Science Teachers for Rural America - A Post-Baccalaureate STEM Teacher Licensure Project

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The project aims to serve the national need of preparing high-quality science teachers with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to serve in rural communities. The project at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, will recruit high-quality biology, chemistry, and physics majors and prepare and place them to teach in rural settings, which often represent spaces of education inequity. The prospective teachers will complete a one-year post-baccalaureate preparation program to teach in high-need districts. During the first two years of their teaching careers, they will receive mentoring and additional professional development training to help them continue to develop as effective teachers who are culturally responsive, resilient, and skilled at teaching in high-need rural schools. An important impetus of the project will be the development and testing of strategies to address the challenge of staffing high-need rural school settings with effective science teachers. This will enable high-need schools in western and central Kansas and other rural areas nationwide to provide their students a better science education. This, in turn, will help prepare many of these same students for the STEM workforce.This project at Fort Hays State University includes Kansas partnerships with Southwest Plains Regional Service Center at Sublette, Deerfield High School and Deerfield School District – USD 216, and Dighton School District – USD 482. This project aims to address rural STEM teacher workforce challenges and retention through a focus on the unique contexts of rurality and teaching STEM in rural settings. The project has four underlying goals. First, the project will recruit, provide scholarships, and prepare, through a post-baccalaureate program, thirty (30) STEM majors over the five-year duration of the project to obtain licensure to teach. A second goal is to place the newly licensed teachers in rural schools and implement an online induction (mentorship) program designed to assist in teacher retention. Third, project team members will engage in an iterative and formative feedback process aimed at continuous program improvement. The fourth goal is to explore various models and develop and disseminate a model for high-quality rural science teacher preparation. The theoretical basis behind exploring models and developing a rural model has three fundamental components - context, curriculum, and conveyance (Azano, et.al [2019,2021] and Schulte [2018]). Context will hold an emphasis on rural settings. Curriculum will include place-based pedagogies. Conveyance will feature in-person and online access to teacher preparation programs. Evaluation of the activities and strategies will utilize a mixed-methods approach and be performed by the Docking Institute of Public Affairs using process and outcome elements to advance understanding of effective STEM teacher preparation and retention for rural schools. The project team will take a multi-tiered approach to dissemination of program outcomes, findings, and features of rural science teacher preparation. In particular, dissemination will include presentations at state and national conferences along with publications in rural and teacher education journals. 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.