STEM Dreams in Motion - Episode 4

Curricular Materials
This series of videos highlights contemporary stories of refugees who are considered role models for their tenacity and accomplishments. Each story sheds light on journeys to becoming a STEM professional in the United States. Episode 4 features two Congolese brothers who grew up in a refugee camp and are currently STEM college students.
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Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation Authors

Publications
A resurgence of Indigenous political cultures, governances and nation-building requires generations of Indigenous peoples to grow up intimately and strongly connected to our homelands, immersed in our languages and spiritualities, and embodying our traditions of agency, leadership, decision-making and diplomacy. This requires a radical break from state education systems – systems that are primarily designed to produce communities of individuals willing to uphold settler colonialism. This paper uses Nishnaabeg stories to advocate for a reclamation of land as pedagogy, both as process and
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Indigenous Making and Sharing: Claywork in an Indigenous STEAM Program

Publications
In this article we expand on ideas of making and maker spaces to develop Indigenous making and sharing. We draw from an ArtScience participatory design project that involved Indigenous youth, families, community artists, and scientists in a summer Indigenous STEAM program designed to cultivate social and ecologically just nature-culture relations grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and making. In this article we focus specifically on clay making and the ways in which onto-epistemic heterogeneity can be engaged to create transformative maker spaces. We present findings from an
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Investigating environmental identity development among children in rural Alaska Native communities through intergenerational, culturally responsive community science programming

Poster

Project Overview: This two-year research-design project, undertaken in collaboration with GBH and Molly of Denali is: (1) building new knowledge about the ways in which children from rural Alaska Native communities, ages 6- 8, develop “environmental identity” (defined as the empathy, knowledge, and skills that children need to act responsibly for the environment) and (2) investigating how environmental identity can be nurtured via an intergenerational, community-based environmental science program that is supported by appropriate technologies and

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Engaging Native American Students in STEM Career Development through a Culturally-Responsive After-School Program Using Virtual Reality Environments and 3D Printing

Poster

The project will develop and research an after-school program that is designed to increase the STEM career interests and motivations of Native American middle-school students. Students will use digital technologies, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D printing, to solve spatial design problems presented through the project’s culturally responsive, problem-based learning education modules.

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Supporting Science Inquiry, Interest, and STEM Thinking for Young Dual Language Learners (SISTEM)

Poster

SISTEM’s overarching goals are to (1) Increase DLL PreK families’ perceptions of themselves as partners in their children’s science learning and their engagement, confidence, and skills in supporting their children’s science inquiry; (2)Increase PreK DLL teachers’ perceptions of themselves as partners in their students’ science learning and their skills and self-efficacy in facilitating science inquiry with DLLs; (3) Increase children’s, families’ and teachers’ knowledge of STEM careers; and (4) Improve PreK DLLs’ science, language and literacy skills and their interest and self-confidence

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Peering a Generation into the Future: NSF's Young Scholars Program (YSP) and the nation’s STEM workforce

Poster

This project is a multiyear study of the impact of an enrichment program that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) managed in the 1990s. The Young Scholars Program (YSP) involved around 18,000 7th–12th grade students and 600 separate grants between 1989 and 1996. The purpose of YSP was to introduce high-achieving middle and secondary school students to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields to encourage their entry into those fields and thus increase the size and quality of the nation’s STEM workforce.

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