GTP’s MLK Program for STEM Education Draws Record Attendance

The Global Teaching Project’s annual residential STEM instructional program in Jackson, Mississippi—held over several days leading up to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday—drew record attendance this year, with approximately 200 participants.

Advanced Placement STEM students from 19 rural Mississippi high schools took part in immersive instructional sessions that augmented the classes those students are taking in AP Biology, AP Physics 1, and AP Computer Science Principles.

Those instructional sessions, held at Jackson State University, were led by Mississippi-based, AP-certified Supervisory Instructors, with additional support from Teaching Assistants and staff from universities around the country, including Virginia, Yale, Harvard, Texas, and Southern California, as well as Jackson State, Ole Miss, and Mississippi State.

Our Jackson program also marked Dr. King’s legacy by coupling substantive STEM instruction with ancillary sessions that emphasized the nexus between Civil Rights and educational opportunity.

Students participated in sessions at the current State Capitol, the Old State Capitol, and the Museums of Mississippi History and Civil Rights, as well as Jackson State, where they heard from legislators from both parties, business leaders, a Jackson State Civil Rights historian, and a GTP Physics Teaching Assistant and Yale Biomedical Engineering major who recently earned Academic All-American honors in football.

The Global Teaching Project’s Advanced STEM Access Program provides promising high school students in rural, high-poverty Mississippi communities access to advanced STEM courses they need to achieve their full potential, but which their schools otherwise could not offer.  Our program is provided free of charge to students, their families, schools, and school districts.

We currently work with 34 Mississippi high schools and offer 67 Advanced Placement classes in AP Physics 1, AP Computer Science Principles, and AP Biology.

Those classes are supplemented by immersive, residential, university-based instructional sessions, including a 15-day summer preparatory program at Mississippi State to prepare students for the rigor of advanced courses, and the annual January program in Jackson.

According to recent U.S. Census and College Board data, the only school districts in the nation with the 25 highest school age (5-17) poverty rates that offer those courses do so through our Advanced STEM Access Program.

We are proud of our students, whose enthusiasm for learning was evident throughout the Jackson program.  We look forward to building on their hard work in the remainder of the school year.