Partnerships

In 2019, we established a research-practice partnership with educators at McGlone K-8 Academy in Denver’s Montbello region. Grounded in a social theory of learning, this partnership was conceptualized as a community of practice that included bilingual educators, district instructional leaders, and biliteracy researchers in exploring the potential for genre pedagogy to enhance writing instruction. Ten McGlone teachers (grades pre-K through five) and three district and school leaders participated in the partnership, which was designed to explore how professional development (PD) and collaborative planning for genre pedagogy impacts writing instruction for emergent bilinguals (EBs). Per the teachers’ request, we were invited to re-establish our partnership after a brief pause due to a shift in the administration’s priorities. Our expanded engagement will support ongoing PD grounded in genre pedagogy (including scaffolded curriculum alignment and lesson planning within and across grades) beginning in the summer of 2021 and continuing throughout the 2021-22 academic year. Our work will build on the successes of our research-practice partnership to collaboratively and responsively support  teachers in providing high quality writing instruction for Latinx EBs in Spanish and English across the early grades (K-3) and, in doing so, support the district’s goal of improving EB writing outcomes.

The current Seed Grant project has grown out of an existing partnership, called the Teacher Workforce Collaborative (TWC), between DPS and three faculty at University of Colorado-Boulder (Atteberry, Engel, White). This faculty team shares a commitment to conducting research aimed at improving teacher working conditions, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and Teachers of Color (ToCs). The Seed Grant will enable us to support DPS in its redesign of the District’s annual all-teacher survey, CollaboRATE, to shed light on the experiences of DPS ToCs. Those survey responses will then be leveraged to identify school- and district-based factors that shape the differential retention and well-being of ToCs in DPS. This project contributes to our longer-term goal to sustain a robust partnership with DPS through which we collaborate to improve access to excellent teachers for children from minoritized populations.

The University Hill-CU Partnership aims to support equity by building spaces for critical inquiry and dialogue that center the needs, identities, and experiences of bilingual, transnational and minoritized students. The partnership brings together students and faculty from the School of Education and Ethnic Studies Department with teachers, students, and parents at University Hill Elementary, a Title I dual language school across the street from CU. At the heart of the partnership is a cultural mentoring program that brings together underrepresented students at CU with predominantly Latinx 5th graders at Uni Hill. Through a weekly after-school program led by CU students, we aim to: 1) build community and promote a sense of belonging, 2) reflect on and strengthen cultural identity, and 3) explore issues of common concern in our communities and community cultural wealth. We hope that through this new community, both groups of students will see their identities and experiences as resources for their education; Uni Hill students will begin to see higher education as both possible and meaningful for them, and CU students will see community engagement as a way to enhance their own educational experience. CU education researchers also partner with Uni Hill fifth grade teachers, and offer professional development for the entire faculty, to support teachers to leverage students’ community cultural wealth as resources for teaching and learning.

This project aims to improve life and learning opportunities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) students, families, and employees in educational contexts in Weld County. Principal partners are A Queer Endeavor and Greeley-Evans School District 6. Currently, our university-district partnership is guided by two goals: (1) developing and testing professional development, instructional practices, and curriculum materials that foster safer, more equitable, LGBTQ+-inclusive learning environments and (2) investigating how best to support educator learning of practices that affirm gender, sexual, and family diversity. To support our goals, as well as to advance both research and theory, this award will allow us to develop strategies for extending professional learning for a range of audiences (e.g., parents/families, district leadership, school-based equity teams, teachers, and staff) as well as to engage parents and families in dialogue and education around what affirming gender and family diversity in looks like in District 6.

In this project, CU Boulder teacher educators collaborate with eastern Colorado elementary school administrators and teachers in a professional development (PD) partnership that addresses two pressing needs in rural schools: meeting increased mandates for standards-based literacy instruction and enacting pedagogies that are responsive to students’ life experiences, including trauma. As educators begin to imagine recovery from COVID-19, these twinned priorities are imbued with even greater significance. Our project addresses the need to integrate standards-based literacy instruction and trauma-responsive pedagogies through co-design of a site-based professional learning opportunity. The PD will support teachers to collaborate in cycles of innovative literacy instruction, including co-planning and co-teaching of lessons, collective debriefs of practice, and support for individual instruction between sessions. Through its focus on literacy teaching practices that embed trauma-responsive pedagogies and are animated by local goals and knowledge, this project 1) attends to teachers’ immediate professional learning goals, 2) creates engaging, equity-centered literacy learning experiences for children, and 3) generates rich curriculum and instructional practices that participants can share with other teachers within and across districts in eastern Colorado.

The objective of The L.I.T. (Learning, Ingenuity, & Transformation) Gaming Lab is to create a new learning ecology that centers young people’s everyday cultural practices, supports the development of critical racial analyses, and builds new relationships between high schoolers, undergraduate students, in-service teachers, and researchers. In addition, our research/community partnership will help the Youth Empowerment Broadcasting Organization (YEBO) support the claim, in line with previous research, that video gaming practices and the broader gaming ecologies that they constitute, allow for expansive learning opportunities for young people with the potential to develop critical civic literacies and to make connections to academic disciplinary work. Through intentional co-design, our collaboration will support YEBO in developing a set of practices that will help them accomplish their programmatic goals of strengthening ties with schools, while simultaneously building capacity for future projects that seek to create connections between in-school and out-of-school spaces. This social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez, 2016; Gutiérrez et al., 2017) engages in iterative cycles of inquiry by supporting young people and undergraduate students in examining their everyday collaborative video-gaming practices by drawing on insights from the learning sciences, critical race theory, and critical science and technology studies.