UNE’s Education Department receives grant to promote STEM pedagogy among current and future teachers

Elementary Education minor and STEM Technology Fellow Morgan Day with second grade teacher and STEM Teacher Leader Nancy Golojuch of the Eight Corners School in Scarborough, Maine

UNE’s Education Department recently received a grant from the Perloff Foundation and the Maine Space Grant Consortium to support a STEM Ambassador Program, which will bring together teachers and UNE undergraduate education students to design STEM lessons for K-8 curriculums.

The grant enables five STEM technology teacher leaders (current teachers who are identified as leaders in their schools) and five STEM technology fellows (students studying education at UNE) to jointly develop five STEM Units that utilize STEM pedagogy to foster competencies in K-8 students.

Participants are grouped into partnerships, and each partnership is given a Flash Forge Finder 3-D printer for the teacher’s classroom. At the end of the school year, the teams will showcase both what the K-8 students have learned as result of the program and what the teacher fellows have learned about integrating STEM principles into a curriculum.

The UNE students, all Elementary Education majors, who are participating in the program are Chris Lazaros (’20), partnering with Jake Long of Biddeford Middle School; Maddie Hayward (’19), partnering with John Goff at C.K. Burns School in Saco; Morgan Day (’20), partnering with Nancy Golojuch at Eight Corners School in Scarborough; Julia Thompson ( ’19), partnering with Brianna Chu of Shapleigh Memorial School; and Angela Keating (’19), partnering with Nici Roubo of Kennebunk Elementary School.

To learn more about the College of Arts and Sciences, visit www.une.edu/cas

To apply, visit www.une.edu/admissions