SNAAP: Strengthening Native American Access to the Professoriate

Idaho State University, Pocatello ID

Investigators

Abstract

This project establishes a new strategic alliance, the Strengthening Native American Access to the Professoriate (SNAAP) program that will research activities to improve STEM doctoral degree completion and access to academic careers for Native American STEM students in the Great Basin and Great Plains regions of the United States. All located in EPSCoR states, the program?s partner institutions, Idaho State University, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Lewis-Clark State College (ID), Black Hills State University (SD), and Little Big Horn College (MT), are geographically situated and have relationships that position them to serve tribes in the Great Basin region of Idaho and neighboring states and the Great Plains region of South Dakota and neighboring states. The SNAAP program will greatly expand the geographic impact of the NSF AGEP program in the upper Midwest and Intermountain West, as it capitalizes on historic ties among Native American tribes in this East-West corridor. Funded initially through an AGEP planning grant, SNAAP will lay the foundation for a larger program that fulfills the broader goals of AGEP. Ultimately, the alliance aims to increase the diversity of the scientific workforce, by developing innovative models to recruit Native American doctoral students, mentor these students to doctoral degree completion, and place graduates who desire an academic career in STEM faculty positions. The planning grant is a necessary step to reaching these goals and will enable the alliance?s members to forge stronger links so that current relationships are formalized into a lasting alliance. In this way, the schools will develop methods for communicating and working together effectively to support each institution?s continuing pursuit of shared SNAAP goals. In addition, planning grant activities will focus on developing innovative models (within and across institutions) to recruit, mentor, and retain Native American doctoral students and assist graduates as they begin academic careers in STEM disciplines. Finally, to foster program sustainability, alliance members will prepare and submit, in July 2011, a second AGEP proposal that, if funded, will enable the SNAAP program to implement its models under the cycle of full AGEP grants beginning in October 2011. Intellectual Merit. The project assumes that the most effective recruitment and mentoring programs are those that situate scientific inquiry and instruction within the ways of knowing that all students, including Native American students, bring to higher education. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have examined the methods, effects, and importance of connecting STEM-based knowledge to cultural knowledge. Whether viewed from the perspective of education (Hainline, Gaines, Long Feather, Padilla, & Terry, 2010; Tsui, 2007), sociology (Latour, 2004), economics/forestry (Trosper, 2007), or anthropology and the Traditional Ecological Knowledge [TEK] movement (Nadasdy, 1999, 2003), researchers agree that dominant Western knowledge is itself ?encapsulated within social institutions and worldviews? (Trosper, 2007, p. 2). Researchers contend that to better understand how cultural knowledge enables or hinders discovery in the STEM disciplines, we must explore the ways that non-Western knowledge systems connect to or diverge from the dominant Western tradition and how, if at all, we can ?bridge or combine? these ?knowledge areas? (Trosper, 2007, p. 2). SNAAP will address these issues and add to the literature of the field and the body of successful practices for connecting STEM learning and research to culture. Broader Impacts. The proposed SNAAP alliance aims to increase the diversity of the scientific workforce, by developing innovative models to recruit Native American doctoral students, mentor these students to doctoral degree completion, and place graduates who desire an academic career in STEM faculty positions both within and beyond the Great Basin and Great Plains. Through its planning activities, SNAAP will lay the foundation for a lasting program that fulfills the broader goals of AGEP. Funded by AGEP, SNAAP will provide a geographically isolated and economically disadvantaged region the chance to develop the resources needed to bring more Native American students into doctoral education and the professoriate. Finally, when fully implemented, SNAAP will foster a generation of Native American faculty who will serve as role models for future Native American STEM students. Perhaps more than any other aspect of the program, this new STEM faculty will perpetuate the work of SNAAP for generations to come and ensure that Native American students, their communities, and society as a whole reap the benefits of a vital and diverse STEM workforce.