- Year 2019
- NSF Noyce Award # 1660706
- First Name Dawn
- Last Name Meredith
- Discipline Biology, Chemistry, Geosciences, Math, Physics
- Co-PI(s)
Orly Buchbinder, UNH, orly.buchbinder@unh.edu; Carrie Hall, UNH, carrie.hall@unh.edu; Elyse Hambacher, UNH, elyse.hambacher@unh.edu; Meg Greenslade, UNH, margaret.greenslade@unh.edu
- Presenters
Julie Bryce, UNH, julie.bryce@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 teachers who have dispositions and skills to work with students from diverse backgrounds, and who have high expectations of all of those students.
Goals
How can we support scholars as they bring Culturally Responsive Teaching into their own practice?
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. Our interventions include workshops focused on CRT and on-going readings and reflections with a CRT focus.
Outcomes
(a) We have found that when working with scholars, an explicit focus on CRT directly impacts the mindset of beginning teachers. For example, as interns were completing their teacher performance assessment, there was evidence that Noyce scholars explicitly reference culturally responsive teaching and described students and families in an asset based, culturally affirming way. (b) Key deliverables are workshop activities and reading and reflections prompts focused on CRT. (c) This upcoming year we will develop a model for supplementary internship supervision, when the direct supervisor is not an expert in CRT.
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.
