Our institution has had difficulty in graduating physics teachers in the recent past. The state of NM offers a broad science field secondary science license. Therefore all science disciplines go through the same program and have a specific concentration (e.g. Physics, Life Sciences, Geologic Sciences, Chemistry). We graduate around 4 total secondary science teachers each year.

The Physics Department would like to change the number of physics teachers qualified to teach physics through a few different pathways. One of these pathways would be membership with PTEC, in order to provide resources, access to other colleagues in Physics Teacher Education, professional development, etc. We believe that PTEC could also help our department to establish an undergraduate Learning Assistant Program such as the one implemented at the University of Colorado.

We were awarded an NSF Noyce Scholarship program that we are using to help recruit undergraduate physics majors into the teaching field. We are also in negotiation to become a Woodrow Wilson state for teaching at the Masters level. Both of these grants provides an infrastructure for recruitment, support, and mentoring of pre-service and beginning science teachers.