The students giggled as they threw bread dough against a table they were gathered around and began to knead it. Nearby, other kids opened canned fruit for pie filling, flecks of flour sticking to their hands and dusting their clothes.
Parents, grandparents and other community members helped guide the children on a February morning at Kha’p’o Community School in Santa Clara Pueblo, about 25 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
“We’re all learners here today,” sixth grade teacher Diane Chavarria said to the room.
Her students paired up with kindergarteners for the activity. The idea was that by preparing and then baking a few different treats, the kids would learn about kinetic energy and the scientific method in a way they could actually connect with.
Chavarria is one of seven educators designing a new science curriculum for the Indigenous Science Initiative. Started by nonprofits NACA Inspired Schools Network and the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation three years ago, this school year teachers are piloting the curriculum — which, according to the initiative’s coordinators, meets state and national standards — at seven schools in New Mexico, plus one in Minnesota.
“There’s a wealth of research now that shows that students respond to curriculum that reflects their context and their identities, and that when students feel a connection to what they’re learning, whether it’s a mirror or a window, they’re more engaged, and they tend to achieve more as well,” said LANL Foundation coordinator Paul LeFrancois, who taught at the Santa Clara Pueblo school.
After loading up baking sheets, the students headed to an outdoor oven, called an horno (pronounced OR-noh) or pante (pAHn-teh), and carefully added each tray.
Then they found seats around the oven and at picnic tables nearby, to start on a worksheet that asked them to write hypotheses about what would happen to the food. Chavarria floated among the students. “What are we testing?” she asked. Students threw out ideas: How long the bread, hand pies, and cookies would take to bake, which would bake fastest, how the schools’ oven compared to the ovens at home.
When the students went back to the classroom, some of the helpers stayed outside to watch over the food.
That included Madeline Naranjo, a potter from Santa Clara Pueblo whose grandson is one of the kindergarteners who took part in the activity. Naranjo helps out regularly at the school, guiding students in pottery making.
“When I was growing up, we didn’t have this type of interactions with our culture. We had Tewa language lessons, and none of this, what we’re experiencing now,” she said a couple hours after the food went in. “What I see is, especially with Diane, incorporating a lot of the adobe-making, today bread-making, making jerky, making pottery, weaving belts, it’s all hands-on and it’s all tied and connected to culture.”
As she spoke, a timer on her phone went off.
“The bread’s done,” she said to her son-in-law with a laugh. “They should come out.”
Later, sixth grader Jonathan Naranjo asked to be interviewed.
Reflecting on the baking activity, he talked about experimentation: “Before, our ancestors, we were scientists. We didn’t get it right the first time, but we got it right the couple times.”
This story is part of Indigenously Positive, a collaborative series from New Mexico In Depth and NMPBS telling joyful stories from Native communities throughout our state.
A legacy of violent assimilation
Historically, education in the U.S. has been designed to do the opposite of the Indigenous Science Initiative’s goals.
From the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the federal government, often in partnership with religious organizations, operated boarding schools built to forcibly assimilate Native children. Once at the schools, children were punished for speaking their languages. Some were identified by new English names. Many survivors reported physical and sexual abuse by staff, and at least 3,104 children died, according to a 2024 Washington Post investigation, although a historian interviewed by the newspaper estimates the true death toll to be as high as 40,000 children.
After the boarding school era, many Native children were funneled into a public education system that’s given tribal nations little control, where Native children infrequently see themselves represented, either in their teachers or in the content of their lessons.
In New Mexico, parents and several school districts sued the state over a decade ago, arguing it had failed Native American and low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. In 2018, a state judge agreed, ruling the state had violated its own constitution by not adequately educating those student groups, who together made up about 70% of public school students, resulting in poor academic outcomes.
The plaintiffs returned to court in 2024 to accuse the state of not complying with previous court rulings in the case, known as Yazzie/Martinez. A different judge again sided with the plaintiffs and the state Public Education Department was ordered by the court to develop an action plan. Officials picked two nonprofits to help with that work; the LANL Foundation was one.
Native education advocates, including the plaintiffs and their attorneys, have criticized the draft and final versions of the plan filed last fall.
New Mexico In Depth asked what the LANL Foundation would say to people who might be skeptical about the science curriculum, given that the foundation was also part of the action plan’s development.
Spokesperson Stephanie Montoya wrote in an email that the foundation led engagement efforts that gathered comments and input from communities around the state that state officials then used to design the plan. Documentation of those public discussions was provided to the Public Education Department and the other nonprofit, but the foundation wasn’t involved in drafting the plan itself, she wrote.
“While the Foundation did not participate in the drafting of the plan, we worked to ensure that the community input process was fair, equitable, inclusive, and designed to lift up community voices,” Montoya wrote. “Our hope is to always work in partnership with community, and we hope that as the Action Plan is revisited and improved upon, this is taken into consideration.”
The foundation’s work on the Indigenous Science Initiative, Montoya added, came before its work related to the court case.
Made to be adapted
One of the goals of the initiative is to make the curriculum open source later this year, free to access online. Teachers are meant to tailor it for their particular students.
“That’s the hook for the kids,” said initiative coordinator Diane Katzenmeyer-Delgado from NACA Inspired Schools Network. “It’s about engagement. If you can’t engage the students, you’ve already lost them.”
Like LeFrancois, Katzenmeyer-Delgado used to teach at Kha’p’o Community School.
She recounted a girl questioning during a math lesson why she needed to learn to create data tables.
Then, days later, a person who works for the tribal nation came over to the classroom to talk with students about water samples they’d taken to better understand the impacts of devastating wildfires in the region and flooding that followed. That employee shared data tables, and “the light bulb went off,” Katzenmeyer-Delgado said, in part because they looked similar to what the class was learning.
“She says, ‘I see the connection, Mrs. Delgado. This is why you’re teaching us what you’re teaching us. And now I know when I finish my school, I can come back and I can give back to the tribe, and this is how I can do it.’ And to me, it was everything coming full circle,” she said. “It was showing where community values were, where community partnerships were, where their learning was integrated, and that there was value in that, and identity, and she could see herself in those roles, giving back and using these skills.”
With an open-source curriculum, though, comes a challenge.
“The implementation needs to be different in different Indigenous communities,” said Dr. Natalie Martinez (Laguna Pueblo), a former teacher and principal who’s now a professor in New Mexico State University’s School of Teacher Preparation, Administration, and Leadership. “Because not only are social systems going to be different, but so are belief systems and the adherence to different protocols, and how to approach different kinds of knowledge is going to vary.”
The teacher-designers, including Chavarria, are contemplating what kind of guidance they might be able to offer on that front, said Martinez, who acts as a community liaison for the initiative.
She’s arranged gatherings over the past few years where parents and educators have shared their thoughts about the curriculum. And about a year ago, an advisory collective formed, Martinez said, which has helped the teacher-designers think through questions about how other educators, particularly those who are not Native, can adapt lessons for their communities.
The collective’s members include Native education experts whose work has informed the initiative.
“We definitely exist within a much larger mosaic of curriculum work like this, which is great because there’s a lot of things to look to for inspiration,” LeFrancois said.
Looking ahead
There’s a hope that the Public Education Department will eventually endorse the curriculum.
“When someone at the department who has decision-making authority says, ‘OK, this is going to count as the official curriculum,’ once that hurdle has been overcome, then it’s going to be more widely accepted,” Martinez said.
While it’s made for middle school, they plan to branch out to include other grades, she added.
Back at Kha’p’o Community School, the students, Chavarria, and her co-teachers for the day took turns dishing up.
As everyone ate, Chavarria asked what they learned or enjoyed from the activity.
A sixth grade student talked about patience, adding that things might not work the first time. A kindergartener shouted: “I learned how to cook!”
Jonathan, the sixth grader, spoke during his interview with New Mexico In Depth and NMPBS about how outdoor ovens — like the one his class worked with, which the entire school helped build — are used to make food for Santa Clara Pueblo’s annual feast day.
“It’s just going down, passing down,” he said. “Some day I might get to do that, too, you know? Make one, or I’m gonna come here to do it with the kids, the younger, the other generations after me. Yeah, that’s what I think about.”
Indigenously Positive is a collaborative series from New Mexico In Depth and NMPBS. Host/producer: Bella Davis (Yurok); Director/producer: Benjamin C Yazza (Diné)
Have an idea for a story? Reach out to Bella at [email protected].