Chapter 13: Stem Teaching for Social Justice: Experiences in Early Fieldwork Courses

This chapter reports on our effort to integrate equity and social justice into our Step 2 course at the University of Maryland, College Park. We are convinced for many reasons that it is worthwhile to spend time in an introductory teacher recruitment course on questions related to diversity, equity, and social justice. The story we tell in this chapter outlines how we came to decide to modify Step 2 and the specific modifications we made to the course in our efforts to center social justice. We pay special attention to describing why we believe it was timely and necessary to design instruction to address questions related to social justice and why we are doing this in Step 2. We also describe the specific ideas about why we believe this work should start at the beginning of teacher preparation. We then outline our approach to carrying out the course revision and present a few examples of modifications we made in our instruction. We conclude with some personal reflections on the process we took in revising the course. Throughout our chapter, we will refer to our students as “undergraduates” and K12 students as “students.”