The Pacific University Preparation of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse STEM Teachers project is a collaboration between Pacific University College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Education, the Woodburn School District, the TeachOregon Consortium, and the South Metro-Salem STEM Partnership, designed to increase the number of new middle and high school STEM teachers equipped to serve in multicultural, multilingual, high-needs communities. This project will be a comprehensive, community-based STEM teacher recruitment, training, and induction program, which will provide up to two years of scholarship support for 40 exemplary STEM teaching candidates. Over a five-year period, the project will evaluate and research the transformative community-based model of STEM teacher preparation, further broadening its impact as a regional and national leader in understanding "what works" in preparing STEM teachers for success in 21st century schools.
The Pacific University project seeks to better understand how new STEM teachers can be best recruited, prepared, and inducted for ambitious, literacy-rich STEM teaching. In many high-need schools and communities, including Woodburn, student development of STEM academic language literacy is critical to being prepared for college, careers, and citizenship. To better understand how to prepare STEM teachers for such communities, the project will study how proficient these Noyce Scholars are in enacting literacy-rich teaching practices compared to similar non-Scholar teacher candidates and what the impact on student learning will be. In addition, the project will study the trajectories of Pacific Noyce Scholars' teaching practices influenced by this pre-service experience. Finally, the project will study the specialized tools and professional routines used in this community-based clinical teacher preparation program and the development of literacy-rich STEM teaching practices. A design action research methodology will be implemented in which multiple data sources are collected and analyzed on an ongoing basis to illustrate inputs, formative outputs, and summative outputs. Data will be collected for the 40 Pacific Noyce Scholars during the teacher preparation phase and first two years of early-career induction to the teaching profession. This applied research work will build on prior NSF initiatives in STEM literacy, making critical breakthroughs in understanding how STEM teachers can be best prepared to teach literacy-rich STEM in high-needs schools.
