Indigenous Ways of Learning

Dr. Zoe Higheagle Strong (Nez Perce tribe), vice provost for Native American relations and programs/tribal liaison to the president and associate professor in Educational Psychology at Washington State University, oversees the Office of Tribal Relations, Native American student services, and the Center for Native American Research and Collaboration. As an indigenous scholar she remains active in applied research that examines social, emotional, and cultural factors that influence students’ identity, safety, belonging, and learning in educational environments.

Dr. Tiffany Smith (she/her/hers) is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a descendent of the Muscogee Nation. She joined AISES in August 2021 as the director of research, where manages several grant-supported, research-related projects as well as conducts research focused on Indigenous students and professionals in STEM disciplines. She currently serves as adjunct faculty for the Higher Education Administration graduate program at the University of Alabama – Birmingham.

Nuria Jaumot-Pascual, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist at TERC. She researches the experiences in STEM education and careers of populations that live at the intersection of interlocking marginalities, with an emphasis on gender/sexual identity and race/ethnicity. She co-leads Native STEM Portraits, an NSF-funded longitudinal study of the experiences of Native students and professionals in STEM.

Andrew Dayton is a Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research examines cultural differences in collaborative micro-behavior in everyday learning contexts, especially involving Indigenous and Indigenous heritage families. His work is focused on the analysis of naturalistic video data in terms of mutual engagement and interactional synchrony. He is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.