STEM-ACT Community of Practice participants plot their STEM Journey

STEM for Youth Development and Social Transformation

December 9th, 2025

STEM Education can empower students and fuel upward socioeconomic mobility; this was the focus of our most recent STEM-ACT Community of Practice (CoP) event. Dr. Shannon Gleason from the Westfield State University Department of Education hosted the event, which asked participants to think about how STEM Education can lead to improved scientific literacy for making informed choices and increase access to careers in fields that tend to have highly competitive salaries. Dr. Gleason started the CoP event with the interactive presentation, “STEM for Youth Development and Social Transformation,” which offered the audience foundational statistics and knowledge related to teaching STEM. As it progressed, the focus of the presentation shifted to the audience, who worked in groups and as individuals to work through several prompts.In groups, STEM students, including STEM-ACT Scholars, and faculty were asked to invent STEM projects that are connected to their communities, and then share these ideas with all groups. A math student from Pittsfield invented a project that focused on the catastrophic effects of PCB pollution from the local GE plant, which has led to persistent issues of environmental toxicity that disproportionately affect families that are either unaware of the dangers or do not have the means to leave. A biology faculty member talked about a project that examines the connections between genetics and sexual diversity, and a faculty member in the Mathematics Department suggested a project that sought to consider broadening access to public transit through routes that have been made more extensive and efficient through math. The opportunity for these educators and teacher candidates to take the time to develop these ideas and share them across disciplines created the sparks that could spread to their own classrooms, creating impactful activities for their students.Another prompt given to individuals was to graph out their own STEM journey over time with chalk and blackboard (image above). The profiles tended to have the X-axis as time, and the Y-axis as STEM interest or momentum. The graphs that were produced by participants took incredibly varied forms, some gradually increased, while others were filled with peaks, troughs, and interruptions, each journey was a unique and individual endeavor. When shared in the room of educators, and educators-to-be, it surfaced challenges, solutions, and motivations to be mindful of when seeking to inspire the next generation of STEM-literate citizens, STEM professionals, and perhaps… STEM educators.The STEM-ACT CoP gave participants the opportunity to take pause and think about the act of teaching and the students they impact. It followed a progression of reviewing access to STEM Education, to its power to empower students to become informed citizens with access to more opportunities, to ideas for creating effective STEM projects and looking for opportunities to reach students, and be a position of inflection point in their own student's STEM journey.

Shannon Gleason organized the event “STEM for Youth Development and Social Transformation"
Arne Christensen authored the post.
STEM-ACT is supported by an NSF Noyce Track 1 grant [ Award Number 2344950 ]

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