Promoting Diversity and Social Justice through Community Based Programs

Amazing Space: Re-Imagining Literature Instruction in a Public High School
Dr. William McGinley
The purpose of this collaboration is to engage teachers, CU teacher education students, and university faculty in conversations about the nature of literature instruction as they experience it as part of their academic and professional lives. The goal of the project is to create local discursive contexts in which teachers and their students would be provided with opportunities to question, challenge, or negotiate some of the more dominate or invisible instructional assumptions they have inherited as literature teachers and students in English classrooms. We wanted to develop ways for teachers to articulate their own theoretical visions regarding literature instruction because we believe that employing theory as an imperializing, systematizing knowledge, not only dishonors the diversity of educational theory, but also denies teachers in complex local situations an important intellectual tool.  

During the first year, we developed the curriculum for the project centerpiece, the on-site course for participating teachers, called the Praxis Seminar. The seminar met four hours each month at Monarch High School. The coursed serve as a discursively meaningful forum (Insider Language Space) that allowed teachers to voice their professional concerns, as well as to develop their own conceptual frameworks for examining and interpreting their literature-teaching lives. As an approach to the professional development of teachers, the curriculum of our class invited teachers to begin creating localizing knowledges, “not to extend a great vision over the [literature-teaching] world” but to negotiate and produce a localized social, professional, and communal sense of identity and intellectual work. Throughout the course, we trusted the insights of participating teachers, and sought to cultivate the expression of a questioning spirit as it pertained to the curriculum of literature teaching in school classrooms.

Action Research for Youth and Community Development: EDUC 4800 (offered 2007-8 year, Dr. Ben Kirshner)
In this seminar-size class students will learn how to carry out an authentic, high quality research project that meets a community need. Projects will focus on youth development issues in linguistic and culturally diverse communities in Boulder and Denver. For example, students may collaborate with members of a local youth program to create a document summarizing “jobs with a future” for young people in Boulder County. Or students might work with a community development agency to help evaluate its outreach programs and make recommendations for how services could be improved. Projects will be created based on community needs and student capacity. Students do not need to have prior experience doing applied research – but they do need to be interested in learning about it.

Arts, Identity and School Culture: Arts Focus
Dr. Margaret Le Compte
This project has studied teachers and students who do not “fit the mold” in a public middle school whose three arts strands—visual arts, theater and dance, and music—provide an intensive arts immersion through year-long, daily 90-minute blocks.  Arts Focus also transforms the school curriculum, as the arts are integrated across the curriculum. The research focuses on relationships between school culture and the culture of the arts as they affect and transform a public school, and on the impact of arts participation on the identities and roles of teachers and students in the program.

Career Ladder Program
Dr. Lorenso Aragon and Dr. Carmen De Onís
This BUENO Center program provides opportunities for paraprofessionals working with bilingual students to earn an AA degree then a BA degree and a teachers license.  This program works closely with Aims Community College and the University of Northern Colorado.

Cultivating Creative and Performative Literacies in an Urban High School
Dr. William McGinley
The inspiration for this outreach project with urban high school students derives in part from the spirit of the Black Arts Movement of the revolutionary 1960’s and the Chicano/a Cultural Renaissance/Theater Movement of 1960’s and 70’s. Artists and writers from this period believed that creating and encountering works of art could become occasions for transcendence, self-knowledge, and critique. The poets, artists, dancers, actors, and creative performers in this project are largely Latino and African American adolescents at Denver North High School and Denver East High School. The purpose of this project is to cultivate the creative literacies of these young people by providing them with opportunities to engage in a range of artistic-aesthetic performances and practices in school contexts that make use of existing cultural knowledge, values, and language practices. Although young people in urban environments have a wide repertoire of creative and performative literacies, they are seldom acknowledged or valued within the frameworks of “official” school literacy practices. One of the important products of our work took place in January 2006 when students in the program helped to write a play that they performed to an audience of 1300 children and adults at the Paramount Theater in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. We also published our first edition of an on-line spoken word poetry journal that features biographies, photos, and audio performances of student poets and teacher poets from Denver and surrounding communities. The journal is called SpOkeN.

Female Recruits Explore Engineering (FREE)
Dr. Margaret Eisenhart
FREE is an outreach and research project that brings together academically talented Black, Latina, Native American, and White high school girls in small groups to focus on exploring engineering and information technology as career choices.  The program concentrates on 3 factors known to affect the appeal of engineering and IT for girls:  (1) exposure to up-to-date engineering content and activities that intrigue and challenge girls specifically; (2) development of close networks of peers, parents, and other adults who support these interests; and (3) serious consideration of the attitudes and conditions that discourage girls from futures in engineering and IT.

Begun in 2006, the program includes 120 girls in 3 states—Colorado, Iowa, and Ohio.  A central feature of FREE is to introduce the girls to wireless mobile technologies (in this case the Blackberry 7250) as a means of exploring and making connections to engineering and IT.  Using their Blackberries, the girls browse the web for information about engineering and IT, connect with mentors currently working in engineering, post (and share) forum, blog, poll, and gallery entries about their experiences on a secure website, and use email and instant messaging with each other, the mentors, and the researchers to build support for a “learning community” focused on girls and minorities in engineering careers.  This information is captured on a secure server, thus allowing capture of “in the moment” thought processes from busy, teenage girls as they record (email, instant message, and browse) their discoveries, insights, ideas, and questions during the career exploration process.

Manual High School Action Research Study
Dr. Ben Kirshner
The purpose of this project is for students to document the impact of a high school closure on their peers. It is a collaboration between Ben Kirshner and three youth-serving agencies in Denver: the Manual Academic Resource Center Youth Leadership Team (led by Michael Simmons), Students 4 Justice (led by DeQuan Mack), and Project VOYCE (led by Brian Barhaugh). Students from these groups, who receive stipends, are studying the impact of the closure using surveys, interviews, and media analysis. Students have been trained in research design, data collection, and data analysis. When they are done they will present their findings to local and national audiences. Two youth participants have already presented at the Research Collaborative on Youth Activism, a national convening of social justice researchers held at the Alex Haley Farm.

Migrant Education
Dr. Leonard Baca and Tammy Molinar-LeBlanc
The BUENO Center in the School of Education provides opportunities for migrant and seasonal farm workers to earn a high school equivalency (GED) and to have access to Higher Education.  These opportunities are provided at eight sites throughout Colorado including: Greeley, Brighton, Longmont, Ft. Lupton, Ft. Morgan, La Junta, Alamosa and Denver.  Through this program some 600 migrant workers earn their GED each year.

Rural Area Teacher Outreach
Dr. Leonard Baca and Dr. Rocky Hill
This BUENO Center program provides opportunities for teachers in rural and remote parts of Colorado to earn MA degrees in Bilingual/ESL education.  Classes are offered both on line and face to face to cohort groups in schools with large numbers of English Language Learners.

Science Discovery
Dr. Jeffrey Kidder
Science Discovery, established in 1983, is an experience-based educational outreach program of the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Education. Science Discovery’s mission is to stimulate scientific interest, understanding, and literacy among Colorado’s youth, teachers, and families by interfacing with university resources and academic expertise. Programs offered include after-school classes, summer classes, wilderness camps, and outdoor environmental education programs. In addition, Science Discovery provides opportunities for collaborations with UCB faculty, consultations on science curriculum, and the CU Wizards' program for school children.

Simply the Best!
Dr. Margaret Eisenhart
Simply the Best! is an after-school program in science and technology for African-American and Latina middle-school girls in the Five Points community of downtown Denver. The program was developed in 1999 at the request of a Five Points community organizer who felt that young people in his community should have access to more academic resources.

The program offers after-school classes two times per week.  Each student is provided her own state-of-the-art PC computer, scanner, and digital camera.  Curriculum encompasses advanced biology and sophisticated technology experiences, such as multimedia authoring, web page design, animation and graphics.  Additional activities include field trips to historic and science sites hosted by female scientists of color.  In addition, Simply the Best! participants visit the Boulder campus to receive information on college preparation and admission.  These important experiences have been supported by a variety of organizations including Denver and Colorado based foundations, and the CU Boulder Outreach Committee. Approximately 30 girls participate each year.