UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Carmen Vanderhoof, assistant teaching professor of education in the College of Education, has received the 2025 Outreach and Online Education Emerging Faculty Award for Engaged Scholarship.
The Emerging Faculty Outreach Award is a Universitywide honor that recognizes early-career tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members whose work has significant potential to advance engaged scholarship through teaching, research and/or service. Their engaged scholarship work shows significant potential to influence societal issues on local, regional or national levels.
Vanderhoof leads the Teaching Elementary Science Leadership Academy (TESLA), a program designed to help elementary education students interested in science education. Students serve as TESLA interns and design STEM learning opportunities for local communities, including underserved communities. Since 2021, more than 40 Penn State students have participated in the program.
Vanderhoof mentors students through teaching opportunities with the help of numerous community partners including the Discovery Space, the Rivet, WPSU, the Arboretum at Penn State, an after school ESL program at Easterly Parkway Elementary, the Hazleton Integration Program and Brentwood school district, among others.
Nominators said the program lets future elementary teachers gain valuable and relevant teaching in informal environments. They can work with others, try out new ideas and learn while they teach. Nominators said, under Vanderhoof’s leadership, the program has had a lasting impact on the interns and the communities they serve.
“We know from the research that the key to having good science happen at the elementary level is having teachers trained and comfortable to facilitate it. TESLA is making great strides with students in doing just that as interns work with elementary students in a variety of locations – from schools to the local science center,” a nominator said. “They also develop professional identities working alongside our museum staff to plan and deliver programming to the community. Vanderhoof meets with them weekly to guide their planning and teaching of high-quality STEM projects. She even volunteers along with them and collaborates with our staff to meet the needs of our museum and makerspace while giving interns meaningful teaching opportunities.”
Along with a Penn State graduate and participant in the TESLA program, Vanderhoof this spring co-presented at the National Science Teachers Association, sharing tools for teaching STEM to multilingual students. Vanderhoof shared details of a TESLA effort that brought remote teaching to multilingual students in Hazleton and Brentwood, Pennsylvania.
Vanderhoof also worked with her interns to help multilingual students at Easterly Parkway Elementary School.
“Through this effort, Vanderhoof hoped to identify pathways of involvement with youth in the local school district that would serve children who may often be overlooked by existing science and engineering enrichment programs and enhance the experiences of her teacher candidates,” a nominator said.
The effort is one of more than 20 programs planned and facilitated by Vanderhoof. Nominators said she’s equally passionate about improving STEM education for K-12 students as she is at improving the education of future educators serving those students.
“Vanderhoof is excelling in her outreach goals for science teaching and teacher education as equity-oriented endeavors,” a nominator said. “Her work is transformative for our elementary education program and the countless children served by those teacher candidates now and in the future. Dr. Vanderhoof recognized the need to build new partnerships in order to prepare teachers to see the affordances of working with youth who are often marginalized by STEM education programs, especially those who experience language barriers in science.”