A tribute to ‘unsung teachers’: teachers’ influences on students enrolling in STEM programs with the intent of entering STEM careers

ABSTRACT

This narrative inquiry examines teachers’ influences on undergraduate and graduate students who enrolled in STEM programs and intended to enter STEM careers. Three National Science Foundation (NSF) scholarship grants sat in the backdrop. Narrative exemplars were crafted using the interpretative tools of broadening, burrowing, storying and restorying, fictionalisation and serial interpretation. Three diverse students’ narratives constituted the science education cases: one from teacher education, another arising from cyber technology and a third involving cyber security. The influence of the university students’ former teachers cohered around five themes: 1) same program-different narratives, 2) in loco parentis, 3) counter stories, 4) learning in small moments, and 5) the importance of the liberal arts in STEM education. The students’ narratives form instructive models for their siblings and other students pursuing STEM degrees and careers. Most importantly, the multiperspectival stories of experiences capture the far-reaching impact of ‘unsung teachers’ whose long-term influence is greatly underestimated by the public.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• teacher influence
• teachers’ long-term impact
• narrative inquiry
• STEM (Science, Teaching, Engineering, Mathematics) careers

Acknowledgments

A sincere thank you is extended to Dr. Xiao Han who assisted with the technical preparation of this paper. All errors are the responsibility of the authors, not the funding agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The influence of professors is another paper in the series.

Additional information

Funding

This article includes findings from the following grant programmes in the United States: National Science Foundation Noyce Grant [1240083], Recruitment, Preparation and Retention of STEM Students as High School Teachers, awarded to Donna Stokes, Paige Evans, and others; National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education Grant [1356705], Preparing Cyber Security Students for Global Challenges of the Twenty-First Century (S-STEM [Scholarships for STEM Education]), awarded to Rakesh Verma and others; and the National Science Foundation Division of Graduate Education Grant [1433817], titled Scholarship for Service: Increasing Talented Trusted Computing Professionals (SFS), also awarded to Rakesh Verma and others.

Notes on contributors

Cheryl J. Craig

Cheryl J. Craig is a Professor and the Houston Endowment Endowed Chair of Urban Education at Texas A&M University. She is an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow, an AERA Division B (Curriculum) Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Awardee, and a recipient of the AERA Michael Huberman Award for Contributions to Understanding the Lives of Teachers.

Paige Evans

Paige Evans is a Clinical Professor and Science Master Teacher at the University of Houston. She has been instrumental in developing the teachHOUSTON Program, UH's STEM preservice teacher education program, which prepares secondary STEM teachers to create innovative inquiry lessons and become certified. She currently is the President of the UTeach STEM Educators Association (USEA) and a Fellow of the Physics Teacher Education Coalition.

Rakesh Verma

Rakesh Verma is a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Reasoning, Data Analytics and Security Lab at the University of Houston. He has received the University of Houston's Lifetime Faculty Award for Mentoring Undergraduate Research. He is a distinguished speaker of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Editorial Board of the Frontiers of Big Data journal, for the cybersecurity and privacy area.

Donna Stokes

Donna Stokes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Houston. She conducts research on the preparation of science and math teachers for secondary education and on improving student success in physics courses. She is a Fellow of the Physics Teacher Education Coalition.

Jing Li

Jing Li is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at East China Normal University. She recently graduated with her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. She has worked as a Research Assistant on a number of National Science Foundation-funded projects alongside her doctoral advisor, Cheryl J. Craig.