Systematic evaluation of geoscience education programs that are designed for Indigenous students, or use Traditional Knowledge

Abstract

The geoscience community has begun to grapple with the whiteness of the community and the harm and erasure of Indigenous communities done by earth and environmental scientists. We have come to understand that to recruit and retain Indigenous students, geoscience education needs to be culturally responsive by explicitly centering Indigenous students. This has created a great need for guidelines about how to approach and evaluate educational programs that are designed for Indigenous students, and/or use Traditional Knowledge. There are many recent initiatives, especially those led by Indigenous scientists and faculty, that have done this well. We present here a newly developed rubric and systematic review of publications about Indigenous geoscience initiatives for K-12, college education, and professional training. Our evaluation examines the implementation of the program, its content, approach (i.e., if the program used Indigenous ways of learning and knowing or taught Indigenous concepts in a western education framework) and research design. The goal of this review is to identify further areas of research, areas that need improvement, and to develop recommendations for similar future initiatives. Overall, the articles reviewed herein are consistently implementing multiple epistemologies, and explicitly centering and validating Indigenous culture. However, there is work to be done to improve the ways similar programs address racism, Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and data sovereignty moving forward.

Keywords:

• Traditional Knowledge
• effective practices
• geoscience education
• Indigenous education
• land education

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Indigenous Land we reside and work on as well as the land that was stolen and sold to benefit Land Grant institutions like The University of California Davis. We would like to acknowledge Deborah L. Pierce and Matthew Parsons, reference librarians at the University of Washington, for their help building the literature search we used to identify papers to review. CCM would like to acknowledge the immense privilege of having a parent with a PhD, and the gift of being able to collaborate with TLC and benefit and learn from his expertise in program evaluation and quantitative research methods.

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.