Building Trust, Experiential Learning, and the Importance of Sovereignty: Capacity Building in Pre-Engineering Education - a Tribal College Perspective

At tribal colleges and mainstream universities, program success is often identified solely with matriculation and graduation rates. However, particularly for new STEM programs, capacity building is another key measure of success. In this paper, three of the co-authors, who are faculty members at a tribally-controlled college and participants in a multi-year collaborative pre-engineering education initiative between a tribal college and two mainstream universities, provide their perspectives on capacity building in summer camp activities within the alliance. The three each wrote essays reflecting on capacity building, guided by pre-determined questions written by the fourth author. Through qualitative analysis, we present common themes, divergent opinions, and quotations extracted from the essays from their unique perspective as faculty at a tribally-controlled college. We emphasize impacts among the partnering schools, faculty, students, and communities where the summer camp activities took place. Three common themes dominated the essays including the importance of (1) building trust within the reservation community, (2) recognizing the effectiveness of experiential and project-based service-learning approaches, and (3) encouraging tribally-controlled colleges to take a lead role in determining research and educational foci

Fostering the Development of Earth Data Science Skills in a Diverse Community of Online Learners: A Case Study of the Earth Data Science Corps

Today’s data-driven world requires earth and environmental scientists to have skills at the intersection of domain and data science. These skills are imperative to harness information contained in a growing volume of complex data to solve the world's most pressing environmental challenges. Despite the importance of these skills, Earth and Environmental Data Science (EDS) training is not equally accessible, contributing to a lack of diversity in the field. This creates a critical need for EDS training opportunities designed specifically for underrepresented groups. In response, we designed the Earth Data Science Corps (EDSC) which couples a paid internship for undergraduate students with faculty training to build capacity to teach and learn EDS using Python at smaller Minority Serving Institutions. EDSC participants are further empowered to teach these skills at their home institutions which scales the program beyond the training lead by our team. Using a Rasch modeling approach, we found that participating in the EDSC program had a significant impact on learners’ comfort and confidence with technical and non-technical data science skills, as well as their science identity and sense of belonging in science, two critical aspects of recruiting and retaining members of underrepresented groups in STEM