Monday and Tuesday, ABI participated in the Motorola Foundation 2009 Innovation Generation Network Conference. ABI is a grantee of the Motorola Foundation – their support is supporting our efforts in putting together a workshop for K-12 teachers at the Grace Hopper Celebration, in partnership with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and the University of Arizona.
The Motorola Foundation focuses on STEM education – Eileen Sweeny, Director of the Foundation, says: “It is the Motorola Foundation’s mission to support programs that make STEM education accessible and compelling – whether that is with real-world role models on an issue that young people care about deeply, or with experiences that that are completely out of the box. Real-world applications bring these subjects to life.” Organizations from all over the US were represented at the conference – I networked with colleagues from MESA, the National Federation of the Blind, Purdue University Women in Engineering Program, University of Illinois Women in Engineering, the Center for Teaching Quality, IPraxis, FIRST Robotics, the American Chemical Society, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, NCWIT, and many others.Here are topics that were discussed in the sessions I attended on supporting K-12 teachers in STEM disciplines:
- K-12 STEM teachers lack access to significant opportunities and funding for professional development – this makes their ability to implement the latest teaching methods, as well as their ability to remain current in their STEM topic, difficult.
- This situation is worst for teachers in the poorest school districts, often those with significant proportions of under-represented populations – these students are more likely to lack access to quality STEM education.
- Organizations such as the Center for Teaching Quality, the Illinois Math and Science Academy, and the American Chemical Society, are creating communities of STEM teachers to engage them in creating and sharing best practices. In computing, this is a significant focus of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and our workshop at Grace Hopper will specifically address the needs of k-12 teachers in underserved communities.
- Many successful programs focus on providing teachers the opportunities to provide hands-on (project-based learning) STEM experiences to the children – grounding the experience in what is of interest to the students themselves – this is a topic that has been identified as a key issue in teaching computer science by other colleagues, notably ABI Advisory Board Member Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson, who have written extensively on this topic and created new models for CS courses.
- Math and science education starts early – a speaker from the Erickson Institute discussed how just as language concepts are taught at the pre-k and k levels, so can math concepts, again in a hands-on, fun, and engaging way.
- These programs benefit the children but also the teachers, who once again experience passion for their profession as teachers, access resources that are unavailable through traditional means, and break their feelings of isolation in teaching STEM disciplines.
These approaches of community building, best practice sharing, and the shared creation of solutions are ones that resonate with the goals of the Grace Hopper Celebration. This is also what the Motorola Foundation did by convening this conference – creating a strong network of nonprofit of organizations sharing complementary missions. This is, incidentally, the topic of the hour for the BridgeSpan Group, who has called on funders and nonprofits to engage in creating strong fields, without which social change cannot scale http://www.bridgespan.org/strong-field-framework.aspx As I leave this conference, I am more convinced than ever that in order to increase the proportion of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines at all levels, a strong cross-sectoral network of organizations need to engage in tackling the issue – nonprofit, industry, and government institutions are all a part of the solution.