Project TEAM to expand statewide

Indiana University has received funding in the amount of $340,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to expand an existing program designed to encourage minority students to enroll in teacher education.

Project TEAM (Transformative Education Achievement Model) originated in the IU School of Education in the early 1990s on the Bloomington campus and soon spread to the IUPUI and Gary campuses.

Now, with the help of continued federal funding, Project TEAM will reach to Richmond and Ft. Wayne, and then to the remaining IU campuses during the next three years.

Created by Christine Bennett, professor of education and director of TEAM, the project was initially supported with IU Strategic Directions funding. The primary tactic was to establish a community within the School of Education that would provide academic, social, personal and financial support for students from under-represented minorities who wished to become teachers.

The program works by recruiting talented minority college students into teacher education. They are enrolled in honors work beyond regular teacher education courses and participate in opportunities created for them to work with promising minority students from public middle schools who attend TEAM summer camps on IU campuses.

At the beginning of the project, less than 1 percent of the minority students on the Bloomington campus planned to seek a teaching license. That statistic mirrored a nationwide trend that would eventually translate into a shortage of minority teachers in the country’s classrooms.

In its first year, Project TEAM attracted 21 minority students, eight of whom had not been headed toward teaching. Since that beginning, the program has helped the School of Education increase its minority undergraduate student population by nearly 50 percent.

The federal funding will be used to provide scholarships for undergraduates in elementary and secondary education and technology training for teachers. It also will provide tuition for minority middle schoolers to attend Project TEAM summer camps.