OOS 3-6
Enhancing climate change curriculum at tribal community colleges through partnership and collaboration
Thirty-six Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) serve over 20,000 Native American undergraduate students across the US. TCUs were created in response to the higher education needs of American Indians and generally serve geographically isolated populations that have no other means accessing education beyond the high school level. Tribal community colleges play a pivotal role in training Native American ecologists by providing them with the expertise to address the environmental challenges faced by their communities such as climate change. On a broader scale, well-trained indigenous ecologists who also have a strong grounding in their own cultural knowledge can provide the scientific community with unique multi-contextual, indigenous perspectives on the science of ecology through traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Since TEK includes human interactions and is holistic in nature, interdisciplinary curriculum including the social science dimension is a natural outcome of teaching science from an indigenous perspective. Thus, creating culturally-relevant science curriculum represents a challenge because of its highly interdisciplinary nature. One approach to address this issue is through multi-institutional collaborative partnerships across TCUs, universities and national environmental organizations.
Results/Conclusions
These multi-institutional collaborative partnerships have resulted in transdisciplinary, culturally relevant climate change curriculum that is incorporated into environmental science programs across TCUs. These collaborations have been facilitated and greatly enhanced by national organizations such as the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), the Council for Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). For example, a partnership between five TCUs, AIHEC and NCAR resulted in a semester-long course global change biology course taught from the perspective of the traditional ecological knowledge held by native peoples of North America. In addition, a transdisciplinary module was developed by Tohono O’odham Community college and Northern Arizona University for NCSE’s Climate Change Adaptation, Mitigation and e-Learning (CAMEL) site www.camelclimatechange.org. This transdisciplinary module integrates social science, water policy, TEK and climate change science. The goal of this module is to examine strategies for including indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions into water policy and environmental decision-making. These projects have also served to develop permanent and on-going relationships between TCUs, universities and national environmental organizations resulting in several new projects such as development of distance learning resources. TCUs are eager partners in developing culturally and scientifically well rounded ecologists.