Designing Pedagogies for Indigenous Science Education: Finding Our Way to Storywork

Reflective

Community-based design research (CBDR) methodology was "retooled" to be grounded in and informed by input from various community members including elders, parents and other adults, experts and professionals and designers.

Teacher design meetings – building curriculum for the program and implementing it first in a summer pilot study then in an afterschool program at a community center. Sessions brought teachers together to collectively design science programming outside of mainstream curricular constraints.

In this article, the authors reflect on their experience as teacher-researchers and analyze the sense-making that occurred among American Indian teachers in design meetings focused on the process of designing and implementing science curricula. The authors engage with Archibald's concept of Indigenous Storywork, and explain that "For us, stories took on the role of Trickster, inviting us to work through the relationship between Western forms of science and Indigenous ways of knowing. We often entered contradictory spaces, where we found our way through the deep and often contrastive intersections between cultural protocols, knowledge generation, relationships (intertribal, intergenerational, nonhuman-centric, etc.), science content, literacy, and orality." (p. 46-7)

Research design process was adjusted to create space for Indigenous people to be self-determining in their navigation of intergenerational trauma as well as they educational processes

Community engagement in order to support community to take up teaching positions and leadership positions in the education of the young people from their community.

Understanding science through relationships in order increase engagement and interest in science education and improve educational attainment for Native American middle-school students

In order for science education to be "culturally sustaining and revitalizing" teachers need the opportunity to engage in community-based exploration of Western and Indigenous sciences and incorporate storytelling into their research and pedagogy.

Recordings, Transcriptions, Thematic Analysis

After School, Summer and Weekend Program delivery

"Using traditional or community-based stories in formal learning environments requires continuous work with community members and elders. The relationship between learners and stories is reciprocal in nature and akin to being on a journey." (p. 34)

"A teacher's epistemological frame, or his or her expectations about ways of knowing and the forms that knowledge may take, not only in fluences what he or she notices about students' thinking but also the teacher's development of instructional tasks" (p. 35)

"We spontaneously relied on stories as we reflected on issues of knowledge production and representation in the sciences, and this supported our journey in becoming more skilled at navigating between ways of knowing and designing hybrid spaces." (p. 46)

"For us, stories took on the role of Trickster, inviting us to work through the relationship between Western forms of science and Indigenous ways of knowing. We often entered contradictory spaces, where we found our way through the deep and often contrastive intersections between cultural protocols, knowledge generation, relationships (intertribal, intergenerational, nonhuman-centric, etc.), science content, literacy, and orality." (p. 46-7)

Western and Indigenous science
Education