NORTHERN STEWARDS:
Summer fellowships help community stakeholders map and share their stories
Northern Steward Summer Field School, a collaboration between Northern New Mexico College and Simtable, brings teachers and students together to learn how to map and model the natural world in order to help their communities better steward their cultural and environmental resources.
Northern Stewards is one of several community outreach initiatives and partnerships developed by Dr. Steve Cox, Associate Professor of Engineering at Northern. During the month-long program, local teachers and students ages 17 and up who care for the environment learn how to build maps with their phones and with drones. They learn to integrate that data into interactive models, develop their voice and narrate their maps into stories and build and program a simulation table that supports smart stewardship of our cultural and environmental resources. Participants receive a $2,000 stipend.
At the end of the fellowship, participants share their maps and models with the community, creating wonderful presentations about the places they love, experiences that transformed them and their desires to protect and preserve the land and their cultures.
Northern Stewards and Simtable received the 2023 Computational Social Science Impact Award from the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas for their conference paper, “Developing a Computational Geospatial Curriculum for Community Decision Making.”
Simtable, an important collaborator in this project, is committed to helping the next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, i.e. STEM, in developing strong computational skills. Simtable holds workshops and mentors students in using and writing their own agent-based models, encouraging students to approach their academic disciplines through the lens of computation.
You can learn more about the program, read the award-winning paper and see both individual and group mapping projects on their webpage at Northern Stewards home.
You can also contact Dr. Steve Cox at steve.cox@nnmc.edu or 505-747-5424.
The Northern Stewards Summer Mapping Field School is funded by NSF 1911607 GP-EXTRA: Place-Based Participatory Path to Geoscience and Indian Resources Development, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences and New Mexico State University.