story by Claire Miller
Assistant Professor Gholnecsar Muhammad received a three-year, $749,895 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to study a professional development model designed to improve secondary school teachers’ literacy instruction in STEM content areas.
The grant project, entitled, “STEM is LIT(ERCIES): A Culturally and Historically Responsive Model for Teaching Literacy Across STEM,” will provide 12 STEM literacy instruction sessions each year to local teachers, literacy coaches and school principals and will support STEM summer literacy institutes for 60 students in surrounding rural communities.
The professional development model outlined in the grant – which will be used to train 780 educators over the three-year grant period – will teach Muhammad's Four-Layered Equity Model to science and math teachers. This model helps to improve students' literacy proficiencies, identity development, intellectualism and criticality. Criticality teaches youth about power, oppression and social justice.