Thanks for sharing your projects with us!  What experiences do think positively influence STEM identity for female URMs that would scale across institutional contexts? Thanks for your thoughts on this. 

Dr. Paige Evans and Dr. Donna Stokes, my video collaborators and PI's of the featured NSF grants, are strong women in physics and physics education (Donna is one of the few African American female physicists in the U.S.).  Both live stories that serve as role models for the students in the innovative teachHOUSTON teacher education program and in the S-STEM grant program. In addition to them being flesh-and-blood models, both actively live the inquiry process in their teaching and in how they conduct research.  In my professional opinion, inquiry learning and teaching resonates exceptionally well with women's ways of knowing.  Lastly, neither Dr. Paige Evans nor Dr. Donna Stokes will accept the answer that physics is too hard or that it does not have relevance to students' lives (or a million other excuses).  They actively involve students in real-world problems with real-world materials and students (particularly female ones) find themselves enjoying and succeeding at physics, which provides them with a counter story to the stuck/frozen stories and the fixed gender-related narratives that females have often been given.              

Maybe I missed it, but I was wondering how scholarship recipients/participants were chosen? 

The scholarship committee selected applicants based on the following criteria: grade point average, career goals, leadership experience, honors and awards, professional development, community service, teachHOUSTON & university service, financial need, gender, ethnicity, and disability status.  

Welcome to our video. This video emphasizes the value of three NSF funded scholarship programs that foster female participation in STEM.  I invite you to view and comment on our video.  Thank you!

Support for female students in STEM, and in particular, teaching secondary STEM subjects, is a lifelong commitment of my own. I greatly appreciate your work. How do you follow up on retention data for your former students? Thank you.

Thanks for sharing these women's stories! I'm interested to learn more about what occurred in these programs, which appear to have effectively enhanced these women's STEM identity/confidence/interest/motivation. Could you share more about what Maria, Joyce and Tonya experienced in their programs? Are there common experiences shared by all participants across all three grants?

The mentoring activities are not the same for all of the grant programs, but there is strong mentoring component embedded in each grant program. Interacting with alumni, peers and, in the case of one grant, parents, is integral.  These approaches become part of teachHOUSTON as it becomes further institutionalized.   The NOYCE regional meetings were also a major influence for those who were able to attend. The strong regional/national females in science (particularly those of color) who led the meetings and attended them reinforced what the students were experiencing locally.            

What a great way to support female participation in STEM. Let's talk more about what we can do at UTeach to promote these ideas!

I forgot to mention earlier... We have an extensive paper that describes and evidences mentoring with teachHOUSTON.  We have not submitted it to a journal yet (summer work!)