In the United States, many communities face challenges that require science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) solutions. Those communities most affected by these challenges often lack opportunities in school to use their funds of knowledge as they develop STEM literacies that would equip them to address these challenges. With new national science standards and increasingly diverse student demographics in classrooms across the United States, teacher educators must utilize strategies that prepare science teacher candidates, who are predominantly White, with pedagogies that can support diverse learners in expanding their STEM literacies from their funds of knowledge. The problem of practice guiding this research was that within the shifting landscape of STEM education, too few science teachers are prepared to implement the new standards in ways that are culturally sustaining for their traditionally underserved learners. The purpose of this convergent mixed methods study was to describe cooperating teachers\u27 perceived preparedness to support science teacher candidates to use culturally sustaining pedagogies to inform practices and policies that influence STEM teacher preparation. To address the problem of practice quantitative and qualitative data were collected using a survey instrument and then analyzed through the lens of a conceptual framework developed called culturally sustaining science teaching. The findings suggest cooperating teachers feel prepared for the components of the culturally sustaining science teaching framework (curriculum, instruction, and relationships). No statistically significant differences were shown between the components but nuanced differences were apparent when quantitative mean score ranks and qualitative data were converged
