Transformative Computational Models of Narrative to Support Teaching Indigenous Perspectives in K-12 Classrooms

This project will contribute to the national need for sharing Indigenous perspectives in US K-12 education. By providing accurate representations of Indigenous narratives within social studies curricula, this project will address misconceptions of Indigenous peoples and their communities. The project will mitigate potential impacts of misrepresentations such as cultural identity silencing, disconnection, and lower graduation rates for Indigenous students and lack of cultural competence for non-Indigenous students.

Often, Tribal Knowledge Holders visit classrooms and share their histories and perspectives class by class, which has the potential to overburden Indigenous communities. Technology can support both teachers and Indigenous communities to develop sustainable processes and practices to appropriately preserve and share Indigenous knowledge, culture, and perspectives.

To date, little work has examined the role of Indigenous representation in the creation of narrative technologies designed to mitigate the lack of Indigenous representation in the classroom. This project will develop emerging narrative technologies from an Indigenous perspective to support teachers and classroom learning. The broader impact of the work includes benefits for tribal communities, K-12 educators, and policymakers, and other community and education organizations that wish to expand representations of diverse knowledge, cultures, education, and computations.

The proposed work builds on existing efforts to address pressing issues of bias embedded in emerging technologies and expand current notions of how to design new forms of technology for more equitable futures. The proposed project will deconstruct and culturally reformulate the basis of emerging technologies: the underlying computational models, data, algorithms, and interfaces.

The overarching research question is: What does a culturally sustaining/revitalizing computational model of Indigenous narrative(s) look like? Building on an existing partnership with the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and K-12 teachers, the project team will use the social studies classroom as a design context to address issues of representation of Indigenous knowledge and culture via computational models.

The proposed work seeks to empower Tribal members to (re)engage technologies that have historically perpetuated disparities and caused significant harm to their community to develop prototypes that represent their ways of being and knowing. The prototypes will be Tribally-created design experiences that preserve Indigenous history and effectively share it with students in fourth grade classrooms.

This project will offer empirical insights for effective strategies and processes of how to engage Indigenous communities through a community-driven design methodological approach. The project has the potential to reimagine not only how models and algorithms are designed, but also who designs them. This project will inform and advance diverse fields including computer science, learning sciences, psychology, Indigenous education, teacher education, and social studies education.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.