Creativity and the Urban Teacher: A STEM-Related Professional Development Program
Creativity Under Duress in Education?, Springer, (2019)Abstract
We examine the urban context of learning for the fellows in a partnership
between Michigan State University (MSU) and Wipro Limited, a leading global
information technology, consulting and business services company, which resulted
in the Wipro Urban STEM Fellowship Program at Michigan State University
(MSUrbanSTEM) program. This grant-funded fellowship provided full tuition
scholarships and stipends for 124 highly motivated teachers in Chicago Public
Schools (CPS) who demonstrated a passion for teaching STEM. The fellows were
divided up into three cohorts. Each cohort participated in an innovative yearlong
integrated learning experience to build STEM teachers’ capacity to lead and inspire
transformative, innovative practices in urban K-12 schools. In this chapter, the fellows’ instructors explore how to support these teacher participants in their efforts to
foster creativity in an era of intensified authority, control, and resistance. By engaging in creative pedagogies explicitly connected to disciplinary knowledge, the program aims to disrupt traditional ideologies around teaching. The mission of the
MSUrbanSTEM program is to empower K-12 math and science teachers in CPS to
create transformative, innovative, and multimodal instructional experiences through
project-based and experiential learning experiences. Each educator participant was
encouraged to engage in inquiry around how the ideas of wonder, improvisation,
invention, and reflection connected with his or her subject-matter expertise. As
reported by way of this case example of teacher creativity, these strategies supported the activities the teachers engaged in throughout the year. The fellowship
itself provided a foundation for fellows to develop projects for reshaping aspects of
their teaching practice.