Our faculty and students work in and learn from schools and communities to address today’s complex public challenges in K-12 education, public policy, and more. Combining the expertise of our faculty, our communities, and our students we integrate research, teaching, and outreach.
Our commitment to social justice and educational transformation is interwoven into our partnerships in local schools and communities. These partnerships are concentrated place-based educational research and development in threeinitialColorado communities: Lafayette in Boulder Valley, nearnortheast (NNE) Denver, andNortheast Colorado.
By locating our research, professional development, teacher preparation, community engagement and policy work in these communities and more, we look for synergies andconcentrate ourengagement work to help facilitate the university's goal to impact humanity.
2022-23 Place-based Partnership Projects
Fueling Culturally Sustaining Ambitious Science Teaching in Denver Public Schools
Melissa Braaten, Beth Vinson, & William Penuel
Region: Denver
After adopting high-quality curricular materials and conducting initial workshops for science
teachers, what should happen next to support deeper professional learning, expand teacher leadership capacity, and foster the institutional supports needed to sustain improvement in science education? This problem of practice motivates our partnership to co-design, implement, and examine science teacher leadership and learning collectives as a next step for sustainable inquiry oriented professional learning. Collective case studies will examine how teacher inquiry group activities can support science teachers in NE DPS to deepen their professional learning, leadership, and classroom practices. An ethnographic case study of the institutional and cultural contexts of NE DPS schools will illuminate how dilemmas of practice can provide productive tension fueling changes in schools paving the way for culturally sustaining ambitious science teaching. Findings and designs emerging from this NE DPS project will then equip leaders to expand efforts across DPS.
Co-Designing Responsive Literacy Instruction with Rural Elementary Educators: A Professional Development Partnership
Elizabeth Dutro & Olivia Cox
Region: East Central Rural Colorado
In this project, CU Boulder teacher educators (faculty and doctoral students) collaborate with east central Colorado elementary school teachers in a professional development (PD) partnership to support teachers in co-designing engaging and equitable literacy instruction that is also responsive to increased state mandates in literacy instruction. This project addresses a key imperative in rural elementary schools: providing place-based PD that supports teachers’ collective learning about literacy content and instructional practices, while tailoring professional learning structures to the unique needs of rural educators. The team of teachers and CU educators engage a school-based, collaborative model of professional learning focused on literacy content and teaching practices that arise from teachers’ goals. The monthly PD sessions 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. In addition to supporting the participating teachers in their practice, the project aims to 1) generate rich curriculum and instructional practices that participants can share with other teachers in their school and other districts in east central Colorado and 2) collaborate with participating teachers to study and share what we learn about innovative structures and tools for collaborative, school-based professional learning.
Voices of Healing
Ben Kirshner, Solicia Lopez, & Alexis Hunter
Region: Lafayette & NE Denver
We are developing a multigenerational community-engaged research project that explores the relationship between activism, mental health, and healing among Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other racially marginalized youth in the Colorado Front Range, with priority placed on Lafayette and NE Denver. The interdependence of youth voice, agency and mental health is increasingly recognized by educators, researchers, and youth activists. Although experiences of activism and voice can foster well-being, they can also take an emotional toll, including stress, anxiety, and backlash. Our project, called Voices of Healing, will explore these issues through an iterative process carried out with young BIPOC activists, NGO organization leaders, and community elders. Specifically, we propose to: a) identify the assets and cultural practices that young people already engage in to support their health, wellness, agency, and identity, b) identify gaps and needs in the broader ecosystem of youth-serving organizations in Lafayette, NE Denver, and other neighborhoods of Denver and Aurora, and c) create a program of work that addresses those gaps through ongoing community-engaged research partnerships that build capacity for healing justice in youth organizations. In doing this work, we aim for youth participants to walk away with their own tools and strategies for healing and mental health, while also generating a recommended course of action for an intervention at the level of the ecosystem of organizations.
Manual High School Youth Build and Utilize a Hip-Hop Studio as a Culturally-Legitimate STEAM Learning Task
Kalonji Nzinga
Region: Denver
The placed based partnership between the RAP Lab (CU Boulder) and Manual High School seeks to engage youth in building a state-of-the-art hip-hop recording studio on the site of one of Denver's oldest public high schools. The design-based research intervention will study how reconfiguring the sociotechnical infrastructure of this historic high school creates openings for youth to engage in consequential STEAM problem solving tasks, creative identity formation, and counter-storytelling through culturally-legitimate language arts. With one of the largest concentrations of Black students in the Denver Public Schools district, Black cultural lifeways are pervasive within the academic and social spheres of student life. For example, MHS educators (Rodney Douglas and Deon Hilligoss) have noticed young people engaging in various forms of hip-hop inspired intellectual activity; studying rap poets, writing song lyrics, and audio engineering their own songs. These innovative teachers have identified the potential of hip-hop as a culturally-legitimate way of engaging youth in learning. We want to better understand this potential in order to catalyze it for holistic youth development. During the 2022-2023 school year, the instructional team consisting of community audio engineers, on-site high school teachers, and graduate/undergraduate research assistants will support youth in designing the studio, and then using it to write, record, and audio-engineer songs that tell their stories. Youth will finally transform their artistic works into NFT's, learning how to distribute their stories in the blockchain-facilitated digital marketplace.
2021-22Place-based PartnershipProjects
Building on Our Collective Strengths with McGlone Educators to Improve Writing Instruction for Latinx EBs
Mileidis Gort & Vanessa Santiago Schwarz
Region: Denver
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.
Collaborating on CollaboRATE: Partnering to Shine Light on the Racialized Experiences of DPS Teachers
Allison Atteberry, Mimi Engel, & Terrenda White
Region: Denver
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.
Developing Critical Consciousness through Dialogue with our Neighbors: Uni Hill and SOE Partnership for Equity
Deb Palmer & Andrea Dyrness
Region: Lafayette/BVSD
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.
Equify: Building LGBTQ+-Inclusive Capacity in Greeley-Evans District 6 through University-District Partnership
Sara Staley, Bethy Leonardi, Brittni Laura Hernandez, and Jesse Tijerina
Region: Northeast/North-Central Colorado
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.
Integrating Standards-Based Literacy Instruction and Trauma-Responsive Pedagogies with Rural Elementary Educators: A Professional Development Partnership
Elizabeth Dutro and Olivia Cox
Region: Northeast/East-Central Colorado
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.
From Players to Hackers: Creating Robust Learning ecologies that Privilege Video-game Play, Socio-political Critique, and Techno-structural Analysis
Arturo Cortez and Tiera Tanksley
Region: Denver
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.
2020-21 Place-based PartnershipProjects
Culturally Sustaining and Critical Civic Engagement with Latinx Youth
Charla Agnoletti and Enrique Lopez
Our objective is to merge two autonomous programs affliated withCU Engage,the Center for Community-based Learning and Research—Aquetza and Public Achievement (PA)—to create robust programming and scholarship that leverages the strengths of both programs. Our programming will incorporate Latinx cultural practices and historical identities as tools to address school and community based social justice issues, which we refer to as culturally sustaining civic engagement. In addition, we will expand programming for CU undergraduates and Lafayette high school youth across a calendar year. Aquetza is a 10-day summer program at CU Boulder for primarily Chicano/a high school youth across Colorado. PA is an undergraduate program that guides critical civic engagement with youth in Boulder Valley School District. We will work directly with Centaurus High School youth inLafayettethrough the PA program who will serve as co-members in our project. Our interdisciplinary team, led by Dr. Enrique Lopez and Charla Agnoletti, M.Ed., brings together experts in education, Chicana/o Studies (Dr. Enrique Sepulveda), and youth-led civic engagement (Dr. Ben Kirshner). In concert with our program, our team will produce an ethnographic case study that documents the development of agency among youth participants. Our project advances our broader mission of strengthening CU Engage’s outreach efforts by creating a research-practice site where CU affiliates (faculty, staff, students) and community members can observe culturally sustaining civic engagement “in action” and receive training on incorporating similar programming in their projects or classes.
Partnerships with Rural Districts for Post-Pandemic Planning
Valerie Otero, Angela Bielefeldt, Bret Miles, and Jason Westfall
In the Partnerships with Rural Districts for Post-Pandemic Planning project, CU Boulder faculty and staff from the Physics through Evidence, Empowerment through Reasoning (PEER Physics) project and from the Engineering Plus program are partnering with teachers, coaches, and administrators from the Northeast, East Central and Centennial Boards of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) to generate knowledge and relevant practices that address the unique needs of the BOCES and inform the development and revision of the PEER Physics Suite.We plan to meet the immediate needs of teachers of science in rural Colorado through remote professional development, classroom tools and resources for teaching state of the art physics, and to build a regional cohort of science teachers for ongoing support. These high school science teachers are using the PEER Physics curriculum and participating in remote professional development where we are modeling remote instructional strategies and sharing remote learning resources that have been effective for our veteran PEER Physics teachers.We ultimately seek to build models for physics and engineering teacher preparation and development, which will prepare in-service and prospective teachers to act quickly in crises such as COVID-19, including more substantive remote science instruction and online physics-specific teacher preparation modules.
SCENIC: Science-Engineering Inquiry Collaborative In Rural Colorado
Joseph Polman, Daniel Knight, and Michael Hannigan
The Science-Engineering Inquiry Collaborative in Rural Colorado (SCENIC) project involves faculty and students from CU Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Scienceand School of Education with teachers and students in multiple districts in rural Colorado, including the Northeast Boards of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) area, Delta County, and Mesa County. SCENIC is a research-practice partnership focused on engaging youth in rural schools mentored by engineering students from CU Boulder in scientific inquiries with the help of cutting-edge environmental monitoring tools. The initiative supports the learning and developmental needs of rural K-12 students as well as CU students. The initiative provides rural K-12 schools access to engineers and environmental monitoring equipment they could not otherwise access. The initiative also provides CU Boulder engineering students an opportunity to engage in meaningful educational outreach work, and improve their own communication practices, which will be valuable in their future professional careers. The project also fulfills a research need—namely, to surface and better understand how interdisciplinary project-based learning involving high school youth supported by university students can serve rural high school sites in culturally responsive and sustaining ways. The project willsupport research and development on the learning and identity development of participating students at the middle, high school, and university levels, as well as research on the research-partnership practices and routines.
2019-20Place-based PartnershipProjects
Developing Critical Consciousness through Dialogue with our Neighbors: Uni Hill and SOE Partnership for Equity
Deb Palmer, Andrea Dyrness & Krishna Pattisapu
University Hill Elementary is a Title I school, part of Boulder Valley School District, serving 70% Latinx students/families, situated directly across Broadway from the Education building. They are currently undergoing significant changes to their model for instruction in their DLBE program. Together with faculty, parents, and children, SOE faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students of color, are working to understand what kinds of spaces support the development of critical consciousness and equity - and we are working to address needs articulated by the school’s principal and counselor and build connection at this diverse elementary school that is, quite literally, our neighbor in Boulder.
Accountability and Assessments in Small Rural School Districts
Terri Wilson, Ben Shear & Kendra Anderson
Partnering with Bilingual Educators to Improve Writing Instruction and Outcomes for Low-Income, Latinx English Learners
Mileidis Gort, Molly Hamm-Rodríguez, Laura Hamman-Ortíz & Vanessa Santiago Schwarz
Building School-University Partnerships to Support Humanizing, Place-Based, and Community-Based Elementary Teacher Preparation
Jamy Stillman & Melissa Braaten
2018-19Place-based Partnerships Seed GrantProjects
This year's place-based seed grant projects plant the seeds of sustainable partnerships acrossColorado communities.