Ethnoscience Strategies to Indigenize Science at Tribal Colleges: Connecting to the Tribal Community

The importance of engaging students through hands-on laboratory experiments and connecting to their personal experiences cannot be overstated. Specific community connection information has been provided in the background of each lab, but each lab report provides students the opportunity to share their own personal connection. Why community connections? Connecting chemistry content to students’ a prior knowledge, authentic phenomenon, and culturally-relevant topics increases the learning of new content. The community connection section of each lab only scratches the surface of the tribal community connections. The sharing of their own connections will enrich the authenticity of the chemistry as well as your instructor’s and classmates own knowledge. How we used Ethnoscience to enhance chemistry lab instruction and experience will be demonstrated, including engaging the audience’s sharing of their own experiences curriculum indigenization.