Abstract

To increase equity and inclusion for underserved and excluded Indigenous students, we must make efforts to mitigate the unique barriers they face. As their knowledge systems have been historically excluded and erased in Western science, we begin by reviewing the literature on the inclusion of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in biology education and describe best practices. Next, to better understand how Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NHPI) students integrate into the scientific community, we used Social Influence Theory as a framework to measure NHPI student science identity, self-efficacy, alignment with science values, and belonging. We also investigated how students feel their ethnic and science identities interact. We found that NHPI students do not significantly differ from non-NHPI students in these measures of integration, and that NHPI students are varied in how they perceive their ethnic and science identities interact. Some students experience conflict between the two identities, while others view the two as having a strengthening relationship. Next, we describe a lesson plan created to include Hawaiian TEK in a biology class using best practices described in the literature. This is followed by an empirical study on how students were impacted by this lesson. We measured student integration into the science community using science identity, self-efficacy, alignment with science values, and belonging. We found no significant differences between NHPI and non-NHPI students. We also looked at student participation, and found that all students participated more on intervention days involving TEK and other ways of knowing than on non-intervention days. Finally, we describe qualitative findings on how students were impacted by the TEK interventions. We found students were predominantly positively impacted by the inclusion of TEK and discuss future adjustments that could be made using their recommendations. The last chapter describes how we used remote sensing to investigate land cover in a fenced and unfenced region of the Koʻolau Mountains on the island of Oahu. After mapping the biodiversity hotspot Management Unit of Koloa, we found that there is slighlty more bare ground, grass, and bare ground/low vegetation mix in fenced, and thereby ungulate-free areas, than those that were unfenced and had ungulates. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Degree

PhD

College and Department

Life Sciences; Biology

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2023-08-18

Document Type

Dissertation

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd12891

Keywords

Indigenous knowledge systems, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, equity in education, Native students, Hawaiʻi, NHPI students, decolonizing science, cultural competency, culturally responsive teaching, place-based learning, remote sensing, GIS, semi-supervised classification, land cover classification

Language

english

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