Welcome to our video, “Towards Increasing Native American Engineering Faculty.” It is a brief snapshot of questions we focus on in a collaborative study by Oklahoma State University and the University of Minnesota. We have completed data collection and are currently analyzing project data. In this video we describe some findings including barriers and supports for individuals who identify as Native American who are engineering students or engineering faculty. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF EAGER EEC1743329/1443572).

We hope you watch it, and comment and make suggestions on the questions we ask. To begin:

· What do you think is the most important strategy to help Native American students consider engineering or the engineering faculty?

· If you are a faculty member in engineering or another STEM area, what led you to become and persist as a faculty member? What do you like most?

· Why do you think it is important for Native Americans to become engineers and engineering faculty members?

We especially look forward to your comments and questions, and also your vote. Our teams also hope to watch others’ videos, network and learn about your projects.

Sherri Turner, Ph.D., Associate Professor and PI, University of Minnesota

Sue C. Jacobs, Ph.D., Professor and P.I., Oklahoma State University

Boozhoo!  As an Ojibwe person and more than 30 years of working with Indigenous peoples in higher education, I have become to understand that too often we are asked to check our culture at the door despite the fact that our ancestors have many millennia of scientific and engineering experience and knowledge.  However, in recent years western science has become more open to acknowledging that inclusive science is often better science.  I think Native students often do not connect with the western scientific curriculum that does not have relevance for them as a people or communities. Our ancestors respected mother earth, not exploited it.  Also, they helped nature to evolve naturally rather than forcing irreversible changes to accommodate our very short existence.   

Awesome research! It will be very interesting to unfold the various factors, strategies, and resources to promote Native American students towards future career in academia. 

Mark, Excellent post. Inclusive science;respecting nature and indigenous values are increasingly critical for our planet and world. Rather than asking culture to be checked at the door as is done too often, I believe we need to find better ways of faciitating young people finding ways to bring their culture to science and engineering and possibly inspire them to help others do the same.

The training grant at the University of Arizona deserves looking at in this regard; I just viewed.

Sue’s Activity   See Related: Engineering Research / Evaluation Broadening Participation TORRAN ANDERSON University of Arizona    

Indigenous Food, Energy, and Water Security and Sovereignty (Indige-FEWSS)

NSF Awards: 1735173

 

This is such an important study. There is some higher ed/pedagogy research that suggest that teaching approaches that integrate arts and humanities into STEM courses lead to positive educational outcomes (higher level of engagement, critical thinking, and communication skills) as well as higher retention and graduate rates. Perhaps if engineering learning is more contextualized and students can see themselves in the process of learning, they'd be more inclined to consider engineering/academic engineering as a career pathway. I also wonder if there are other disciplines in the STEM fields that we can learn from. Certainly no one field is doing a great job but I wonder if there is an opportunity to collaborate with other disciplines to find promising practices to broaden participation. 

Excellent video to spark discussion around Native Representation in STEM! I would be interested to read articles or see more presentations on what the project has discovered and how they are moving the STEM education discussion into broader arenas. 

This is a great video! As an international student, I would love to share my ideas on this question below. 

What do you think is the most important strategy to help Native American students consider engineering or the engineering faculty?

I think the crucial things for helping Native American students is to listen to their stories first and try to deeply understand them. There will be so many things that we do not see as non Native American students. I think trying to meet a lot of them to listen to each of her/his story will be helpful to understand who they are and what they need deeply. Also, making solutions together with them will be beneficial to them. Instead of being passive students, they can be also active solutions-makers together with researchers. 

 

Thank you for reading my ideas. 

Rachel Younglong Kim

Rachel, I also agree with you! Listening to iand learning from indigenous people is very important to advance STEM as well as to broaden participation in STEM.

A next step for me after completing this exploratory project will be to better explore the role and nature of mentorship for Native American students.  What role do faculty play? How do near peer opportunities influence pre-college and college students attitudes? We need more nuanced portraits for how STEM interests and identity develop over time.

I am so thankful for the NSF support and for the opportunity to be part of this research team!

Thank you very much for preparing and submitting this video. It describes some crucially important work. Your results will be very important in helping the engineering community specifically, and the larger STEM community think about (and, where necessary, rethink) what they are doing to educate students.

The first thing that struck me after viewing the video was nicely captured in Mark Bellcourt's first sentence in his first post about leaving their culture at the door. We are always trying to figure out the best way to attract students to existing courses and programs and getting them motivated to become interested in what is being offered rather than seriously considering how courses, programs, and majors might be redesigned to place what is being learned in the context of what students see as being important to their own lives and communities. The learning research emphasizes that motivation and relevance are critical factors in promoting learning and retention. There are ways to make programs more community-focused and contextual while providing the kinds of concepts and competencies that professionals in a field consider as essential for success in that field. 

Undergraduate research experiences may be one way to emphasize this connection. And there is ample evidence to show that such experiences can begin in the first year of college, if not sooner. As another example I would point to a project that is featured in a 2015 publication by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum: Report of a Convocation. I was the staff director for that event. The project, the The Rock Art Stability Index, is described beginning on page 46. It is a collaboration between Mesa Community College and the National Park Service. It helps students learn techniques for preserving unique Native American cultural and creative records by classifying their
condition on a numerical scale with a replicable system. While this isn't an engineering course, it illustrates how courses can be restructured to teach the important concepts of a discipline (in this case, Anthropology) while focusing on issues that are important to the students in the course. My opinion is that higher education at large needs to rethink how it can better work with students rather than typically asking them to figure out how to adapt to higher education's current protocols. 

The report to which Irene Ngun refers was published by the National Academies in 2018: 

The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree. 2018. https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24988. She and I both severed as staff for the study.

Your comments are incredibly insightful, and we really need to work on building curriculum and extra-curricular activities around students' interests, values, and cultural beliefs and ways of being. Thank you for sharing these resources.

Thanks for sharing this project.  Mark - I was struck by your comment about 'place-based' and how important that is.  Given how transient the US population is (in general - we move a lot!) and often separated from landscape and place communities are, does the study have any insights for incorporating this aspect into our educational programs/outreach in a more systematic way?

Hello All! My name is Ivory Toldson, professor at Howard University, president of Quality Education for Minorities, and one of the facilitators for the STEM for All Video Showcase. The conversation is off to a great start and I will be chiming in with my own input this afternoon and over the next few days. I'm excited about what we can achieve for the next generation of STEM learners!

We will be at the 2019 ASEE Conference presenting the student findings.  Check us out:

https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/140/registration/view_session?session_id=11261

Great to learn about your project! As part of the Indigenous Food, Energy, Water Security and Sovereignty (Indige-FEWSS) Project we've been collaborating with tribal colleges on Navajo Nation. In April, we visited Navajo Technical University's Fabrication Lab and saw how they are increasing indigenous student interest in engineering through access to top of the line equipment and hands on projects. If you're interested here's a link to their work:

http://digitaltech.navajotech.edu/

 

The projects the tribal college students were doing and their access to state of the art technology was impressive!

Thank you so much,Torran. We will definitely check out the link!

 

Mark and Erin, your comments about place-based could also be community-based, tribe/nation-based, family-based. In interviews with Native American Faculty, many ended up as faculty where they are currently becaue they or family wanted to be closer to home, family, etc. Some talked about being lucky because they never had to leave their place.

Thanks for this good work. Your study will provide a framework for other STEM disciplines. You mention the need for mentors to support students who wish to become a faculty member or who might not realize the options such a career might allow, etc. I wondered if you have any mentor training programs and/or have identified a cadre of folks who might serve a mentors?

Thank you for sharing! I found your video to be both interesting and informative.

Knowing that the cultures within this population can vary significantly depending upon the tribal culture, I am curious to know what efforts were made to create a unifying environment for these students? What challenges have you faced developing relationships with this population (e.g. establishing trust)? 

Ivory, great question. As Nicole indicated, this was an exploratory NSF EAGEER project. We focused primarily on AISES Regions 4 and 5, going to the National Conference, two Region 4 conferences and one Region 5 conference. We primarily did individual structured qualitative interviews with faculty and individual structured interviews or focus groups with students. We also collected quantiative data. 

At Oklahoma State, we continue to strengthen our networks and relationships with differenct STEM and Native American Indian/Indigenous research and training in the area. 

 

Dr. Toldson, thank you for your questions and insights. I have worked with Native American students for 25 years -- and others on our team (e.g., Dr. Bellcourt, for example) have been working with Native American students their entire careers. Your comments about establishing trust with individuals and families are so important. Establishing trust helps to ensure the integrity of the project, and helps to ensure that there are positive outcomes for the people we seek to serve. My insight on this is that establishing trusting relationships with the Native American community at large is incredibly important. Since we are interconnected, what our elders, leaders, tribal members, and extended families and friends believe and need are so important, and are often considered even more strongly than what we as individuals want. I think that is the beauty of Native American cultures. That being said, one of my concerns in helping Native Americans, as a group, consider and enter into engineering and into the engineering faculty is sharing relevant information that shows how engineering can be used in a way that respects our ways of being, supports our values and beliefs, and also promotes our students' successful matriculation, graduation, and professional engagement in engineering. Our partner in the EAGER grant, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), does an excellent job of this, and they have engendered the trust of families and communities across the nation.

Thank you for doing this important work and for building the trusting relationships that it requires. I agree with other comments that too often the content and structure of the STEM disciplines do not engage the "non-normative" STEM student, "normative" meaning White male student. We find similarly that the climate of STEM departments are not as engaging for women or men of color. As Irene and Jay mentioned, integrative undergraduate education as presented in the National Academies report may be one solution. In the meantime, in our ADVANCE IT grant, we are trying to address faculty attitudes through our Bystander Leadership program that is aimed at reducing gender and racial bias and increasing inclusion among faculty. We hope this will benefit the students by making the faculty more aware of their implicit biases and more sensitive to their impact on students. Have you done any work with faculty more generally to better enable them to be effective mentors for the Native American students - or do you primarily work with faculty that have already made the connections with them?  

Suzanna, It sounds like you are doing incredible work. I am really interested in your Bystander Leadership program, and want to learn more about it. Currently, we have been exploring those factors that encourage Native American participation in engineering and in the engineering faculty through our BPE Eager Project. In my department, however, and in other areas in which we are working, we are looking for models and methods to enable effective mentorship for Native Americans and other underrepresented students as well. Thanks for sharing these resources with us.

Congratulations on a very worthwhile project. Many of us are looking for ways to increase participation in STEM fields from under-represented groups, and I am sure that we will have much to learn from your work.

Thank you, Dr. Mattingly. It is clear from this showcase that we all can learn from one another!

 

Thanks to everyone who visited and commented on our video and project. Good exchange of ideas and networking. Now back to staying safe in the current Oklahoma weather!