STEM educationSpreading STEM learning opportunities in the San Diego area
UC San Diego and the San Diego region more broadly are well known for strength in STEM— or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — education. There are numerous STEM pipeline outreach efforts already underway. What has been missing and needed, however, is coordinated and systematic action to spread learning opportunities and to plug “leaks” in the K-20 pipeline to STEM skills, degrees, and careers. The STEM Success Initiative aims to gather community and university resources to lift the region’s K-20 STEM education. The STEM Success Initiative has been launched by the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) at UCSD.
The CREATE team is working hard to network, leverage, and multiply existing resources to improve STEM education throughout San Diego.
“It’s basic physics: You can only lift a small rock above your own head, but if you press a lever you can move a giant boulder,” says Mica Pollock, professor of education studies in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences and director of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence (CREATE).
Pollock is referring to the work of CREATE’s recently launched STEM Success Initiative. A UCSD release reports that the initiative, funded in July by the Offices of the Chancellor and Executive Vice Chancellor, seeks to network UC San Diego’s resources to the education community’s, to collectively improve K-20 STEM — or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — education throughout the San Diego region.
That metaphor of a lever comes up a lot when Pollock and her colleagues talk about the initiative’s main M.O. So does a metaphor that relies on a basic operation in arithmetic: multiplication. The CREATE team charged with realizing the initiative’s goals has been working hard to leverage and multiply existing resources and expertise “to produce maximum supports for high-need students and their teachers.”
UC San Diego and our region more broadly, Pollock explains, are well known for strength in STEM. There are numerous STEM pipeline outreach efforts already underway. What has been missing and needed, however, is coordinated and systematic action to spread learning opportunities and to plug “leaks” in the K-20 pipeline to STEM skills, degrees, and careers.
The STEM Success Initiative is not meant to replace any current efforts, Pollock said, but rather to “facilitate their integration, improvement and collective impact.”
In the few months since the initiative’s launch, the CREATE team has already met with partners and potential partners for nearly 300 consultations. The campus consults have included faculty, staff and students from the Jacobs School of Engineering, Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute, the School of Medicine, Extension, and the divisions of Physical, Biological and Social Sciences, among many other UC San Diego entities. Community groups working with the initiative include the San Diego County Office of Education, the San Diego Rotary Club, and numerous K-12 schools.
