Building Capacity to Develop a Program for Future STEM Teachers within a Framework of Justice, Community, and Leadership

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This project aims to serve the national need of building capacity to prepare high-quality STEM teachers. To do so, it seeks to develop a teacher preparation program aligned with the College’s Justice, Community, and Leadership Program. The project will collect data needed to develop a program that addresses persistent national and regional challenges in STEM teacher education. It will examine high STEM teacher turnover in schools that serve populations with high levels of poverty. Data about representation of people of color and women in STEM teaching will be examined. In addition, the project will explore cultural relevance and social/environmental justice connections in the STEM curriculum. The College will develop curricular programming with the aim of preparing STEM teachers from diverse backgrounds who persist as teachers in urban, high-need schools. This project at St. Mary’s College includes internal partnerships with the Kalmanovitz School of Education, School of Science, and School of Liberal Arts, and a partnership with the Mount Diablo Unified School District, a high-need local educational agency. The long-term goal of the project is to design an evidence-based, equity- and social justice-relevant undergraduate STEM teacher preparation program that combines robust STEM disciplinary training, secondary teacher education, and justice, community, and leadership studies to prepare students to teach in high-need, urban public schools. This project intends to build the capacity for individuals earning a degree in a STEM discipline to simultaneously earn teacher certification. This project may contribute to the STEM education field by generating new knowledge about the convergence of STEM disciplines, secondary pedagogy, and social justice-oriented teacher education. This Capacity Building project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 STEM teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.