- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2050579
- First Name Lynne
- Last Name Zummo
- Registration Noyce Scholar/Teaching Fellow/Master Teacher
- Discipline Chemistry, Geosciences, Life Sciences, Physics
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Rebecca McMurray, Benjamin Searle and Lynne Zummo, University of Utah
Approach
The Utah Collaborative for Equitable STEM Teaching (UCET) is a partnership between the Colleges of Education and Science at the University of Utah, Salt Lake Community College, and local school districts to recruit and prepare highly qualified, equity-oriented secondary science teachers. As part of this Noyce Track 1 Teacher Scholarship program, UCET partners created a new course intended to extend and deepen Scholars’ science teaching preparation. This course, called Teaching 3D Science through Environmental & Social Issues: Preparing Students for a Changing World, was designed to address the major challenge of how to support pre-service teachers (PSTs) develop ambitious, three-dimensional instructional practice towards the goal of teaching for a just, equitable, and sustainable world. In the course, PSTs learn to design phenomenon-based instructional units grounded in authentic, local social and environmental issues. Drawing on Ambitious Science Teaching, this course helps build PST capacity for using student-centered approaches to build deep conceptual understanding of foundational ideas in science. Additionally, drawing from practice-based teacher education, the course engages PSTs in extended approximations of practice, in which PSTs design, develop, and enact discussion-centered science lessons in a low-stakes environment. This poster will share the framework guiding this course, and will feature the voices and experiences of Scholars who have taken the course.
