Cultivating Relationships: Partnering with Teachers and Tribes to Integrate Indigenous and School STEM Knowledge

教师很少带着对土著人民、民族的了解或对土著人民如何实践他们与土地和风景的关系的认识方式进入K-12课堂。这一知识差距对土著青年产生了严重影响，他们在教育机会、结业成果和STEM代表方面持续存在差距。为了解决这一知识差距，必须发展教师专业学习，使其在STEM教育中优先考虑部落领导和土著知识。该项目将来自四个部落国家伙伴的跨学科研究人员和专家联系起来，制定和实施一项将土著知识融入STEM教学的在职教师专业证书计划。这一多地点的教师专业发展模式将招收西部农村四个不同土著地区的K-12教师参加为期12个月的证书课程，该课程将土著科学、人与自然系统的耦合以及土地教育理念结合到一个体验式学习周期中，并对与土地进行的本地和广泛的学习进行研究。参与的教师将获得关键知识，以解决认识论的多样性和经验工具，这些工具对于解决土著和农村社区土地和生活方式变化的复杂问题至关重要。该项目将增加关于地方认识论和做法以及国家科学标准在四个具体土著背景下的可转移性的知识，并为部落领导的专业发展扩大空间，以改变教师的课堂实践。该奖项由发现研究预科-12项目(DRK-12)资助，该项目旨在通过研究和开发创新资源、模型和工具，显著提高预科-12学生和教师在科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)方面的学习和教学。DRK-12计划中的项目建立在STEM教育的基础研究和先前的研究和开发工作的基础上，为拟议的项目提供了理论和实证证明。该研究将遵循定性的多地点案例研究方法来回答以下问题：在土著、基于地点的土地教育证书计划中，教师如何理解STEM的多种认识论？哪些类型的教师发展活动支持将土著认识论纳入STEM学校实践？教师如何将土著STEM的学习运用到他们的课程和教学选择中？三个主要目标将支持该项目的中心研究问题：1)发展跨站点伙伴关系团队，以统一和现场特定的内容指导教师专业发展的设计；2)为教师实施特定地点的身临其境的STEM学习机会和支持教学理解的综合专业发展证书计划；3)研究课程对教师的影响，即对学习轨迹和课堂教学选择的影响。收集的数据将包括事前和事后调查、基于符号的反思、与教师的小组访谈和谈话圈，以及对教师实践的课堂观察。这项研究将有助于教师教育项目和专业实践的创新，并为K-12创造更公平和更具包容性的陆基STEM教育模式。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。

Teachers rarely come into K-12 classrooms with an understanding of Indigenous peoples, nations, or a sense of how Indigenous peoples practice their ways of knowing in relationship to land and landscapes. This knowledge gap acutely impacts Indigenous youth who experience persistent disparities in educational opportunities, completion outcomes, and STEM representation. To address this knowledge gap, it is imperative to develop teacher professional learning that privileges tribal leadership and Indigenous knowledge in STEM education. This project connects interdisciplinary researchers and experts from four tribal nation partners to develop and implement an in-service teacher professional certificate program that integrates Indigenous Knowledge into STEM teaching. This multi-sited teacher professional development model will enroll K-12 teachers in four different Native-serving regions of the rural West into a 12-month certificate program that combines Indigenous science, Coupled Human and Natural Systems, and Land education concepts into an experiential learning cycle with local and broad study of learning with the Land. Participating teachers will gain critical knowledge to address epistemological diversity and experiential tools central to addressing complex issues of land and lifeway changes in Indigenous and rural communities. The project will add knowledge about the transferability of local epistemologies and practices and national science standards within four specific Indigenous contexts and expand space for tribal-lead professional development to transform teacher classroom practice. This award is funded by the Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) which seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects.The research will follow a qualitative multi-site case study approach to answer these questions: How do teachers make sense of multiple STEM epistemologies during an Indigenous, place-based, land education certificate program? What types of teacher development activities support the inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies in STEM school-based practices? In what ways do teachers apply learning from Indigenous STEM into their curricular and pedagogical choices? Three main objectives will support the project’s central research questions: 1) Development of cross-site Partnership Teams to guide design of teacher professional development with unifying and site-specific content; 2) Implementation of site-specific immersive STEM learning opportunities for teachers and a wrap-around professional development certificate program to support pedagogical understanding; 3) Research into the impact of curriculum for teachers, i.e., on trajectories of learning and pedagogical choices in the classroom. Collected data will include pre- and post-surveys, symbol-based reflections, group interviews and talking circles with teachers, and classroom observations of teacher practice. The research will contribute to innovations in teacher education programs and professional practice and create more equitable and inclusive Land-based STEM education models for K-12.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.