Learning Sciences Research Institute > News and Events > Past Speakers > Speaker

Improving Science Teaching and Learning for Native American Children through Community Based Design: Investigating Impacts of Relational Epistemologies.

Megan Bang (Click name for speaker's biography)
Monday, March 03, 2008
2:00 - 4:00 p.m, Room 3233, EPASW

There is chronic under-representation of Indigenous people in STEM-related fields. Over the past 10 years there have been a total of only 14 doctorates awarded to Native scholars in Computer Science, 10 in Physics, 5 in Astronomy, 3 in Ocean Sciences, and 1 in Atmospheric Sciences (NSF, 2007). The way to understand and address this under-representation is far from simple. We propose that a critical reason for Native students' lack of school success is because school based learning environments fail to mobilize, and worse, recognize the intellectual resources Native children bring to classroom environments, specifically schools fail to recognize what we call Native students' relational epistemologies. This talk will focus on our findings about the cognitive consequences of relational epistemologies and the ways in which to build on these epistemologies to enhance science learning. To unpack what relational epistemologies mean at various grain sizes we have examined community-based practices involving the natural world across three communities (2 Native and 1 non-Native) in order to better understand and document students' community based ways of knowing. We have found relationships between the structure of practices and participants tendency to focus on relational understandings, their narrative structures, and the construal of the relational distance of the natural world within everyday practices. Further we find that Native students do not reason about the natural in the typical asymmetrical pattern that much of the child development literature suggests is universal (i.e. Carey, 1985). From these findings we have been working on collaborative design research project between Northwestern University, TERC, the Menominee Tribal School (MTS) and the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC) that explicitly builds on Native students' community based practices and ways of knowing to support students' learning and navigation between and through multiple ways of knowing science.

No Audio File Exists for this speech at this time.

Quicktime Movie
(Right Click/Control Click & Save to download):
109 MB