HAZLETON, Pa. — Faculty and graduate students from the College of Education at Penn State have expanded a partnership with the Hazleton One Community Center with a pilot program that connects future teachers with emergent bilingual children to engage in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
One of the major benefits of the program, funded by a quarter-million-dollar gift from the Martinson Family Foundation, is that children who may not have a chance to experience STEM education otherwise are able to access high-quality learning experiences outside of school.
“Because schools often pull children whose home language is not English out of their classes to work on English language development, they do not have the same opportunities and exposure to STEM as their peers,” said Carla Zembal-Saul, head of the College of Education’s curriculum and instruction department who holds the Kahn endowed professorship in STEM education. She and her colleagues — Amy Farris, Julia Plummer, Mark Merritt (project manager) and May Lee — have been involved in creating and implementing the STEM Between Us project.
"STEM jobs tend to be higher paying and more stable than other options, making lack of access to these career pathways an equity issue,” Zembal-Saul said. “Furthermore, recent research demonstrates that engaging emergent multi/bilingual children in STEM practices allows for a broader range of communication approaches — such as use of data and representations, drawings and diagrams, gesturing — that can support language development. These findings add another layer to the inequities created by the lack of access to STEM education.”
The original partnership with Hazleton One offered virtual homework help to children in the afterschool program offered by future teachers in the College of Education. During the pandemic, educational programs expanded to include virtual STEM experiences. The addition of a STEM education lab generously funded by the donor was a welcome addition to support afterschool programming.
Zembal-Saul said meeting and working with children at the center this year is embedded in science methods and content courses that future teachers who are non-science majors, predominantly elementary and middle-level, take as part of their programs. Education students first get to know the children and their interests, then work with peers in a mentored environment to design or modify a STEM-focused sequence of lessons. The college students eventually will get the opportunity to travel to Hazleton to meet their young partners in person.
The STEM Between Us project team intentionally seeks to work with communities that are more racially, culturally and linguistically diverse than those in proximity to University Park. This criteria necessitates spanning large distances, like the approximately 120-mile drive to Hazleton, creating new challenges, said the team. Given the virtual format, members of both partner organizations are onsite in their respective spaces to facilitate interactions between children and future teachers.