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SALT LAKE CITY — "It looks like string cheese," a Native American elementary school student said to his friend as he pulled something "stringy" out of a cow heart.
About 20 students in fifth through eighth grades in the Duchesne and Uintah school districts visited the University of Utah on Wednesday afternoon to explore the campus and participate in a dissection of a cow heart.
Donna Eldridge, administrative program coordinator for the School of Medicine's Office of Inclusion and Outreach at the U., said the activity was a way to provide deeper interest in academia among Native American students.
“They got excited. They really were interested,” Eldridge said. “They got to learn about the anatomy and the physiology of the heart.”
Native Americans have the highest dropout rate in the state, Eldridge said. The Navajo tribe member said she dropped out of school in high school and had a hard time working well in a school setting.
Eldridge beat the odds, went back to complete high school, and later earned both a bachelor's and master's degrees at the U.
Currently, only .5 percent of University of Utah students are Native Americans, and Eldridge hopes the school's outreach efforts will change that.
Martha Macomber works as an educational liaison between the U. and the Ute tribe. Her role is to help Native American students become goal-oriented, she said.
“If the kids made a goal of where they want to go, when they stumble, they can get back to the goal instead of worrying about the stumbling," Macomber said.
Many of the students at Wednesday’s activity would be first-generation college students if they continue on to higher education, Macomber said. And the students enjoy making the trip, she said.
“They drive three hours on a bus to spend three hours here, to go three hours back. And no one’s complaining,” Macomber said.
The University of Utah has a “special relationship” with the Ute tribe, she said, because the school uses the tribe's name. Events like the one Wednesday helps students see that the relationship is “about more than athletics,” Macomber said.
Eldridge said bringing the students from rural communities to a city and a large campus gives the students a “whole different experience.”
“They’re going to take that back home with them and tell their peers about it, their teachers about it, their parents about it, their siblings," she said. "And it just really creates that interest."
“I’m so excited for them," added Iktomi Favel, culture coordinator and summer school teacher from Fort Duchesne. "They don’t ever get this opportunity, especially with their peers."
Many of the students in the summer school program are related, according to Favel, which helps them be comfortable and “experience things more actively.”
“Education is key, as well as culture,” she said. “Living in two worlds is very important. So we need the education and culture component as well."
