Indigenous STEM Education

Preface (SHARON NELSON-BARBER AND PAULINE W. U. CHINN).- Foreword - An Indigenous Sense of Place (GREGORY CAJETE).- PART I:  CULTURE, LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE, AND PLACE AS FOUNDATION FOR LEARNING.- Chapter 1. Native Astronomy: A Skyward View (GREG CAJETE).- Chapter 2. Listening to the People: Reforming science education through incorporation of Chuukese traditional knowledge (MARGARITA B. CHOLYMAY).- Chapter 3. E 'Imi I ke 'Alanui, To Find the Way: A Native Hawaiian educator's Journey (ALYSON NAPUA BARROWS).- Chapter 4. KahuaA o: Science education through Hawaiian-language newspapers (JASON K. ELLINWOOD AND JOHANNA KAP MAIKA'I STONE).- Chapter 5. 'O kekumukeka'ao, The story is the source: The discipline of ancestral stories in nurturing Native Hawaiian scientists (HUIHUI KANAHELE-MOSSMAN).- Chapter 6. Developing a Framework for Integrating Systems of Local Indigenous Knowledge with Climate Education in the Mariana Islands (SHARON NELSON-BARBER, ELIZABETH DIAZ RECHEBEI, JOSE TILIPAO LIMES, ZANETTE JOHNSON).- Chapter 7. Culturally responsive science education for rural students: Connecting school science with local heritages in Thailand (NANTANA TAPTAMAT).- PART II:  RESEARCH  THAT TELLS OUR STORIES AND INFORMS POLICY AND PRACTICE.- Chapter 8. Perspective taking and psychological distance in children's picture books: differences between Native and Non-native authored books (MEGAN BANG, JASMINE GURNEAU, LORI FABER, ANANDA MARIN, MICHAEL MARIN, DOUGLAS MEDIN, SANDRA WAXMAN, JENNIFER WOODRING).- Chapter 9. Integrating Place, Indigenous and Western Science:  Implications for Teacher Agency, Expertise, and Identity (PAULINE W. U. CHINN).- Chapter 10. Keystone characteristics that support cultural resilience in Karen refugee parents (SUSAN HARPER).- Chapter 11. Symmetry and halving: A way to teach mathematical foundations, based on the everyday knowledge of Yupiaq and Caroline Islanders (JERRY LIPKA, DORA ANDREW-IRHKE, MIUTY NOKAR, DAVID KOESTER, DONALD H.

Pauline W. U. Chinn's great-grandparents arrived in Hawai i when it was the Kingdom of Hawai i and Hawaiian was the official language.  After the Kingdom s illegal overthrow in 1893 and annexation by the United States in 1898, Hawaiian language was forbidden in education and government until a constitutional amendment in 1978.  As a science teacher in Hawai i's public schools, she used textbooks from the continental U.S. except in Plants and Animals of Hawai i, a class for non-college bound students. Creating a place-based curriculum allowed her to intersect her fishing, hiking, and gardening experiences with western biology frameworks.  Seeing students in this "terminal" class become engaged as their lives and places entered the curriculum led to doctoral research exploring the roles of culture, gender, language, place, and power in underrepresentation of Kanaka Ma oli, descendants of Polynesian voyagers, in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  At the University of Hawai i at Manoa, her teacher education and professional development projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation support research and education to develop teacher leaders who create place-based, culturally sustaining, inquiry-oriented curricula inclusive of diverse and underrepresented students. This work led to establishing an Interdisciplinary M.Ed. Place-based, Sustainability and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainability and Resilience Education.





Sharon Nelson-Barber, a sociolinguist and Senior Program Director at WestEd, has lifelong personal and professional experience in Indigenous communities. Her interests in STEM began early on as she accompanied her father and grandfather while subsistence hunting and fishing. Much of her research, funded by the National Science Foundation, centers on understanding ways in which students' cultural backgrounds influence how they make sense of