The Noyce Phase I project at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) is supporting 43 junior and senior chemistry, geoscience or biology majors each for two years, as they are educated to become secondary teachers. In addition 80 freshman or sophomore students are supported as they explore a teaching career through a 2-credit course and an summer intern experience in informal learning settings, that allows them to see, through early field experiences, what teaching is like and the reward and satisfaction that can come from teaching. By partnering in meaningful ways with Volunteer State Community College and Columbia State Community College, MTSU is ensuring that students from those schools arrive at MTSU fully-equipped to be competitive for Noyce Scholarships. The Noyce Project is tightly woven into a newly initiated UTeach replication model at MTSU called MTeach. The Noyce Scholars experience and practice hands-on, inquiry-based teaching under the guidance of master teachers and quality mentors as the Scholars gain deep content knowledge in their STEM majors and strong pedagogical instruction specific to those content areas. Newly hired Noyce Scholar Teachers are supported through immersion in an education community that includes workshops designed to maintain the transformative teacher preparation culture they enjoyed.
The Noyce project is guided by a view of science education that seeks the highest good for the greatest number for the longest time. Similarly, the project assumes that in today's knowledge and information age, it is not essential that everyone be able to do science, but that it is essential that everyone needs to understand science and how it is done in order to make informed decisions in the increasingly complex world. The foundational framework is provided by the UTeach model for STEM teacher education and leverages the institution's commitment to establishing MTeach. Close collaboration by education and STEM faculty is ensuring highly-qualified teachers are produced, with respect to both STEM disciplinary knowledge, teaching pedagogical knowledge, and understanding of how students learn.
MTSU and its partner 2-year schools are collaborating with Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, Grundy County Schools, Cannon County Schools, Warren County Schools, and Ruther County Schools to meet needs from recently established guidelines stipulating that all Tennessee high school graduates complete three years of science including either chemistry or physics. The project is leveraging an ongoing Noyce project in Physics/Math, as well as a Noyce Master Teaching Fellows Program.
