ISLE (Integrated Science-Literacy Enactments)
NSF-Funded ROLE Project (award # REC-0411593)
Project Description:
ISLE is a comprehensive program of educational
research around teaching and learning of integrated science and
literacy in primary (grades 1-3) urban classrooms. It builds
on several years of preliminary, pilot work in 1st
and 2nd grade Chicago
classrooms—development and research work on two science
units, Matter and Forest. ISLE is a three-year
school-university action research project in which six school-based
teacher-researchers (who teach 1st, 2nd,
and 3rd grade at urban schools in Chicago)
collaboratively work with university-based researchers at the
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of
Education—faculty members Maria Varelas in science education
and Christine Pappas in literacy education, and several graduate
students in various doctoral and masters degree programs.
Using primarily qualitative, interpretive, and
ethnographic methods, the ISLE team studies scientific understandings
and linguistic registers that young low socio-economic status children
from various ethno-linguistic backgrounds bring to their classrooms,
and develop further, as their teachers orchestrate and guide them
through instruction that includes high-quality children’s
information books, hands-on explorations, various writing and drawing
opportunities, and dialogic discourse practices. |
