2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Providing equitable, meaningful, and ambitious STEM learning opportunities for all students requires an extremely high level of professional skill and judgment from teachers (e.g., Educate to Innovate, 2016; National Research Council, 2012; U.S. Department of Education, 2022). Broader systemic issues of educational inequity disproportionately exclude students from minoritized backgrounds from high-quality STEM learning environments (e.g., Calabrese Barton, 2003; Calabrese Barton & Yang, 2000; Carter, 2016; National Research Council, 2012; Windschitl & Calabrese Barton, 2016), making recruitment and retention of STEM teachers trained in socially just teaching practices critical.

In this paper, we present findings out of our Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) funded research effort called “Improving STEM undergraduate teacher education and developing the STEM profession through institutional transformation.” We present the outcomes and ongoing development effort on a re-envisioning of STEM teaching and learning that takes place within a larger partnership effort—a cradle-to-career learning campus, part of a large urban school district, serving primarily Black and Brown-identifying children and youth from preschool through grade 12. The vision of the learning campus “Leaders Designing Change,” which emphasizes the two focus areas of human-centered design and Engineering and social engagement for justice. Further, this campus houses a Teaching School, which, like a Teaching Hospital, hosts an intergenerational teaming structure from preservice educator development through residency for certified teachers in the first three years of teaching that seeks to extend the time that university partners can continue to educate and support early career teachers to enact ambitious instruction.

This design and research effort seeks to create and refine the Teaching School model to offer a proof-of-concept for the multi-institutional transformation project. Our findings provide insight into the development of a translatable model of STEM teacher development and pathways and how this may support STEM learning along historically underrepresented students. Our findings describe how project- and place-based learning in STEM, and specifically engineering learning, increased educational and standardized testing outcomes for youth across domains, how STEM teachers engage in curriculum co-development, and how our team (of university collaborators and K-12 teachers) supported enactments of teaching through the Teaching School model. We present data on the ways that intergenerational and extended teaming supported STEM teachers, and specifically engineering teachers, within this high school context. We describe the human-centered design and engineering curriculum developed through this collaboration. This curriculum and STEM teaching showed increases in high school students’ literacy, mathematics, and science learning outcomes on standardized tests. The data also suggest that students are developing a sense of belonging in STEM and seeing opportunities to take action as powerful actors in their communities and the world.