STEM Educational Outreach and Indigenous Culture: (Re)Centering for Design Scholarship

Abstract

Integrating Indigenous culture into STEM education is a critical process in building pathways to justice and diversifying design. This process serves to (re)center our conceptions of STEM education by challenging strictly Western notions of STEM, representing an opportunity for learning not just in curricular design, but in technological design as well. Postcolonial computing scholars have critically examined design processes, highlighting the dominance of Western knowledge undergirding cross-cultural design. However, such efforts have yet to fully leverage insights from national curricular (re) centering initiatives. We take up this opportunity through a qualitative case study of an educational outreach organization in British Columbia, Canada, a subsidiary of a nation-wide effort in curricular integration of Indigenous and Western STEM material. Applying postcolonial computing thought, we offer enrichments to theory by providing an empirical basis for a) integrating resiliency, b) politicization in design, and c) arguments for (re)centering epistemological authority in computing. These contributions both enrich theory and enhance the practice of cross-cultural design by encouraging and exploring an Indigenous (re)centering of our understanding of both curricular and technological design.