U.S. education generally portrays science from the Western perspective. As a result, students from different cultures, also referred to as nonmajority students, often struggle to relate material learned in class to their own cultures and lived experiences. Cultural relevance is gaining momentum in broader education reform movements to relate content in the classroom to students' cultures and worldviews. Even with this momentum, examples of implementing culturally relevant instruction remain sparse in science education, and in chemistry education in particular. This article outlines a collaboration between Iḷ isagvik College, a tribal college in Utqiagvik, Alaska, and the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to learn more about how culture and context influence the design and implementation of culturally relevant curricular materials for introductory chemistry. Throughout the ongoing process, students work with community members, Elders, and scientists to develop an environmental chemistry research project focused on integrating local, cultural, and scientific resources to explore Arctic snow processes. Participating students engaged in a three-part unit, including information gathering from cultural and scientific resources to develop research questions, collecting and analyzing samples from the local area using analytical methods, and interpreting the data and communicating results to the greater community. Here we outline the design considerations used to construct and implement a culturally relevant chemistry unit. We describe activities where students cultivated relationships with the community and identified resources to inform their research design and classroom interactions. We also detail how culturally relevant education relates to the unit and identify areas where we are still growing as we engage in the design process. Finally, this project demonstrates how a student-driven environmental chemistry project can connect introductory science students to their community while engaging in authentic research practices.

Reading and understanding scientific literature is an essential skill for any scientist to learn. While students' scientific literacy can be improved by reading research articles, an article's technical language and structure can hinder students' understanding of the scientific material. Furthermore, many students struggle with interpreting graphs and other models of data commonly found in scientific literature. To introduce students to scientific literature and promote improved understanding of data and graphs, we developed a guided-inquiry activity adapted from a research article on snow chemistry and implemented it in a general chemistry laboratory course. Here, we describe how we adapted figures from the primary literature source and developed questions to scaffold the guided-inquiry activity. Results from semi-structured qualitative interviews suggest that students learn about snow chemistry processes and engage in scientific practices, including data analysis and interpretation, through this activity. This activity is applicable in other introductory science courses as educators can adapt most scientific articles into a guided-inquiry activity.

Seven mycobacteriophages from distinct geographical locations were isolated, using Mycobacterium smegmatis mc2155 as the host, and then purified and sequenced. All of the genomes are related to cluster A mycobacteriophages, BobSwaget and Lokk in subcluster A2; Fred313, KADY, Stagni, and StepMih in subcluster A3; and MyraDee in subcluster A18, the first phage to be assigned to that subcluster.

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