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Collaborations between faculty from the teachHOUSTON program and physics department have led to an increase in the number of highly qualified physics teachers produced by the University of Houston. Faculty were able to systematically build the physics teacher preparation program through the following endeavors: streamlined degree plans, a physics inquiry course, an internship program, a scholarship program, and induction activities for the first three years of their teaching degrees. This has resulted in preparing approximately three physics teachers annually. Prior to this collaboration, the University had not produced any physics teacher graduates in the previous decade.

In order to teach science effectively, teachers need a strong background in science content as well as an understanding of productive methods of teaching. This includes inquiry-based learning that will cultivate conceptual development of science concepts with their students. Furthermore, it is imperative to use student-focused activities in high-needs schools to engage all students, particularly students of color, in the learning process. As a result, faculty from the teachHOUSTON Program and the Department of Physics at the University of Houston produced a Physics by Inquiry course to engage middle school and high school preservice teachers in interactive, inquiry-based teaching pedagogies for physics. This chapter provides an overview of the course. It also highlights the benefits of including such a course in a STEM teacher education program.

This chapter traces the career trajectories of the teachHOUSTON science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers since the inception of the program. It asks whether the National Science Foundation (NSF) investment of millions of dollars in STEM education produced more STEM teachers of high quality for the diverse, urban area. The chapter is filled with descriptive statistics and stories. Two major findings are that the teachHOUSTON program produced double-digit physics teachers when the Greater Houston area had not had a freshly prepared physics teacher in over a decade. Additionally, teachHOUSTON graduates have distinguished themselves by being named recipients of several awards such as beginning teacher of the year awards, district teacher of the year awards, among other distinctions. teachHOUSTON alumni are also serving in a variety of leadership capacities for high-need public school districts. The chapter ends with a discussion of the program's strengths as well as the areas in which it continues to grow. Three new NSF grants allow for continued improvement and transition this work into two additional books proposed in this three-volume series.

This chapter outlines the contents of Preparing Secondary STEM Teachers to Teach in America's Urban Schools. The volume begins with an overview of the teachHOUSTON STEM teacher education program in Chapter 2 and is followed by an account of the collaboration that took place between a Physics professor and a teachHOUSTON Physics teacher educator and its impact on STEM teacher preparation in Chapters 3-4. Chapters 5 and 6 include discussions about formal and informal learning opportunities and include a narrative of a student's experience on how the Noyce Internship Institute contributed to their STEM teacher learning. In Chapters 7–9, readers learn about the influence of parents, teachers, and professors on students' entry into and decision to work in the STEM and/or STEM education field, with an emphasis on those in STEM teacher education. Chapter 10 highlights the value of scholarship grants; Chapter 11 addresses the growth and development of teachHOUSTON, the impact of the scholarships awarded to many of its students and traces where its graduates currently are teaching in order to demonstrate that teachHOUSTON has fulfilled its mission. The final chapter of the book reflects on teachHOUSTON as a secondary urban teacher education program and summarizes significant points that have led to its success.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what physics and chemistry preservice teachers learn on the nature of the inquiry tasks and about classroom communication in an inquiry task when they take part in a lesson study.

This is a qualitative and interpretive research which was carried out within a master’s degree course in physics and chemistry teaching with three preservice teachers. Data were collected from participant observation with video recording, interviews, written reflections and group report by the preservice teachers. This two-cycle lesson study was conducted over 12 sessions. The data analysis took place through asking questions and using the constant comparison method, which allowed the identification of the most relevant issues about the preservice teachers learning according to the categories nature of the inquiry tasks and communication promoted by the teacher.

The results show that the preservice teachers learnt to identify the characteristics of inquiry tasks, how to develop an inquiry task when planning the research lesson and acknowledged its potential for student learning. Moreover, the preservice teachers acknowledged the fact that the classroom communication promoted by the teacher fostered student participation, negotiation of meanings about scientific concepts and construction of new learning that can be shared within the class.

Research is needed as regards how initial teacher education providers may contribute to the learning of preservice teachers in lesson study in initial teacher education programmes.

This research contributes to show potentialities of lesson study in the initial teacher education of preservice physics and chemistry teachers.

This research examines the influence of parents on students studying the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and entering STEM careers. Participating youths were awarded scholarships from large funded US grant programmes. Cases of two graduate students (one female, one male) and one undergraduate student (male) are featured. The first two students in the convenience sample are biology and physics majors in a STEM teacher education program; the third is enrolled in computer science. National reports emphasizing the importance of parents on their children's education are presented, along with diverse international literature. The use of narrative in STEM curriculum and narrative inquiry in STEM research are also documented. Experience, story, and identity form the study's conceptual frame. The narrative inquiry research method employs broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying to elucidate the students' academic trajectories. Incidents of circumstantial and planned parent curriculum making surfaced when the data were serially interpreted. Other noteworthy themes included: (1) relationships between (student) learners and (teacher) parents, (2) invitations to inquiry, (3) modes of inquiry, (4) the improbability of certainty, and (5) changed narratives = changed lives. While policy briefs provide sweeping statements about parents' positive effects on their children, narrative inquiries such as this one illuminate parents' inquiry moves within home environments. These actions became retrospectively revealed in their adult children's lived narratives. These small stories, while not generalizable, map how students, shaped by their parents' nurturing, enter the STEM disciplines and STEM-related careers through multiple pathways in addition to the identified pipeline.

After spending three years as a secondary science teacher in an affluent Toronto neighborhood, I was surprisingly hired as a Literacy Teacher in my old school district just north of the city. I did not have a regular classroom; instead I was expected to work with as many teachers as I could within a cluster of elementary and secondary schools to, broadly speaking, pay explicit attention to the role of language in learning within the content areas. The purpose of this chapter is to analyze and interpret this part of my educational career by engaging in self-study via personal history; a personal history refers to becoming an accidental teacher educator, by virtue of a unique role as an in-service teacher educator with a language and literacy portfolio. Journals kept over two years reveal that, in many ways, I was a teacher educator before I knew what the term meant and that developing a pedagogy of teacher education with a focus on literacy made me increasingly frustrated with the over-simplified ways in which my school district framed issues of diversity.

For many years, public education has been concerned about the number of teachers of color in public schools, the experiences of teachers of color, and the ability of teachers to understand how to be culturally competent. These concerns have been addressed by programs and projects that focus on recruiting more teachers of color, providing more coaching and mentoring, and/or professional learning. So far, none of these have made a significant difference in addressing any of these challenges. It is time to move from projects and programs and examine the fundamental structures and systems of classrooms that limit, obstruct, and hinder the ability to create workplaces that are equitable and conducive to real inclusivity. In this chapter, we narrate how the Next Education Workforce (NEW) initiative at Arizona State University is cultivating diversity and inclusion in the education workplace by rethinking and redesigning the workplace for educators, especially those from marginalized groups. In partnership with multiple districts across Arizona, NEW is rethinking educator roles and responsibilities in the workplace and their accompanying entry, induction, specialization, and advancement practices and pathways. To mitigate these challenges of the current workplace – where a single educator is responsible for an entire classroom of students – and to work toward a more equitable one, the future workplace must be redesigned so educators operate in teams. By creating teams of educators who work in real time, recognizing educators' unique expertise, and focusing on deepening and personalizing learning – whether content, pedagogical, or lived experiences – we can redesign the workplace, learning environments, and the teaching profession.

There is an increasing interest in incorporating information literacy (IL) instruction into undergraduate curricula in higher education (HE) as a stand alone specialism, "a soft applied discipline" on its own. However, diverse and conflicting views exist about whether information use and evaluation can be taught as discrete activities in isolation from disciplinary content and context, and who, faculty or librarians, should be teaching information literacy. This article seeks to shed additional light on these issues by empirically exploring how literature evaluation and use is taught by faculty in four fields: physics, medicine, social politics and social work, and literature. Using Becher's (1989) characterizations of academic fields along the dimensions hard-soft and pure-applied, convergent and divergent, rural and urban, we explore the relationships between the nature of knowledge production within the fields studied and their practices of teaching literature use and evaluation. The findings indicate that IL is best conceived as something that can not be meaningfully approached or taught as separate from disciplinary contents and contexts. Information skills must be taught in ways that are wholly integrated with the ways literature is searched, used, and evaluated within disciplines.