Boston Museum To Spend $200,000 To Help Teachers With Engineering Curriculum
The Museum
of Science, Boston will spend $200,000
to help elementary school teachers integrate engineering into their
classroom
instruction.
Scholarships
will be awarded on a competitive
basis to first- through fifth-grade teachers so that they can better
teach
engineering to young students.
The
scholarship program will provide the teachers
with their own classroom sets of Engineering Is Elementary (EiE)
curriculum,
which was developed at the museum's National
Center for Technological Literacy.
It will also pay for the teachers to attend a two-day hands-on EiE
teacher
professional development workshop at the museum in Boston.
"This
scholarship program is a direct expression
of commitment to our core mission, which is to see that all students
have
access to high-quality engineering education, starting at an early
age," said
EiE Director and Museum Vice President Christine Cunningham. "One way
we do
this is by giving teachers the tools and training they need to be
successful
teaching engineering."
The
museum created the EiE curriculum because
curators there said they believed that engineering was one subject in most STEM
(science,
technology, engineering and math) programs that has received little
attention.
The
museum is now accepting applications and
scholarship recipients will be announced in January. Special attention
will be
given to applicants who teach in rural areas and who work with English
language
learners.
"It
can be especially challenging for teachers in
rural districts to access high-quality professional development,"
Cunningham
said.
The
Museum of Science, Boston is one of the
largest science centers in the world. It receives about 1.4 million
visitors
each year and its STEM programs have affected 9.5 million students and
104,000
teachers.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.