The curriculum we provide is one developed by and informed through the body of research by Yvonne Thevenot, our Founder, who developed the curriculum at Columbia Teachers College. It is called Culturally Responsive STEM Curriculum, which is both an explicit and implicit curriculum that recognizes that different kinds of cultures exist within the classroom and that culture is not just a construct derived from ethnicity or nationalism. This curriculum can be easily integrated into a school’s culture and existing curricular aids, without posting conflicts of learning objectives and aims.

Why Culturally Responsive STEM Curriculum?
Children have a natural ability to learn and possess one or more varied levels of intelligence that, if supported and deepened by the teacher, her strategies, and her content, will enable them to acquire knowledge, master the content and to thrive in STEM learning spaces. A curriculum that responds to a student’s specific culture, honors student funds of knowledge and allows it into the classroom, and support a student’s preferred mode of learning, or mode of intelligence is important to create a learning space that supports the student, enable that student to learn and succeed in STEM learning spaces, and therefore result in reversing the lagging trends in STEM interest, majors, and jobs found in many student populations, because it is designed to enable children who have a natural curiosity, a varied mode of learning as compared to the monocultural lens used to assess academic behavior in U.S. schools, and ability to learn to thrive in classrooms that are responsive to their cultural and learning styles, is flexible to enable them to use different ways to learn and make choices on how they wish to learn and does not restrict Engineers to a specific, one-size-fits-all rubric.

The purpose of Culturally Responsive STEM Curriculum is to provide opportunities for Engineers to engage in the process of science, computer science, and engineering and design and to continue to develop student curiosity within the STEM classroom. This curriculum is developed to be utilized and incorporated throughout the school year.