United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota is the first tribal college in the country to be a “Tree Campus USA” site. The designation came May 6 from three of the nation’s major tree planting organizations involved with the program: the Arbor Day Foundation of Nebraska, the USDA Forest Service, and the National Association of State Foresters.
As the nation’s oldest tribally controlled colleges and universities prepare to celebrate their fiftieth anniversaries, a new book recalls the challenges faced by those who founded some of the first colleges located on reservations in the 1960s and 1970s. Continue reading
Thanks to fracking, North Dakota is now the second largest oil producer in the nation. Drilling and maintaining its roughly 8,000 wells has brought revenue and low unemployment rates to the state. At the same time, some residents worry that it is damaging the environment and contaminating water supplies, threating the health of residents.
Continue readingAre robots now passe? The coming thing in undergraduate STEM research just might be rockets–including rockets that break the sound barrier. According to a feature recently aired on the NPR program Here and Now, faculty and students at Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Washington are leading the way.
Continue readingThe liberal arts should be an integral part of engineering education, according to Loni M. Bordoloi, program director at the Teagle Foundation, and James J. Winebrake, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, they describe several innovative programs that are bringing these two distinct worlds together: Continue reading
Testimony by Dr. Hannan LaGarry spotlights the vital role of research in tribal colleges
Continue readingA landmark agreement signed by Sisseton Wahpeton College and North Dakota State University will support the academic needs of Indian students attending both institutions, especially in STEM fields, tribal and state education leaders recently announced.
Illegal immigrants can build robots, too.
That’s the message of Spare Parts: Four undocumented teenagers, one ugly robot, and the battle for the American dream. This new book by Joshua Davis (FSG Originals, 2014) recounts the work of four high school students who, according to a January 10 story in New Scientist, “live in a run-down suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, with barely a legal immigration document between them.”
The National Science Foundation is inviting proposals to support innovation in undergraduate math instruction during the first two years of college. According to a recently released Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the goal is to strengthen academic success in core math courses for students interested in pursuing STEM degrees. Projects will be funded as supplements to existing awards. Specifically:
Until recently, many American Indians living on the nation’s poorest and most isolated Indian reservations did not know what engineering was or what engineers did. Aside from associations with locomotives, engineering was a mysterious and inaccessible profession.
The 2014 Pre-Engineering Education Collaboratives workshop will be held December 16-17 at the Embassy Suites in Minneapolis. The focus of this year’s gathering will be on discussing and documenting outcomes of the NSF-funded effort. It will be a rich conversation and we are looking forward to your presentations.
The full agenda is available here: 2014 PEEC Workshop agenda
Tribal colleges are often viewed as under-resourced institutions that must do more with less; they have smaller campuses, fewer books, less equipment for teaching and learning. This image conforms to a widely held view, often reinforced by those of us who advocate for the movement, that tribal colleges succeed despite their limited funding.
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