Now more than ever, STEM Ed Innovators imagines a world of equitable, anti-racist STEM education for all. Over the last decade, we have supported teachers’ work in creating this change in hundreds of STEM classrooms. We are privileged to have a powerful network of incredible educators, and we want to better connect, grow, and leverage the people, the ideas, the hard work, and innovations.
This newsletter will serve as a way to start this work within our network. We aim to highlight some of the core ideas of the Democratic STEM Teaching Framework, offer curated resources that exemplify STEM Ed theories in action, provide updates about STEM Ed program expansion, and recruit potential Fellows and Master Fellows. In these challenging times, we need each other!
The STEM Ed Innovators Fellowship begins with Student Voice, so we thought it natural to highlight this idea in our inaugural newsletter. In the STEM Ed framework, Student Voice is the idea that students' ideas and opinions are an integral part of growth and knowledge acquisition within a classroom. In a STEM classroom, teaching and learning are authentic, just, and meaningful when they embody this spirit of Student Voice. Instead of a set of top-down prescriptions found in most traditionally structured STEM classrooms, Student Voice centers the beliefs, creativity, ideas, and lived experiences of the teachers and students involved.
