Connecting Native Students to STEM Research Using Virtual Archaeology

ABSTRACT Universities struggle to provide meaningful education and mentorship to Native American students, especially in STEM fields such as archaeology and geography. The Native American Summer Mentorship Program (NASMP) at Utah State University is designed to address Native student retention and representation, and it fosters collaboration between mentors and mentees. In spring 2020, as university instruction went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, NASMP mentors were faced with adapting hands-on activities and face-to-face interaction to an online format. Using our Water Heritage Anthropological Project as a case study, we show how virtual archaeological, archival, spatial, and anthropological labs can be adapted for online delivery. This approach may be especially useful for reaching students in rural settings but also for engaging students in virtual or remote research in the field sciences.

“I’ll Be Right Behind You”: Native American Families, Land Debt, and College Affordability

Family connections are critical for Native student persistence, yet families’ voices are absent in research. Using an Indigenous-specific version of educational debt, land debt, we center familial perspectives by exploring the financial struggles among Native families as their students transition to a Predominately White Institution. Findings indicate that Indigenous families experienced fear and frustration surrounding college affordability and the financial aid process. Regardless, these Native families made extreme sacrifices in paying for college. These findings were contextualized within the economic conditions created by land theft from Indigenous peoples. Returning to land debt, we argue that institutions need to begin from a perspective of what is owed to Native peoples in their policy decisions. That is, such decisions should take account of the benefits historically accrued by institutions residing on forcibly taken Indigenous land, and then examine how that debt can be repaid by supporting Native students, families, and communities.

Commentary on the Recruitment and Retention of American Indian and Alaska Native Students in California Postsecondary Education Institutions

In this commentary, we engage and summarize existing practices for recruiting and retaining American Indian and Alaska Native students in postsecondary institutions in California. This commentary is the output of a two-day symposium, “Lighting a Path Forward: UC Land Grants, Public Memory, and Tovaangar,” held at the University of California, Los Angeles in October of 2019. The symposium brought together campus and community leaders from across California to discuss the past, present and future of American Indian and Alaska Native student and community concerns, and provide intervening policy and practice recommendations. Participants included both American Indian and Alaska Native and non-Native individuals with a wealth of professional experience and employment in American Indian and Alaska Native education, from the California Community College, California State University and University of California systems. We jointly created a table of critical interventions in education, the justification for this, and potential strategies for implementation. Here, we summarize the discussion of participants from the American Indian and Alaska Native student retention and recruitment workshop to document recommends interventions for campus practitioners and leaders to serve as a guiding document for system and campus advocacy.

Linguocommunicative competence of the linguist teacher: ethnospecificity of anthroponyms’ functioning in the learning and pedagogical discourse of the educational space

The article deals with the linguocommunicative competence of a language teacher in relation to a professionally correct contact with a non-native student in the class of Russian / Ukrainian as a foreign language. The focus is on the form of addressing the student in view of ethnospecificity, i.e. using the full personal name and taking into account the number and functions of its constituents, their legally fixed sequence and traditions of naming. The purpose of the research is to draw the attention of language teachers to the ethnospecificity of the anthroponymic formula, functional and socio-cultural significance of its components, to its connection with the national concept of personality and the linguistic picture of the world, to its special place in the process of adaptation and acculturation of foreign students to a different educational of space. The authors identify, describe and analyze the functions of these constituents in the anthroponymic formulas of numerous ethnic groups that are represented in the university educational space (Arabic and Indian students). The article reveals their differences from the modern traditional anthroponymic formulas for the social identification of personality in Ukraine. The authors analyze the correspondence of such a form of address to the requirements of intercultural communication and the limits, behind which the student begins to feel discomfort and even could have a cultural shock. The relationship of anthroponymicons with the linguistic picture of the world, national concepts of personality and mentality of each ethnic group have been noted as well. The modern general trends of the process of changing the world anthroponymicon, lexical and grammatical educational topics in the language of the specialty, during the study of which students need knowledge of practical comparative anthroponymy, have been named. The article uses the concept of ethos to determine the hierarchy of communication values, which is reflected in the sequence of components of such a formula and markers of a personal name.

Enabling Robust Grammatical Error Correction in New Domains: Data Sets, Metrics, and Analyses

Until now, grammatical error correction (GEC) has been primarily evaluated on text written by non-native English speakers, with a focus on student essays. This paper enables GEC development on text written by native speakers by providing a new data set and metric. We present a multiple-reference test corpus for GEC that includes 4,000 sentences in two new domains ( formal and informal writing by native English speakers) and 2,000 sentences from a diverse set of non-native student writing. We also collect human judgments of several GEC systems on this new test set and perform a meta-evaluation, assessing how reliable automatic metrics are across these domains. We find that commonly used GEC metrics have inconsistent performance across domains, and therefore we propose a new ensemble metric that is robust on all three domains of text.

Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawai‘i’s Public Schools, 1920–1940

This article explores the efforts of Native Hawaiian students to appropriate and take control of their schooling as part of a broad Indigenous story of empowerment during Hawai‘i’s territorial years (1900–1959). Histories of this era lack a visible Indigenous presence and contribute to the myth that Natives passively accepted the Americanization of the islands. This article challenges this myth by examining Native student writings to tell a story of Native involvement in education as a pragmatic strategy designed to advance distinctly Indigenous interests through the American education system. These stories reveal schools as complex sites of negotiation where Native students regularly navigated sociocultural pressure from their friends, parents, teachers, and America's growing presence in the islands while testing and exploring their own identities.