Project LEARN (Language, Equity, and Action Research with Newcomer Students) is a dynamic collaboration among teacher educators, district administrators, pre- and in-service teachers, and newcomer and emergent plurilingual students from Anaheim Union High School District and California State University, Fullerton’s Department of Secondary Education.  Our work is supported, in part, by the Spencer Foundation, through their Research-Practice Partnership grant program.

In Project LEARN, teachers and students work collaboratively to stretch their linguistic repertoires, grow academically, explore and document the experiences of their communities, and use their voices to transform their worlds. In addition to focusing on ways to build community/comunidad, confidence/confianza, and complexity/complejidad in the classroom, Project LEARN engages  teachers and students in action research (including Youth Participatory Action Research, or YPAR) as they collaboratively tell the stories of newcomer and emergent plurilingual students within and beyond the classroom.

Project LEARN emerged from the Summer Language Academy (SLA), an award-winning arts- and literacy-rich summer program for newcomer and emergent plurilingual students in Southern California.  Since 2016, almost 1000 students from 23 countries and 19 linguistic communities have participated in a Summer Language Academy in one of three partner school districts. The SLA purposefully positions newcomer and emergent plurilingual students as the experts of their own identities, cultures, and stories by utilizing curriculum that centers their inherent, plurilingual abilities to make connections with one another, with teachers, and with texts.

This website features examples of teachers can embed principles of radically inclusive teaching into their academic year classrooms, focusing on strategies for building community/comunidad, nourishing confidence/confianza, and scaffolding complexity/complejidad within and beyond the disciplines.  To see examples from Project LEARN teachers, click here.