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Center for Innovation in STEM Education

The Center for Innovation in STEM Education (CISTEME) will be housed and co-located at the Science Museum of Virginia, coordinating our research and impact efforts in collaboration with their outstanding resources, staff and facilities.

The STEM Center team at the Science Museum of Virginia on February 13, 2020.

Mission

Inspire all students to make sense of and contribute to the world in which they live through hands-on investigations and innovation in STEM.

Vision

Empower students, particularly those from underserved and underrepresented populations, and the teachers who serve them to engage in high impact trans-disciplinary STEM learning experiences and become aware of similarly aligned STEM college and career opportunities.

Goals

  • Build capacity, knowledge and skills through innovative strategies needed to close the skills gap and prepare the STEM workforce of tomorrow both for college and career ready students and support an informed citizenry that will be making critical decisions on local and global issues in STEM.
  • Cultivate teachers’ skills through effective models and strategies through “trans-disciplinary” STEM instructional materials and pedagogy informed by a cross-section of educational, corporate and foundation leaders.
  • Build a vibrant network that includes educators, businesses, post-secondary institutes, non-profits and community leaders across Virginia to scale and share the learning.
  • Infuse culturally relevant and sustainable educational pedagogies closely mapped to specific STEM content and examples for classroom application across the disciplines to support under-represented minority and historically marginalized student populations in STEM education.
  • Contribute to the research base in culturally relevant STEM education through external research funding to deliver the goals and objectives for CISTEME.

Questions?

Al Byers, Ph.D.