The Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM) proposes to develop an extension service project, "Peer Alliance for Gender Equity (PAGE) Extension Service," that will build the capacity of district education leaders in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) to provide professional development (PD) to K-12 STEM teachers in research-based, gender-sensitive pedagogical classroom practices. These K-12 district leaders will serve as Extension Service Agents (ESAs) in the Upper Midwestern United States to implement a unified program of change focused on gender equity in STEM education that integrates theory, research findings, and practice. Each ESA will participate in 80 hours of PD through a PAGE Institute, Colloquia, a Virtual Learning Network (VLN), and Symposium over a 12-month period. The PAGE Portfolio of research, methods, and strategies will be used throughout the program. The goals of the PAGE Extension Service are to (1) prepare district-based, K-12 PD leaders to serve as ESAs for gender equity in STEM education by engaging them in summer institutes that provide a coherent foundation in related theory, pedagogical practices, and belief systems (referred to as the PAGE Portfolio); (2) develop ESAs' ability to adapt, incorporate, and refine PAGE Portfolio modules within their own PD services for K-12 teachers through colloquia and on-going consultation; and (3) promote educational researcher awareness of the challenges and successes that teachers encounter as they ground their practice in theory by creating feedback loops among researchers, the Expert Project Team, ESAs, and teacher practitioners.
Intellectual Merit: PAGE will create a new model of extension services incorporating best practices from the PD literature that approaches gender equity in the context of complex equity issues of race, culture, and class, and is highly sensitive to the needs and pragmatic concerns of K-12 district leaderships who rarely are offered intensive professional development specifically designed for their positions. The field-tested PAGE Portfolio is organized around four major themes: (1) Equity and Access, focusing on classroom interaction patterns and pipeline issues; (2) Curriculum and Pedagogy, focusing on gender sensitive pedagogy and curriculum; (3) Reconstructing the Nature and Culture of STEM, focusing on the epistemology of these disciplines and the ways in which the values and beliefs behind scientific knowledge production have been associated with the masculine; and (4) Identity, focusing on the relationship between students' identity formation and learning in STEM classrooms.
Broader Impact: Over five years, PAGE will involve the efforts of 125 ESAs, each of whom provide professional development to a minimum of 50 STEM educators per year. The Practitioner Community upon whom PAGE will ultimately have an impact includes 18,750 K-12 STEM teachers in public schools in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. PAGE will bring together strategies that translate research into action through the PAGE community of educators who have extensive aggregate expertise in gender equity, STEM education, PD, research, and evaluation. The capacity built in individuals and programs through PAGE will be sustained through the combination of intensive PD, the virtual and face-to-face consultation, and material support for implementation of modules. The creation of a regional model that is responsive to local, state, and regional contexts and to the complex issues of identity will be disseminated to the national STEM education community and gender equity researchers.
