This project aims to serve the national need of preparing highly effective STEM teachers to serve in rural communities. The project will actively recruit students from rural communities to enter and stay in college with the goal of becoming certified secondary STEM teachers who are prepared for teaching in rural schools. In this way, the project will help to provide rural schools with a pool of qualified STEM teachers and to improve the schools’ ability to offer their students a broader range of STEM courses. The program will recruit high school, community college, and college students to complete a baccalaureate science degree and earn teaching certification. It will provide these Noyce Scholars with early teaching experiences and training in mental health, mindfulness, and understanding poverty. As a result, the project intends to better prepare the Noyce Scholars to teach in high-poverty, high-need, and rural schools.
This project at Northeast Iowa Community College includes partnerships with sixteen high-need school districts (Allamakee, Central, Clayton Ridge, East Buchanan, Eastern Allamakee, Edgewood-Colesburg, MFL-MarMac, North Fayette Valley, Oelwein, Postville, South Winneshiek, Starmont, Sumner-Fredericksburg, Tripoli, Turkey Valley, and West Central), with the goal of establishing a recruitment pipeline of qualified STEM teachers. It intends to prepare 15 Noyce Scholars to teach in high-need schools or school districts, particularly in high-poverty rural areas. The preparation emphasizes cultural competency through mindfulness and mental health training, technology, and distance learning. To improve new teacher retention, the project will provide enhanced induction support. The project aims to generate new knowledge about effective teacher preparation by investigating the impacts of mindfulness and mental health training on preparing effective STEM educators to teach in high-poverty and rural areas. The project will also seek to determine which specific activities result in better preparation to teach STEM subjects in rural districts. This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
