Lessons Learned from Running a Scholarship Program for Undergraduate Pre-Service STEM Teachers

With good reason, there has been a great deal of attention over the past two decades on the structures and strategies of STEM teacher education, particularly in regard to the preparation of teacher candidates for high-need schools and diverse student populations through well-designed coursework and fieldwork components of teacher education programs (Anderson & Stillman, 2013; Fortney et al., 2019; Larkin, 2014; Mensah, 2019; Stroupe et al., 2020). Yet running a scholarship program for prospective STEM teachers within an existing teacher education program comes with its own set of challenges, and requires taking a step back from the specific programmatic details in order to recruit, advise, and mentor teacher candidates into their profession.

Since 2013, we have led the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Track 1 Montclair State University Noyce Science Teacher Scholarship program (DUE #1339956), which has supported the preparation of 33 biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, and (in our final year) mathematics teacher candidates as well. Over this time, we have had our share of challenges and successes, and in this blog, we wish to share some of our lessons learned in the hope that these will assist others running their own STEM scholarship programs.

Read the rest of the article on the AAAS ARISE blog.