Purpose

This OER was written to support pre-service early childhood and elementary teachers in their journey to become facilitators of science in their future classrooms. Students who read and use this text will learn what early childhood and elementary students need to know and be able to do in relation to science, and understand ways to create activity plans and implement current research-based approaches to teaching and pedagogy.

Format

This resource was created in Microsoft Word and will be available as an Adobe PDF file, so that it can be downloaded and edited.

Accessibility

This OER was created with attention to those with disabilities. We used a template for Microsoft Word that enables the resource to be used with a screen reader. Online portions will include best practice in accessibility, such as using Alt Text for images and using hyperlinks. We worked with ETSU staff to ensure that our resources comply with these standards for the PDF and online versions. These tools address issues of equity and affordability and allow access for many students within and outside of our programs.

History

The Early/Elementary STEM Collaboration team has been working together since 2017 with the intention of increasing the quality of teacher preparation in STEM across early childhood and elementary education. The team is composed of math and science education professors and classroom teachers in pre-school through fifth grade. The collaboration also depends on the pre-service teachers enrolled in each year in STEM education courses. We are driven by the values of collaboration, strengths-based approaches to teaching and learning, constructivist philosophy of teaching and learning, and applied STEM experiences to increase access and equity. Our model of preparing pre-service teachers has been published elsewhere in more detail (Robertson, Nivens, & Lange, 2019), but we describe the approach components briefly below.

We have worked across early childhood and elementary education departments and have found significant overlap in our goals and approaches through the lens of STEM, even when other philosophical differences often characterize these programs (File & Gullo, 2002). However, we have not found a text that would support pre-service teachers across preservice teacher education departments in STEM and teaching that covers the full grades of interest, including preschool through 5th grade. We built this open access product to include the following: 1) completely new content that includes input from our team as well as examples of integrated STEM learning experiences; 2) adaptations of existing resources, and; 3) compilations of existing free resources (e.g., Next Generation Science Standards).