Changing science education to foster greater equity and inclusion for Indigenous students will require effort from instructors and institutions. Instructors can help by including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in their science classrooms. TEK refers to the many diverse knowledges, practices, and values regarding the environment that Indigenous peoples have acquired and passed down over many generations of living closely with the earth. TEK is practical and still in use today; in 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality released federal guidance that TEK is to be considered alongside Western science when making federal policy decisions. Many have called for the inclusion of TEK in science classes and have provided guidance on how to do so thoughtfully. This lesson takes those suggestions into account and was developed and taught at an institution in Hawai‘i. During the lesson, students work to address an environmental phenomenon, in this case the degradation of water quality in Hawaiian fishponds, or loko i‘a. Students are required to review resources from four interest groups and knowledge systems (TEK, Western science, consumers, and the government) to create plans to address this problem. We found that this lesson helped students understand what TEK is, view TEK as a valuable and irreplaceable knowledge system, and view TEK and science as compatible ways of knowing. We also found that non-Indigenous and Indigenous students alike enjoyed and appreciated the inclusion of TEK in the class, and many of them asked for more TEK to be included in the future. This lesson is an important step for educators as we strive to repair misconceptions that science is exclusively for certain stereotypical groups. It opens the door to meaningful discussions on the relationship between various ways of knowing while exposing students to knowledge frameworks they may be unfamiliar with. Finally, it teaches students important systems thinking, communication, and collaboration skills while demonstrating that Western science is not the only way that humans learn about the earth.

Primary Image: Hawaiian fishpond. An illustration of a Hawaiian fishpond adjacent to a beach with some vegetation. Ocean currents are seen to one side.

A challenge in introductory biology laboratory courses is to provide students with authentic, engaging research opportunities that allow them to take ownership of their experiments. We present a nine-week introductory biology module that allows students to engage with the process of science, gain experience with various laboratory techniques, and communicate their results to a peer audience. These modules use the inexpensive and accessible invertebrate model of the brine shrimp Artemia, which has many applications from aquaculture to ecology to behavior. Students explore known taxis behaviors in the larval (or “naupliar/nauplii”) stages of these brine shrimp before designing their own experiments, collecting and analyzing data, presenting their results orally, and redesigning their experiments based on peer and instructor feedback. This LessonPlus article highlights the exploration of known taxis behaviors and the scaffolding for having students design their own experiments. We originally designed this module to be highly flexible and used it to teach students both remotely and in-person during the early years of the pandemic. We have since found it to be easily adaptable in terms of timing, materials used, and learning modality. Most importantly, we have observed a number of positive outcomes related to student engagement and proficiency, including increased quality of summative assessments.

Primary Image: Artemia nauplius. A scientific illustration of the nauplius stage of Artemia sp. used in these experiments to study taxis behaviors. ©2024 Liesl V. McCormick.