Rural Reimagining of Opportunities for Undergraduate Teacher Education in STEM: A Capacity Building Project

University Of Maine, Orono ME

Investigators

Abstract

The project aims to serve the national need of recruiting, educating, and retaining highly-effective STEM teachers in high-need rural districts. Recognizing the significant shortages in both the STEM and rural teaching workforces, the project aims to ensure the availability of a robust rural STEM teaching workforce through continuous innovation. STEM teaching workforce shortages arise from the low numbers of enrollments in initial licensure programs in mathematics, physical science, and life science licensure areas compounded by strong employment prospects and comparatively high initial salaries for STEM graduates in most fields. Rural districts also face additional hurdles in hiring highly-qualified STEM teachers due to limited local populations, constrained budgets, and difficulties in recruiting experienced teachers. The project seeks to counter these shortages by supporting the recruitment, education, and retention of promising rural STEM teacher candidates. Specifically, the project will explore the circumstances under which rural STEM students would pursue teacher licensure and when those initially seeking licensure in non-STEM areas would switch to a STEM pathway. With this understanding, new licensure pathways will be designed to attract and retain highly qualified rural STEM teachers. This project at the University of Maine includes partnerships with rural school districts and communities. Key objectives include: 1) developing a survey to examine undergraduate motivations for choosing STEM or teacher education; 2) organizing design thinking workshops with partners to create rural-focused licensure pathways; and 3) conducting market research with rural STEM and teacher education majors to determine the best strategies for licensure of rural STEM teacher candidates. The project builds on University of Maine research demonstrating that non-rural teacher education majors rarely consider rural communities for future careers. This finding means that rural STEM students represent the best possible source of future rural STEM teachers. This project has the potential to develop scalable, replicable pathways to move more rural students into STEM licensure pathways. This Capacity Building 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 effectiveness and retention 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.