This capacity building project is a collaboration between a four year (Lehman college, CUNY) and a two year (CUNY Hostos Community College) college, with the community college as the lead institution. Other partners include the American Museum of Natural History and the Black Forest Consortium, a mountainous area 50 miles north of New York City maintained as a resource for research and student and teacher training by the institutions within the consortium. The project is designed to provide a clear pathway to STEM teacher certification from the community college to the four year school with an emphasis on providing chemistry and earth science teachers well prepared to serve students in high needs schools. The partners are: (a) aligning the curricula of Hostos STEM courses and programs of study with those required for Lehman chemistry and environmental science majors, with a minor in education, to create two joint-degree/dual-admission programs to enable students to attend Hostos and then transition seamlessly to Lehman to complete their bachelor's degree; (b) leveraging existing partnerships with the American Museum of Natural History and the Black Rock Forest station to design summer internships and semester workshops to provide field experiences, teacher preparation, and other research opportunities introducing Hostos students to chemistry and environmental science; (c) creating a bridge program, incorporating an intensive screening process to identify the students most likely to succeed in a Noyce Scholarship program and offering extensive mentoring and advisement to ensure that the selected Hostos students successfully transition to Lehman; (d) devising an effective public relations and recruitment plan to inform potential students about SEED at Hostos, so that STEM majors are made aware of the opportunities for careers in education; (e) designing a set of activities to support teachers during their induction years and (f) working with an evaluator who will design and implement an evaluation plan that will measure the stated objectives and outcomes of Project SEED.
