"Start with where you are": The View of Indigenizing STEM Curriculum from Educational Outreach

Draft of conference paperAs educational institutions in Canada respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 “Calls-to-Action” by exploring what it means to “indigenize” curriculum, the process is complex and requires contributions from multiple angles of education, including informal education. This is particularly important for STEM education, where the exclusivity of western-centric notions of science and technology must be re-evaluated to provide a more culturally-aware offering. The unique position of informal education programs like educational outreach provides a unique outlook that offers lessons that formal education can benefit from. To explore this unique position in indigenizing, we use a qualitative study with Geering Up, a STEM educational outreach program at the University of British Columbia, and members of K’omoks First Nation on nearby Vancouver Island. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 members of Geering Up and 4 members of K’omoks First Nation, and identified themes that ought to inform how educators and scholars consider the foundations of indigenizing curriculum and education in general, particularly the value of sharing. We explore its potential as the foundation of a broad framework for indigenizing curriculum in a way that scales from one community’s perspective to multiple in a way that is respectful, and accounts for the significant time, energy, and human resource commitment involved in these practices.Funding for this research was provided by the Interinstitutional Consortium for Indigenous Knowledge and Penn State University

STEM Educational Outreach and Indigenous Culture: (Re)Centering for Design Scholarship

Integrating Indigenous culture into STEM education is a critical process in building pathways to justice and diversifying design. This process serves to (re)center our conceptions of STEM education by challenging strictly Western notions of STEM, representing an opportunity for learning not just in curricular design, but in technological design as well. Postcolonial computing scholars have critically examined design processes, highlighting the dominance of Western knowledge undergirding cross-cultural design. However, such efforts have yet to fully leverage insights from national curricular (re) centering initiatives. We take up this opportunity through a qualitative case study of an educational outreach organization in British Columbia, Canada, a subsidiary of a nation-wide effort in curricular integration of Indigenous and Western STEM material. Applying postcolonial computing thought, we offer enrichments to theory by providing an empirical basis for a) integrating resiliency, b) politicization in design, and c) arguments for (re)centering epistemological authority in computing. These contributions both enrich theory and enhance the practice of cross-cultural design by encouraging and exploring an Indigenous (re)centering of our understanding of both curricular and technological design