- Year 2017
- NSF Noyce Award # 1660706
- First Name Dawn
- Last Name Meredith
- Discipline Other: all STEM disciplines
- Co-PI(s)
Orly Buchbinder, UNH, orly.buchbinder@unh.edu
Meg Greenslade, UNH, margaret.greenslade@unh.edu
Carrie Hall, UNH, carrie.hall@unh.edu - Presenters
Dawn Meredith, UNH, dawn.meredith@unh.edu
Need
As the growing population of US students become more culturally and linguistically diverse, and as the 21st century education becomes more STEM oriented, there is an acute need to prepare STEM teachers who have dispositions and skills to work with students from diverse backgrounds. By welcoming, engaging, and preparing a more diverse group of STEM students, the students themselves benefit with a wider variety of career options, and employers benefit by a well-prepared more diverse population of STEM professionals.
Goals
Our goals are to provide professional development for our scholars that includes a focus on culturally responsive teaching strategies and dispositions. This includes having scholars do their internships in high needs schools, focusing the internship seminar on CRT, and using formative assessment to guide and refine our efforts.
Approach
Our project adopts the model of Hernandez, Morales and Shroyer (2013) since it is both empirically tested and theoretically grounded in a comprehensive synthesis literature directly focused on STEM teacher preparation. The CRT model includes five facets: (1) CR teachers include content from many cultures (2) CR teachers view students’ cultural background as assets and help them to become critical, open minded and independent thinkers; (3) CR teachers create safe and engaging learning environments; (4) CR teachers explicitly address issues of ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic diversity and bias, and (5) CR teachers implement research-based instructional strategies that provide opportunities for all students. The key people involved in this grant are the scholars, the cooperating teachers, the internship seminar leaders, and the students.
Outcomes
The evaluation process will span the relevant coursework, the internship placement, and the initial two years of their practice. We will use multiple sources of data, such as lesson-plans, feedback provided by cooperating teachers, UNH field placement supervisors, surveys completed by principal and/or administrative personnel in the places of employment along with
self-report of the Scholars. Triangulating data from these and other sources will deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the development of CRT expertise in CREST Scholars. By connecting these developments to the Hernandez et al. (2013) model and the elements of UNH teacher preparation
program, we will generate Scholarship that contributes to the body of knowledge on effective CRT oriented teacher preparation program.
Broader Impacts
By continuing to develop and deploy the model of CRT focused STEM teaching, we will be preparing STEM teachers to in turn welcome, engage, and prepare a larger and more diverse STEM workforce. We will disseminate our best practices and artifacts (such as program evaluation instruments, scholar surveys, focus group protocols, internship seminar syllabi, CRT rubrics, and other relevant products) at Noyce conferences and through our website, which will continue past the life of this grant.
