Connecting American Indian/Alaska Native Students' Heritage Mathematics and Science Knowledge With Mathematics and Science Instruction

• In Event: 49.032 - Indigenous Issues in Education and Research

Abstract

The study is designed to ascertain ways in which American Indian and Alaska Native students and their teachers in selected communities make use of local wisdom and heritage ethnomathematics and ethnoscience practices in STEM education. The research team has been collaborating with nine indigenous communities gathering data in five areas: sociocultural context, influence of place, interpersonal interactions, ethnomathematics and ethnoscience knowledge, and teacher practices of presenting conventional STEM knowledge through their curricula. Elementary and middle level students and their teachers in three states have participated in informal observations of community-based ethnomathematics and ethnoscience activities and interactions, informal review of classroom documents, formal mathematics and science classroom observations, focus groups, interviews, and small group work.

We wanted to know generally: (1) how students may be affected by their ancestral community’s ways of thinking and communicating and (2) ways students draw from their own culturally influenced knowledge. We also wanted to know (1) how teachers assess their students’ problem solving abilities, (2) how teachers take into account the cultural influences that shape the ways in which students interpret and solve mathematics problems and science processes, and (3) what processes teachers go through when they consider how to design instruction that is informed by assessment of the outcomes of student STEM knowledge. Classroom observations and interviews probed: (1) teacher concepts that guide these processes; (2) the principles they employ; (3) how they go about making their own knowledge explicit; and (4) how they expand these intuitions, draw from community knowledge, and determine student understanding of culture-based mathematics and science.

Findings focus on how teachers organize their classrooms for mathematics/science content, structure social interaction to support mathematics/science learning in diverse contexts, and how they can mediate student knowledge building and levels of cognitive demand by building bridges through STEM knowledge. We investigated: 1) the sociocultural setting, 2) students’ relationship to place, 3) student interaction patterns, 4) ethnomathematics/science heritage activities, and 5) integration of ethnomathematics/ science activities in formal education. We describe students’ mathematics/science experiences in and out of school and how culture influences their interpretations of mathematics and science curricula. Such investigations examine the optimal communicative, structural, and curricular conditions that enable teachers to make use of local wisdom in ethnomathematics and ethnoscience to promote STEM excellence.

The results have great potential to inform current teacher preparation programs as well as learning across the continuum of teacher professional development. The rich data from this study will provide a vital bank of concrete examples, cases and illustrations that may be used to improve teachers’ capacities to envision and enact culturally appropriate instruction in their own complex contexts.

Author

• Sharon Nelson-Barber, WestEd