Culturally Responsive and Effective STEM Teaching: Strengthening the Foundation for Teacher Success in High-Need School Districts

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The Culturally Responsive and Effective STEM Teaching (CREST): Strengthening the Foundation for Teacher Success in High-Need School Districts project is a collaborative effort between the University of New Hampshire (UNH), the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH), and local school districts. Many school districts in both urban and rural areas of the State of New Hampshire struggle to find well-qualified STEM teachers who persist in their high-need schools, resulting in a critical shortage of STEM teachers across the state. This Track 1 Noyce project will address this need by attracting and preparing STEM undergraduate majors and STEM professional career changers to teach science and mathematics at the secondary level in high-need districts in a culturally responsive way. The project will target both undergraduate STEM majors and STEM professional career changers, and will produce a minimum of 31 highly-qualified STEM secondary school teachers. Project activities will use culturally responsive pedagogy to confront cultural and resource challenges that exist in high-need school districts; to develop an understanding and appreciation of their students' cultural background; and to develop more sophisticated competencies in addressing the needs of their socially, academically, and linguistically diverse students. As this project builds upon prior work, it will expand its strong preparation of scholars proficient in both content and pedagogy, and produce educators who can make STEM disciplines accessible and exciting to all groups of students in a context-driven way. Additionally, the CREST program will expand on existing collaborations with community colleges in the region to establish a new pathway and recruit STEM majors from two-year programs to UNH for three additional years culminating in a M.Ed. or M.A.T, thus preparing them for future careers in teaching and increasing the diversity of teachers. The CREST program will be directed by a multidisciplinary team of UNH faculty members from mathematics, physics, chemistry, biological sciences, earth sciences, and education in collaboration with faculty members from regional community colleges, school district partners, practicing teachers, and educational advisors. The program will supplement the well-recognized and rigorous UNH teacher preparation program with early STEM teaching activities, mentoring, and professional development focusing on culturally responsive teaching. Guided by this teaching model, the CREST scholars will consider their teaching through five lenses: content integration, facilitating knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, social justice, and academic development. Using a range of qualitative and quantitative tools (e.g., surveys, interviews, and teaching portfolios) the project team and the external evaluator will examine the role of culturally responsive teaching on preparing the CREST Noyce scholars. Hence, the project will contribute to this knowledge base, and will broadly disseminate the results through publications and conference presentations.