Teaching and Learning Bioenergy and Sustainability Concepts Through Place-Based and Culturally Relevant Learning Opportunities.

Our project “Place-based Opportunities for Sustainable Outcomes and High-hopes” (acronym POSOH means "hello" in the Menominee language) is a collaborative effort to build opportunities for teaching and learning bioenergy concepts—from sustainability to the chemistry of carbon cycles—fully integrated with Indigenous knowledge. The project facilitates a variety of collaborative strategies to develop teacher and faculty skills for teaching bioenergy concepts using place-based, culturally relevant, and student-centered pedagogy.

We are building a cross-cultural community of professionals including educators, researchers, industry and custodians of Indigenous knowledge—a community with a wide range of understandings and interests in bioenergy, sustainability, and education. With a major effort in public schools, a long-term goal is that our community’s impact will reverberate throughout the region’s educational and research institutions to grow the bioenergy workforce and citizens’ environmental literacy. Our specific goals are to:

1) strengthen the regional K-16 education system, especially at underserved schools;

2) increase the number and diversity of students from rural and Tribal communities with opportunities to creatively collaborate and contribute to bioenergy fields;

3) increase participation in internships in industry or university summer research programs, ultimately entering undergraduate science programs.

Simultaneously, in partnership with the College of Menominee Nation and their Sustainable Development Institute, we are constructing a model for designing place-based, culturally-relevant materials—a model that will be widely disseminated to support more equitable science education and involvement in bioenergy and sustainability related studies and careers.