The tribal colleges in North Dakota are essential for meeting the needs of educating health professionals on their respective reservations. Chemistry, a required course for nearly all health professions, often limits the number of students who enter these fields. Lack of familiarity to content may be one of the reasons for poor performance. This project will design experiments that make chemistry more interesting and relevant to Native American students. The five tribal college chemistry instructors along with chemistry professors from North Dakota State University and Lake Region State College, will develop culturally sensitive lecture and laboratory curriculum materials for their Introductory Organic and Biochemistry courses based on traditional plants, including those used for medicine. They will also add curriculum elements to their Introductory Inorganic Chemistry courses built around the high interest area of water analysis. The students who take this course will be monitored for three years. The chemistry instructors and six interested Native American students will meet each summer at North Dakota State University to design and test new lab experiments using plants and reservation waters. They will gather the plants that are well-known to the elders of all of the tribes and will employ these elders to teach them how to identify, harvest, and use the plants. They will present their work at conferences. A chemistry professor who currently teaches at North Dakota State University will direct the summer institutes and will also deliver the first Introductory Organic and Biochemistry course over Interactive Video Network (IVN) to all of the tribal colleges. The following two years will be taught over IVN by a tribal chemistry instructor.
