Author(s):
Making improvements in undergraduate STEM education at scale is a challenging task. Most projects seek to improve one program, department, or institution at a time. However, in Washington State, we have created a collaborative model to improve STEM teacher preparation across multiple institutions simultaneously. At our workshop, participants will learn about our “NextGen-WA” model and how we organized and supported inter- and intra- institutional collaborations to benefit pre-service STEM teacher candidates, faculty, and individual programs across an entire state. We will then examine in greater depth, the current lack of diversity in Washington’s STEM teacher preparation programs and STEM teaching workforce, and how collaborative research, expertise sharing, and a commitment to each other’s success has allowed us to make progress on this challenge. More specifically, participants will learn how our partner institutions are using state, district, and program demographic data, the Targeted Universalism Framework, and the development of diversity campaigns to examine ways to acknowledge, navigate, and modify persistent structures, policies, and practices that create barriers to STEM education for students from minoritized communities. While our collaborative model is targeted at improving STEM teacher preparation programs, the processes, practices, resources, and tools developed by our project can be adapted to improve other areas of STEM education
Coauthors
Kathryn Baldwin kbaldwin1@wwu.edu, Jose Rios jrios@uw.edu, Maile Hadley maile@zenomath.org
