Colorado State University

The Little Shop of Physics has a long-established relationship with the Oglala Lakota Nation. We have visited the Pine Ridge Reservation at least once a year for over a decade, and groups from Oglala Lakota College and Generations Indigenous Ways have come to Colorado State University for a variety of programs for students and teachers alike.

The pandemic threw into question the viability of our long-planned summer teacher workshop. Thanks to some ingenuity and hard work by the LSOP team and our Oglala Lakota partners, we hosted a 3-day workshop virtually! Twenty K-12 teachers and preservice teachers participated in this workshop, which focused on weather and climate. Before the workshop, each teacher received a kit in the mail with various experiments. The workshop itself was inquiry-based: teachers would do an experiment, discuss the result in small groups hosted by LSOP staff, and then we would all come back together to synthesize and extent the concepts, as well as discuss pedagogy.