Collaborative Research: Community-Engaged Preparation of Highly Skilled, Equity-focused Secondary STEM Teachers

This project aims to serve the national need of preparing highly skilled STEM teachers for high-need school districts. The project is centered at a Hispanic-Serving Institution and will be conducted in partnership with a community college and a high-need school district. The project aims to support 24 Noyce Scholars as they complete STEM degrees and gain secondary teaching certification.

At the heart of this partnership is a decade-long mutual commitment to develop and retain culturally competent, day-one-ready secondary STEM educators through a strong community-engaged teacher preparation program. The project seeks to ensure that Noyce Scholars will know and understand the students they will teach. To this end, the project will engage community mentors to share local knowledge and cultural awareness with the Noyce Scholars.

In addition, the project incorporates service-learning and self-efficacy-building experiences, with an emphasis on relationship-building with a diverse community. The overall goal is to prepare equity-focused teachers who will use culturally relevant, highly effective teaching strategies that increase student learning, success, and sense of belonging in STEM.

This project at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi includes a partnership with Del Mar College, Texas A&M University, and West Oso School District. It seeks to recruit 24 highly qualified, diverse biology, chemistry, marine and life sciences, mathematics, and physics majors and support them to become culturally competent critical thinkers and effective STEM educators in high-need school districts.

The project intends to generate new knowledge related to how project activities develop future teachers’ STEM self-efficacy, STEM interest, and changes in perception of inclusive teaching and learning. The project also seeks to identify mechanisms, resources, and policies that support and constrain effective implementation of the teacher preparation program and to create a replicable model that can be replicated at other institutions with similar resources and challenges.

Outcomes from this project will be disseminated through presentations and scholarly publications. 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 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.