Theme of the Month

In some communities where children are included in a wide range of activities, children pay close attention and learn through contributing to the ongoing activities of their community. This way of learning appears to be especially common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas. This website presents theory and research on "Learning by Observing and Pitching In" to family and community endeavors (LOPI, previously called Intent Community Participation).

This article focuses on communities’ contributions to a way of learning that seems to be common in many Indigenous communities of the Americas and among people with heritage in such communities: Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavours (LOPI). We briefly contrast this with community contributions in Assembly-Line Instruction, a way of learning that is common in Western schooling, to highlight the distinct contributions of community in these two ways of learning.

Using a holistic, process approach, this article brings attention to cultural differences in the prevalence of fluid synchrony in collaboration, at a microanalytic scale of analysis that is embodied in the processes of everyday life. We build on findings that in a number of Indigenous American communities, fluid and harmonious collaboration is prioritized both in community organization at a scale of years and centuries, and in everyday family interactions and researcher-organized tasks at a scale of days, hours, or minutes.

According to the NSF, Indigenous people, especially those who identify as Native women and two-spirit individuals, are currently underrepresented in the field.To understand what promotes — and what hinders —persistence in undergraduate CS programs, a team from AISES and TERC, a nonprofit focused on promoting equal access to STEM learning opportunities, conducted research.

With such a scarcity of research on two-spirit individuals in STEM, in this article we bring forward findings from NAWC2 about a participant who called himself Tokala and identified as two-spirit, and shared how his identity as a two-spirit Native man influenced his journey as an undergraduate in CS.

How do STEM departments and institutions recruit and sustain Native individuals’ participation in a given discipline, in ways that value their uniquely Indigenous ways of knowing and being? If Native science is not included in classroom instruction, can we expect to increase representation and perseverance of Native people in cell and molecular biology, geosciences, engineering?

American Indian/First Nations/Native people have been historically under-represented in the ranks of college and university graduates in Canada and the United State ...This paper examines the implications of these differences in perspective [institutional and student] and identifies ways in which initiatives within and outside of existing institutions are transforming the landscape of higher education for First Nations/American Indian people in both Canada and the United States.

Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don’t just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality... For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information.

Concerns about secondary use of data and limited opportunities for benefit-sharing have focused attention on the tension that Indigenous communities feel between (1) protecting Indigenous rights and interests in Indigenous data (including traditional knowledges) and (2) supporting open data, machine learning, broad data sharing, and big data initiatives. The International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group (within the Research Data Alliance) is a network of nation-state based Indigenous data sovereignty networks and individuals that developed the ‘CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance’ (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) in consultation with Indigenous Peoples, scholars, non-profit organizations, and governments.