Expanding Pathways for STEM Teacher Education to Better Serve Minnesota’s Diverse Student Populations

This project aims to serve the national need for building the capacity of secondary STEM education programs to recruit and train more secondary STEM teachers, especially those from diverse backgrounds. Significant barriers exist that discourage STEM majors from pursuing careers in secondary STEM teaching. For example, it often takes longer than four years to meet both STEM degree and licensure requirements, thus raising time to degree and college costs.

Additionally, limited strategies and structures are available to encourage and support diverse students’ pursuit of a STEM teaching career. In this project, the University of St. Thomas will work to encourage STEM teaching careers by streamlining its curricular requirements, identifying and addressing barriers to teaching careers, and partnering with a community college to connect with a greater diversity of future STEM teachers.

The University expects this effort to increase the number of secondary STEM teachers in Minnesota that match the state’s diverse urban student population.

The University of St. Thomas, in partnership with Normandale Community College, aims to create a mechanism for recruiting diverse STEM majors to consider becoming secondary STEM teachers while completing their STEM degrees. The partnership intends to collaborate to streamline STEM and secondary education curricula, and to identify barriers to a teaching career.

Few students at the University choose to become secondary teachers, and completing a dual degree program in STEM and education can be even more challenging for community college transfer students. The absence of strategies and supports for these double majors contributes to the low graduation rates of secondary teachers. The goals of this Capacity Building project are to: 1) restructure STEM degree programs to allow for a B.A. double major in a STEM discipline and secondary teacher education that enables graduation in 4-years; 2) complete needs assessments to identify barriers encountered by University of St.

Thomas students and transfer students to completing a baccalaureate degree in a STEM discipline and in secondary education; and 3) partner with Normandale Community College to align their STEM courses and develop strategies for a seamless transfer pathway for community college students to St. Thomas University. The project anticipates achieving these goals can lead to development of a Noyce Track 1 proposal in the future to provide scholarship support to both community college and four-year college students to complete dual degrees and become secondary teachers of a STEM discipline.

Findings from the curriculum analyses and needs assessments could serve as a model for other colleges and universities in addressing curricular and non-curricular challenges of preparing more secondary STEM teachers for the future. This Noyce 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 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts.

It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 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.