与土著领导的规划委员会的互惠和关系的基础上的知识联合生产的道德框架，并侧重于沙漠生态系统的地方性知识。我们的目标是扩大环境问题的解决方案，并通过双眼观察来治愈生态系统--一种用一只眼睛看世界，另一只眼睛通过西方镜头看世界的方法，创造一个更全面、更包容的视野。该项目由美国国家科学基金会的埃迪·伯尼斯·约翰逊在全国工程和科学领域未被充分代表的发现者社区学习社区(INCLUDE)倡议资助，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.