SERVING UNDERREPRESENTED GROUPS IN STEM THROUGH K-6 TEACHER PREPARATION

Clovis Community College (CCC) is a Hispanic-Serving Institution with a particularly diverse student body populated over the last three years primarily by students identifying as Hispanic (40-44%), white (34-38%) or other ethnicities (21-22%) and with a majority of women students (53-59%). Introduction to Earth Science is a required course for the Elementary Teacher Education (ETE) program, a transfer program for aspiring K-6 teachers, who make up ~80% of students in this course; course demographics reflect the diversity of the CCC student body. These students are self-selected for the ETE program and typically in their second year of full-time college course work, and are therefore highly motivated to succeed in the course (pass with a C or higher). Introduction to Earth Science has high success rates, averaging 85.7% over the last three years versus the college average of 73.9%. In the 2019-2020 academic year, there are 11 sections of Introduction to Earth Science (approximately 300 students), taught by four instructors, which provides us with the opportunity to collaborate on assessing and improving our classes based on a standardized set of labs and project rubrics. In order to best serve all students in these classes, we strive for inclusive classroom cultures by structuring our courses to make all student perspectives heard and valued. For example, we include local case studies (e.g., San Joaquin River restoration), societally relevant phenomena (e.g., climate change), peer teaching and jigsaw activities, and student-selected culminating projects that incorporate Next Generation Science Standards based K-6 lesson planning. We have a unique opportunity to collectively test our goals of increasing the confidence and competence of a diverse population of future teachers in Earth Science content, since we are working with the same student body and teach many sections of the course each year. We are working to implement content-based assessments that are tied to knowledge survey assessments (worded in terms of “confidence in teaching” a topic) in order to refine our teaching approach to best serve aspiring K-6 teachers and their future students.