Historically, Native American students are underrepresented at the undergraduate and graduate level in STEM disciplines. Native American students face obstacles in their undergraduate educational environment, including cultural and academic isolation, negative stereotypes, and low expectations, all of which contribute to lower levels of motivation and performance. To overcome these obstacles, culturally responsive education is vitally important to increase the academic success of Native students. At Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC), a tribal college, we have developed unique and innovative culturally responsive problem-based learning (PBL) units that are integrated into the Tohono O’odham Himdag (“life-way”) to increase student success in science and to prepare students to face current and future challenges using both 21st-century knowledge and traditional knowledge. The culturally responsive PBL units provide a culturally rich, high context authentic learning environment which is an important factor for promoting success in Native students. The PBL units also empower students to make unique connections between Western Science and Indigenous knowledges. This approach is an antidote to the deficit model which only recognizes knowledge from European/Western societies and instead promotes transformational learning which values multiple perspectives, removes hierarchical frameworks for knowledge thereby empowering Indigenous students as legitimate knowledge-holders.
Results/Conclusions
Results confirm an improvement in student learning of ecological principles as well as increased understanding of the cultural values, attitudes toward science, and integration of learning into daily life. Based on these results, we are currently implementing culturally responsive, problem-based learning based throughout our science program in a project entitled “Pathways to Indigenous STEM”. Our program seeks to increase the diversity of knowledge as well as diversity of professionals in the sciences. Diverse professionals not only benefit their communities, but also benefit society with their culture-based knowledge, motivation, and skills that bring unique perspectives to problem-solving that are critical in today’s global society. Although the PBL units are culturally specific to TOCC, the concepts for integrating science into a traditional cultural knowledge base can be applied across other minority-serving academic institutions.