TSE NA ALKAAH: COMBINING NATIVE AND MAINSTREAM GEOSCIENCE TO FOSTER PLACE-BASED K-12 STEM TEACHER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON THE COLORADO PLATEAU

Place-based, culturally infused approaches to teaching geoscience are aligned with traditional indigenous education, and illustrate the premise that leveraging the cultural capital of underrepresented minority communities such as Native Americans fosters more inclusive and relevant teaching. Situating learning within local landscapes, environments, and communities; and meaningfully connecting mainstream science with Native science and knowledge of place enables students to construct new knowledge that is scaffolded by their own worldview and experiences, and helps lessen any sense of cultural discontinuity that may arise from apparently disparate interpretations of Earth features or processes.

We applied this philosophy in a multi-year summer program of professional-development workshops for K-12 STEM teachers in the Colorado Plateau and Intermountain regions, many of whom teach in school systems that serve majority Native American student populations. Through collaboration of geoscientists, Diné (Navajo) cultural experts, and in-service teachers, we developed and implemented inquiry-rich field excursions in which learning about Earth-system features and processes on the Plateau utilized factual and conceptual knowledge from mainstream geoscience and Diné geoscience (tsé na’alkaah) alike, as well as on other forms of local place knowledge such as Diné toponymy. Participants used concepts such as the dynamic interactions of Earth (Nahasdzaan) and Sky (Yádilhil) systems and the natural order (nitsahakees, nahat’a, iina, siihasin) to interpret natural landscape features (e.g., desert landforms, Plateau strata and volcanism) as well as anthropogenic environmental impacts (notably: uranium mining and milling, and their environmental and health effects) in the field.