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Western Michigan University
Western Michigan University is a public research university in Kalamazoo, Michigan. HHMI awarded the university grant in 2010.
“STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] professionals must engage actively with precollege-level STEM teachers in a sustained way. In his memoirs, physicist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Andrei Sakharov describes his father, a high school physics teacher as a physicist. STEM teachers must similarly be considered vital members of the professional scientific community.” This timely quote from Maxine Singer’s recent editorial in Science (Science (2009) vol. 325, p. 1047) stands at the heart of our proposal, to create an academic environment that instills in the preservice teacher that they are a vital member of the scientific community. We need to provide the tools and capability to impart scientific knowledge and enthusiasm for science that will impact hundreds of our next generation of scientists.
Western Michigan University (WMU), a research university, is the sixth largest producer of teachers in the country. At WMU, we too believe that great science teachers must have an enthusiasm for science, a knowledge of science and research, and the skills needed to take the enthusiasm and knowledge and use it in their classroom. In fact, with our doctoral program in science education, the students are first grounded in the discipline by completing a traditional research master’s degree prior to moving into the pedagogy of science for the doctorate. However, we have not made the necessary curriculum or experiential adjustments to impart this way of thinking and teaching to the undergraduate preservice teachers. Building on our long history of providing research experiences to undergraduates and success in teacher preparation programming, we propose to transform the experience of our secondary education science majors by adding a summer research experience for future teachers to enhance their enthusiasm for and knowledge of science. We will couple the research experience with a course to assist these students in transforming their research experience into vital (and tested) classroom experiences. In doing so, we transform the culture of the preparation of the preservice secondary education science student from primarily content knowledge with the intent to go into teaching to the practitioner who has a better understanding of content knowledge through a research experience and create the scientist who chooses the profession of teaching.
To accomplish this goal we propose the following program elements: 1) preservice student engagement in authentic scientific research, 2) curriculum development to design an upper-level course for the preintern students that focuses on translation of research experience into classroom success, and 3) expansion of a current summer outreach program for middle school students that engages students in inquiry-based science lessons developed by the preservice teachers and based on the scientific research experiences. All the activities are designed to coalesce into a successful supportive community of young scientists at WMU who choose to pursue a career in teaching. Principal investigators, co-principal investigators, and associated faculty have substantial experience in teaching undergraduates and working with them in research settings and administering undergraduate research programs, including the long-running National Science Foundation (NSF)–supported REU (11 years) and National Institutes of Health–supported Bridges (10 years) programs and in curriculum redesign, including those supported through the PhysTEC program or by NSF’s course, curriculum, and laboratory improvement. |
