Mentoring: The backbone of an interwoven teacher education and teaching community

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Staying Power: Narrating Teacher Identity and Becoming

Abstract

Since 2012, mentoring has been studied within a specially designed STEM teacher education program in the fourth-largest metropolis in America. The city suffers from a severe shortage of STEM teachers. The dire need to provide state-of-the-art STEM teacher education and teacher leadership development, along with the availability of scholarships for underserved students to become teachers, proved to be a winning combination. The program has evolved with new features added annually. Thus far, the program’s approach to mentoring has been multi-layered, generative, and chain-like as knowledge moves from person to person into the academy and back again. This proposed paper unpacks these three synergistic approaches to show how mentoring became the backbone of the innovative STEM teacher education program.

Authors

• Paige K. Evans, University of Houston

• Donna Stokes, University of Houston

• Cheryl J. Craig, Texas A&M University

• Gayle A. Curtis, Texas A&M University

• Karla Adelina Garza, University of Houston

• Karen E. McIntush, University of Houston