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Oftentimes engineering design tasks are thought of as acultural and devoid of community inclusion and values. However, engineering design is inherently a cultural endeavor. Problems needing engineering solutions or design thinking are situated in a specific community and need community solutions. This work in progress paper describes initial efforts from a project to help elementary and middle school teachers create culturally relevant engineering design tasks for implementation in their classrooms. To integrate best practices for culturally relevant pedagogy, the engineering design framework developed by UTeach Engineering was adapted to specifically address community needs and cultural values. Changes to the framework also include culturally relevant instructional strategies for classroom implementation. To situate the engineering design steps within a culturally relevant framework questions involving communities and students’ cultural needs, values, and expectations were posed in each stage of the design process. A water filtration engineering design task was situated in the cultural concept of “Mni Wiconi” (Water is life in the Dakota language). This was taught in a summer professional development workshop for a cohort of elementary and middle school teachers, in rural North Dakota, with school districts comprised of large Native American student populations. Teachers adapted this design task for their individual classrooms and content areas (science, math, social studies, ELA) and implemented it in their classrooms in the fall of 2021. Additional support for teachers was provided with fall workshop days aimed at helping them with the facilitation of a culturally relevant engineering task. To integrate culturally relevant teaching and good engineering design tasks, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction’s Native American Essential Understandings Teachings of our Elder’s website was used. This allowed teachers and students to have firsthand knowledge of how various science and engineering concepts are framed within the indigenous community. Professional development focused on how to situate culturally responsive teaching in engineering design. For example, in one of the school districts the water filtration task was related to increased pollution of a nearby lake which holds significant importance for the local Tribal Nation. In addition to being able to visibly witness the demand for cleaner water, the book “We are Water Protectors” written by Carole Lindstrom, was used to provide cultural grounding for the Identify and Describe stages of the engineering design framework. Case studies of how teachers incorporated the water filtration design task into their lesson plans are presented along with their suggestions on how to improve classroom implementation. Future work in the program includes teachers and their students developing engineering design tasks situated in their own communities and cultures.
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Designing a Resilience Resource Database with Hopi Behavioral Health Services
Despite high incidence of depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder, stigma and lack of access to culturally responsive behavioral health care resources prevents many Native Americans (NA) from seeking care. However, the rise of culturally-responsive in-person and digital behavioral health resources for NA communities provides new opportunities to address these longstanding health equity issues. The major challenge is helping people in NA communities find these meaningful resources and helping anchor institutions understand how resources are being sought and utilized to support more responsive internal programming. In this context, we have partnered with Hopi Behavioral Health Services (HBHS) to design the Resilience Resource Database to digitally disseminate mental and behavioral health resources. This paper presents initial findings that have resulted from the initial stage of an iterative participatory design process with HBHS.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2224014
- PAR ID:
- 10536376
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400706325
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 181 to 184
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- behavioral health Native American rural computing
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- IT University of Copenhagen Denmark
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3656156.3663736
