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Session presenters/authors have worked to support STEM education in Native American serving schools for many years. During the last few years, substantial progress has been made towards capacity-building and sustaining culturally sustaining STEM activity. This session will highlight the ways that improved communication and collaboration among project partners (teachers, teacher educators, school administrators, community members, STEM professionals) have supported this progress. Recommendations for Native American STEM partnerships based on these experiences will be shared in this session. 

As the push to increase computer science (CS) education access for all students in the U.S. grows across states and regions, schools that work with traditionally underserved populations such as Native Americans (NA) have a particular challenge in navigating this new landscape for educational systems. Most curriculum in CS can be hard to implement in schools that have not yet developed the capacity of their staff to teach CS due to the rigid sequence of topics and skills. One approach to expanding CS into these settings is to work with content area teachers to develop mobile apps that not only relate to their content but can also expose students to CS skills. The NSF-funded project Let’s Talk Code recognizes the unique opportunities for Native American-serving schools and has developed an approach that could have broad appeal for secondary schools that do not have well-developed CS programs but want to increase access to CS for their students through an integrated approach that can also connect to sustaining language and culture. 

Professional development in Native American serving schools is evolving and having improved results via participatory design-based research. Instead of starting teacher education projects with a firmly set curriculum, design-based research utilizes iterative rounds of curriculum development and re-design by using feedback from participating teachers along, community advisors, instructors, and project partners. This paper describes how design-based research principles were applied within a research project focused on STEM education in Native American serving middle schools and the results of doing so.