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start. The first was the serious need for more Indian people in STEM fields. We
did a quick survey of STEM-related positions across several Indian nations and the
majority of them were filled with non-Indian people, including on the Menominee
reservation. This was framed as fundamentally an issue of sovereignty because it
meant that non-Indian people had a powerful influence on the use and strategic
direction of natural resources in tribal communities.
The second issue was the achievement statistics at various levels, including
advanced degrees all the way down to state standardized tests. Our previous exami-
nation of standardized tests found that Menominee children in Wisconsin test better
in science in the fourth grade than any other subject but by eighth grade it is their
worst subject (Bang, Medin, & Atran, 2007). It is important to note that perfor-
mance on other subjects stays stable across time, suggesting that there is something
unique going on in science. We coupled this framing with cognitive research we had
conducted with Indigenous children, Menominee included, in which basic biolog-
ical concepts and reasoning patterns were examined (e.g., Ross, Medin, Coley, &
Atran, 2003, Bang et al., 2007). The general findings from these studies suggest that
Native children come to school with advanced understandings of biology, that their
reasoning patterns mirror those of practicing scientists, and further that Menominee
fishermen tend to organize knowledge and reason along ecological rather than tax-
onomic lines (Medin, Ross, Cox, & Atran, 2007). We suggested that this was
potentially a deeply productive intellectual asset that schools fail to mobilize or
recognize.
The last piece of “evidence” that was used to frame the introduction to this
project was a brief survey of science classroom materials we conducted in which we
looked at the way content was organized. We found that the systems level analyses
in general and the coverage of ecosystems was often the last chapter in textbooks
and never used as an organizing principle. Most biology textbooks started with a
microlevel or what we call a model species level and then expanded (Bang, 2007).
Further, the majority of the textbooks had almost no hands-on or experiential com-
ponents. We suggested that this assumed trajectory of learning did not align with
Native students' ways of knowing or experiencing the world (Bang, 2007). Thus we
were proposing to design learning environments with an ecological orientation and
community-based practices as the foundation, to see whether student engagement
and learning was better in such environments. Once the project team was formed,
we also engaged in conversation about the previously mentioned historical perspec-
tive on teaching and learning in Indian communities and noted that we hoped that
this would be a place for us to reclaim, recover, and refine teaching and learning
practices in Indigenous communities.
The early stage of our design process consisted of a series of monthly or bi-
monthly meetings to make sense of the goals of the project and to develop a shared
vision for it. These meetings soon evolved into specific decisions about a range of
issues such as content focus, activities, assessment, and community involvement.
The majority of the work in the first year consisted of making sense of issues of
science and science education from a sociohistorical and larger cultural perspective
rooted in a particular place and based on participants' experiences.
