- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2243462
- First Name Vanessa
- Last Name Dodo Seriki
- Registration Noyce Scholar/Teaching Fellow/Master Teacher
- Discipline STEM Education (general)
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Sandy Spitzer, Diana Cheng, Kimberly Corum and Mary Stapleton, Towson University; Vanessa Dodo Seriki, Morgan State University; and Kyle Bacon, Prince George’s County Public Schools
Approach
This Track 3 project aims to serve the national need of developing highly effective teacher leaders of STEM who can create sustainable improvements in secondary STEM education. In this poster we will address how we leveraged a 2019-2021 Noyce capacity building grant into a successful Track 3 proposal. We will also describe the Making STEM Matter professional learning community that brought together 15 Master Teacher Fellows (MTFs) who are experienced and exemplary STEM teacher leaders in a large urban school district in Maryland. We will detail our plan to accomplish the program goals of supporting MTFs in becoming teacher leaders and transforming their instruction by integrating equity- and justice-centered STEM pedagogies and leveraging makerspaces to introduce new opportunities for community-oriented STEM learning. Finally, we recognize the importance of MTFs’ embarking on a collaborative journey. This process can cultivate supportive networks to advance equitable practices and address students’ unique needs. Teachers must adopt an equity lens, which recognizes and confronts systemic inequities ingrained within the educational system. Our poster will include reflections from an MTF who will share his perspectives on how the professional learning community in the first semester of the Making STEM matter project addressed themes of Leadership, Social Justice/Equity and the use of Maker Spaces in STEM education.
