Leveraging Technology for Justice-Oriented Science Teaching

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This project aims to serve the national need of preparing high-quality science teachers who are prepared to teach in urban high-need school districts. A focus of the project will be to prepare educators to teach social justice-oriented science with integrated technology to diverse populations of students. To accomplish this, the project will incorporate four underlying components. (1) Paid internships will be provided for freshmen and sophomore science majors to experience teaching youth science at community-based camps. (2) Two credential pathways for future science teachers will be offered - an Integrated Teacher Education Program (ITEP) for undergraduate science majors and special cohorts in the Credential Program for College of Science graduates. (3) One-year scholarships will be provided to prospective teachers who will complete the science teaching credentials via one of the two pathways. (4) After the prospective teachers graduate, two years of induction support will be provided during their early teaching period in a high-need school. The internships are designed to gain and foster students' interest in teaching science. Monthly workshops that integrate technology and social justice-oriented teaching approaches will be provided to the science-credential scholarship students. Likewise, a special course dedicated to teaching STEM and development of a community of practice will be part of the credentialing curriculum. Induction will include regular workshops with project team members, coaching meetings with the project's dedicated mentor, and continuation of communities of practice. The project will contribute directly to the development of a skilled STEM workforce in the United States.This project at San Diego State University (SDSU), an Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), includes partnering with San Diego Unified School District, an ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse, high-need school district. As a result, the project represents an authentic, place-based partnership. The project has several goals. First, over five years, the project will recruit a diverse group of twenty-five (25) university freshman and sophomore science majors into paid field experiences to encourage them to consider science teaching as a career. Related to this, a second goal is to recruit a diverse group of forty-one (41) high-achieving students who are majoring in, or have received degrees in, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geosciences, mathematics, or physics in SDSU's College of Sciences to receive a one-year scholarship to complete a credentialing program for K-12 STEM teaching. For a third goal, project leaders will investigate the processes of recruiting, supporting, retaining, and empowering science majors to become STEM teachers who embody a dedication to technology-based and socially-just science teaching. Fourth, the project team will implement and study transitional professional development support for the recipients' first years of teaching. Through research-based learning experiences, this project will develop the recipients’ expertise to enact justice-focused science instruction that is rich in technology. Comprehensive project evaluation, using qualitative and quantitative methods, will provide both formative and summative data and feedback. Proactive and robust dissemination of project outcomes and lessons learned from the SDSU model will have multiple branches. A project website, which will include announcements of events, updated project findings, and a repository of teacher education resources created by and for the project, will be maintained by SDSU's Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education. Also, specific dissemination efforts will be ongoing at the local, regional, state, and national levels. This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends 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 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the 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.