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in teaching and learning practices, and how addressing it pedagogically opens new
opportunities to develop effective teaching and learning strategies that build on the
variety of resources for learning Native children bring to the classroom.
This chapter describes our initial effort to explore the process that enabled design
teams to construct these types of learning environments. These learning environ-
ments have evolved to a place where there is a deep integration of traditional Native
knowledge and history and western modern scientific knowledge and processes,
focused on contemporary problems and issues. A general problem that the project
and design teams are only beginning to address is the analysis of classroom level
events, the moment to moment interactions, and unfolding of teaching and learning.
We see this challenge as historically rooted and amenable to the framework that the
unique structure of our design teams provide.
Developing culturally based science curricula is far from straightforward. One of
the key aspects of this work has been the evolution of our understanding of what
culturally-based science programming means and the ways in which to design and
study the programs. “Culture” and “Science” are two concepts that are strongly
subject to stereotyping and simplistic definitions. For example, it may be easy for
some people to think of science as a body of knowledge and to imagine scientists as
(white) men wearing white lab coats and using beakers and test tubes. Similarly,
it is easy to think of culture as a set of ideas about
what
people think or cus-
toms rather than as affecting
how
people think. If these stereotypes and reductionist
approaches remain unchallenged, then it is natural to take some preexisting sci-
ence curriculum and build in a cultural connection by “adding culture to it.” Indeed
this is an approach that has been widely advocated and used (Yazzie-Mintz, 2007;
Hermes, 1999) but has failed to have the impacts hoped for, perhaps because it has
not addressed the core problems of culture in science.
We think that cultural practices and their connections with Native ways of know-
ing must be the foundation of a community-based science curriculum. There is a
strong body of Indigenous scholarship exploring the philosophies and methods of
Indigenous ways of knowing (or “Native Science”) the natural world and the rela-
tionships and tensions with western modern science (i.e., Cajete, 1997; Deloria,
1979; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Kawagley, 1995). A key aspect of developing our
framework has been to resist placing western modern science and Native science in
an oppositional dichotomy because it has the effect of falsely simplifying both ideas
of western modern science and Native science (Cajete, 1997; Maryboy, Begay, &
Nichol, 2006).
Culture
. One of the most salient shifts in our community design teams concerns
the ways in which culture is being conceptualized. Initially, many community mem-
bers tended to think of culture as something of an “add-on,” to be put into our lesson
plans after the science part was worked out. This might take the form of “histori-
cal connections.” Now, almost all community members see culture as foundational
where science is built around that base. One of our teachers vividly illustrated this
point with a picture she drew representing her conception of science education. She
drew a large turtle (she is a member of the turtle clan) and added microscopes, test
tubes, and the like on its back.
