Students Sophina Tyler, Patricia Francis, and Gary Mike worked in the old chemistry lab in 1992. With the new resources, lab exercises are no longer canceled due to lack of chemicals. Photo by Ed McCombs

Tribal college students are often single parents with limited financial resources. They must work to provide for the family and, simultaneously, take time to nurture the family and themselves. It is a difficult act, balancing the roles of provider and nurturer. In some ways, the dilemma our tribal colleges and universities face resembles that of such single parents: Lack of resources in math/science education is driving faculty to seek external grants. Such efforts to provide for institutional needs consume time and energy, often taking away from the teaching, community-service, and other nurturing missions of the college.

What role do grants play in tribal colleges’ math/science programs? How does such “fund-raising” affect teaching, research, and community-service missions of the college? How can we balance the roles of providers and nurturers?

These questions are being asked at the Shiprock, N.M., campus of Diné College, one of several satellite campuses of the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. (The main campus is in Tsaile, Ariz.) The Shiprock campus offers courses in Diné language and culture, social sciences, foundation studies (language and communication skills), business, fine arts, and math/science. Financial resources provided to the Shiprock campus are minimal—just enough to cover faculty and staff salaries and a tiny amount for infrastructure repair and maintenance for the deteriorating former elementary school building that houses the college. The administration typically sets aside a token amount ($500-$1,000 each year) for math/science instructional resources.

Nevertheless, the college has several new science laboratories, and five of the Math and Science Department faculty members are Ph.D.s, including graduates of Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern University. Although the laboratories are housed in trailers and modular buildings, they represent an impressive success for the tiny college campus and its 500 students. The department offers courses in math, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, and earth and environmental sciences. Such courses involve higher student-teacher contact hours and, increasingly, laboratory exercises. Computer science instruction requires adequate numbers of computer, peripherals, and software. With innovative teaching techniques for improved learning, even math now requires laboratory exercises for many courses.

With only $1,000 or less as institutional support, the math/science faculty realized they needed to look elsewhere for resources to make math/science teaching more meaningful and effective. Such improvements were necessary not only to enhance teaching of math/science but also to significantly boost their research capability and strengthen their community outreach.

Grants create new challenges

Enter grants. Nearly seven years ago, the department started going after external grants in a big way: proposals were written by the dozen and sent off to funding agencies. Some were sent to the Department of Education’s MSIP (Minority Science Improvement Program) and were purely for teaching resources. Others were for research with the hope that external funds could help acquire equipment and materials usable for research and teaching. These funds would also pay for student and teacher time to carry out research relevant to the Diné people and offer students an invaluable learning experience. Still other proposals were for community-outreach; mostly to propagate science and math learning to Diné school children.

Initially, grant-seeking responsibilities were cheerfully shouldered, mostly by Dr. Mark Bauer and Dr. Steven Semken, helped by most math/science faculty. Eventually, their joint efforts started paying off, and badly needed funds started to trickle in. With help from Waste-management Education and Research Consortium (WERC), a modern, modular chemistry teaching laboratory was brought in and the old chemistry laboratory remodeled. The Navajo Dryland Environments Laboratory (NDEL) research lab was set up in an old single-wide trailer. Specialized instruction programs and research and internship opportunities became available. Gradually an alphabet soup of funders became commonplace around the department: DOE (Department of Energy), LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), NSF (National Science Foundation), MSIP, MBRS (Minority Biomedical Research Support), LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory), and WERC.

Much like the single parent who obtains pleasure improving the family’s material resources, teachers find pleasure improving the teaching and learning resources at the college. No more are laboratory exercises canceled due to lack of chemicals or physics “experiments” done with paper and pencil because of inadequate equipment. The computer science lab has new computers, appropriate software, and even a high-speed Internet connection. Math labs, with graphing calculators, have helped improve the success rate in the dreaded college algebra courses! Laser printers have replaced dot-matrix ones. There is an adequate supply of computer floppy disks. Students of anatomy and physiology courses have specimens on which to practice their learning. Books, video-tapes, and audio-visual equipment have added greatly to math/science instruction and student learning. For a college campus that opened barely 25 years ago, Shiprock zoomed into the high-tech age.

Price of success

These benefits, however, come at a price—much like the working single parents who are unable to spend as much time with their families as they would like. Getting grants to the college has taken much time and effort on the part of some of the teachers. Since these funds come with a list of tasks to be accomplished, it takes an additional commitment of time for project execution, documentation and reporting, and financial management. Those faculty members who are more heavily involved in these efforts, seek release time and often receive it–albeit at levels much lower than necessary to do the job well. Thus they spend a lot of their own time carrying out project-related duties, often staying until the wee hours of the night to meet proposal deadlines.

Without adequate release time and encouragement, the extra responsibilities eventually take a severe toll on their personal well being—exhausting them physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Unfortunately, when such individuals have to play the dual role of provider and nurturer, their teaching is affected. The irony is that teaching, which was hampered in the past by lack of hardware, can be hurt by lack of the “software” of teaching.

This has also generated tension within the department. Some teachers perceive a decline in teaching and excessive subservience to and dependence on external grants. Others stoutly defend grants for the infinite improvement in the resources that students and teachers can access. Still others, a visible minority, see both points of view and wonder if there can be a better balancing between the roles of providers and nurturers. Others in the college community raise ethical questions about the sources of contributions, such as the Department of Energy and its national laboratories.

What can we do about it? Perhaps a starting point would be to acknowledge that for math/science departments to fulfill their missions (teaching, research, and community outreach), they need more resources than are currently available to tribal colleges. Much like their counterparts at mainstream private and public institutions of higher learning, tribal colleges must find the balance between teaching and fund-raising/research/outreach activities. We must also accept the reality of external grants and the responsibilities that come with grants. Additionally, the administration should acknowledge the changing role of teachers and offer adequate release time from teaching. This would allow teachers to better balance their roles of providers and nurturers…and create the harmony necessary to do things right for our students.

Ravindra M. Srivastava (Ph.D., P.E.) now works as an environmental engineer at Boxelder Sanitation District in Fort Collins, Colo. For three years, he was an instructor in the Math/Science Department at Diné College’s Shiprock campus.