CREATES Literacy Professional Development

            This year, WISE worked with Project WET to launch the CREATES Literacy Project, which aims to increase access to culturally-responsive and place-based STEAM educational programming that helps students build competencies in critical thinking, science communication, and creative communication technologies. To jump start this project, six Tucson educators attended a literacy and science integration professional development workshop hosted by the CREATES Literacy team on March 5th, 2022 and were able to begin developing educational modules that bring together STEM, literacy, and creative communication technologies. This professional development workshop was led by Jill Williams, Joshua Ruddick, Holly Thomas-Hilnurn, and Elena Greenberg. Working alongside both the professional CREATES Literacy team and the attending teachers, three University of Arizona student interns, Lizbeth Perez, Emily Ciszewski, and Anna Rogers, provided additional support during the workshop.

            The workshop began with a deep dive into what literacy truly means, which led to a discussion on why integrating literacy into science education is vital. Then, the teachers were given the opportunity to practice integrating literacy into science by outlining how they would utilize various strategies from the American Museum of Natural History, which included paraphrasing, summarizing, interactive read-alouds, interactive reading guides, and scientific explanation tools, with a sample scientific text that they brought in.

            During the afternoon, the teachers were able to begin writing their lesson plans and combining various literacy strategies with creative communication technologies. Lessons ranged from using ArcGIS Story Maps to explore natural environments surrounding local schools to having students use Adobe Spark videos to summarize various sources about Monarch butterflies.

Special thanks to the sponsors and donors who made this event possible, including the Stocker Foundation and Arizona Project WET. Without this support, this workshop would not have been possible!