A unique university-tribal college collaboration to strengthen native American pathways to STEM education

Abstract

The authors and some of their colleagues have been engaged in strengthening the STEM education pathways in the North Dakota Reservations for the past eleven years through several activities. The focus of the activities have been at the interaction of tribal high school, tribal college, mainstream universities and engineering profession stakeholders to facilitate the recruitment, education and support of tribal students to acquire and hone the skills that will allow them to enter the engineering profession. Throughout this period the collaborative activities were carried out in a culturally sensitive and supportive fashion. Collaborative activities started with one tribal college in the State and developed to its full scope when all five tribal colleges joined the effort. One on one university-tribal college collaboration is not uncommon. However, this collaboration is unique in engaging the two mainstream universities, all the five tribal colleges, and Reservation high schools in the State. The student pathways are engaged at various entry points: middle and high school, tribal college, and universities and also at different personnel levels: administrators, faculty, and high school teachers. All of the activities such as Sunday academies, summer camps, and research mentoring were developed collaboratively with input from tribal college and university faculty and high school teachers. Such a collaborative approach allowed us to develop activities common to all participating sites and at the same time to retain the unique needs of the individual sites. This approach also provided a leveraging of engineering professors' time for content vs. the tribal high school instructors' efforts on student connections and delivery pedagogy. Another unique feature is that we were successful in having some of the students who participated in these activities aid the process as peer mentors/ instructors. For example some of the college students who benefited from this program earlier were helping us in the high school summer camps. This paper will summarize the experience of the authors with the university-tribal college collaborative effort over the last eleven years: how did it all start, where does it stand now, and what lessons did we learn. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.