The COVID pandemic has disproportionately impacted African American and Latinx students and communities including in the areas of physical and mental health, exacerbating existing inequities. Guided by the core mission of the CalTeach program, we worked and continue to work to address these inequities in K-12 school, and to ensure that our own UCI students are able to persist through the challenges of the COVID pandemic and beyond. As a program, we have focused on how we could address COVID related challenges and build on what we learned and experienced to continue to learn from and support local communities and students.
Zooming to bridge divides. During the 2020-21 school year CalTeach developed a remote Zoom based tutoring program in partnership with College Access, Readiness & Success (CARS LA) and Leuzinger High School in Lawndale. Through the program, CalTeach students provided remote tutoring in STEM subjects to dozens of students through the school year as part of the CARS partnership. CalTeach students developed innovative technology based pedagogical skills and Leuzinger students benefited from tutoring they otherwise would not have had access to. At the end of the school year, 100% of students who were tutored successfully passed courses they were tutored in. Building on the program’s success, for 2021 we have expanded tutoring to include English and social science courses.
The pandemic as a call for action and change. Students in the CalTeach program worked together to provide their K-12 students with opportunities to make sense of and take action about the inequitable impacts of COVID on their communities. One group of students, Annmarie Ngo, Kathy Becerra, and Maria Garcia, created a lesson focused on COVID and air quality, where students analyzed air quality data in different parts of Southern California before and during the pandemic, investigating why some cities had worse air quality than others. Students who were taught the lesson were moved to take action by contacting local political representatives to ask for action to address the inequities they discovered. The group also provided other teachers with professional development around developing phenomena.
Close mentoring even from afar. Completing a STEM degree and a teaching credential is challenging, and being mentored by someone who has successfully done it can be invaluable. Through the COVID pandemic CalTeach program coordinator Kris Houston connected CalTeach alumni, teaching in their own classrooms with student teachers in the program, to provide mentoring, encouragement and advice. Clearly the program helped, because we had the highest completion rate in CalTeach history for the 2020-21 cohort (91% of declared majors). The program is now being expanded to current students, where seniors mentor juniors, and juniors mentor freshman and sophomores. We believe this approach will help build a lasting community and support students’ persistence in the program.