Experts believe that without a strong STEM workforce, America could lose its position as the world’s preeminent power. However, America is facing a STEM labor shortage, and part of the reason is racial. African Americans are underrepresented in STEM jobs, and Black students leave STEM majors at nearly double the rate of whites. The problem has roots at the K-12 level: while 15% of public school students are Black, only 7% of the STEM teacher population is.
On Wednesday, Alabama A&M University, the largest HBCU in the state, launched an effort to tackle the problem: AAMUTeach, a program allowing STEM majors to get a secondary school teaching certification while earning a bachelor’s, without any additional time or cost.
Kim Hughes, director of the UTeach Institute at the University of Texas
AAMUTeach is Alabama A&M’s adaptation of the UTeach Institute’s program, developed 25 years ago on UTexas’s Austin campus. UTeach seeks to attract STEM students who never would have considered teaching to the profession in order to address shortages. The project is being funded by a $2 million grant from the Alabama STEM Council, part of a larger package of spending to start UTeach programs at six schools in the state. Alabama A&M is expected to produce up to 530 STEM teachers during the four-year grant period, starting with a cohort of 100 this August.
UTeach is designed to make it easy for STEM majors to explore a teaching career. It starts as early as freshman year, with two single credit courses in which the student learns to teach inquiry-based STEM lessons and then gets to practice at real schools. If the student likes teaching, they can move to the rest of the program. According to Hughes, around one-third of students elect to continue, a high percentage considering that many were initially unsure about teaching.
The rest of the program consists of six to eight additional courses, culminating in a typical one-semester student teaching experience. UTeach students don’t take traditional teacher prep courses like ed psych, classroom management, and assessment, but those topics are integrated into the classes that they do take, which focus specifically on STEM pedagogy.
UTeach has been an extremely successful model, with programs at over 50 schools in over 20 states. However, Alabama A&M will be just the fourth HBCU to have a UTeach program, after Norfolk State, Virginia State, and Prairie View A&M.
