Current Research

The Read Make and Play Bag project (RMP) is an initiative to cultivate home literacy practices and multigenerational co-learning experiences with children and families of adults in CFL’s GED® and High School Equivalency programs. The RMP program consisted of six weekly dialogue sessions with parent/caregiver participants facilitated by a literacy instructor within the Adult Education department. The sessions were structured to build an empowering space for families to explore learning and to discuss their reading, making, and playing at home. Preliminary findings from our study of this initiative include an increase in the average number of minutes that caregivers spent reading with their children as a result of participation in the program. We also saw an impact among families participating in the program in cultivating positive, literacy-centered interactions with their children, specifically around play, self-efficacy, and making connections across texts and the real world.

This project is funded by the City of Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services and the Donley Foundation. For more information, please contact Kira Baker-Doyle (kirabd@uic.edu), Sarai Coba-Rodriguez (scobaro2@uic.edu), and/or Andrea Vaughan (avaugh6@uic.edu).

Youth Writing Their Lives (YWTL) is a summer out-of-school program with youth creating multimodal texts (e.g., video making, podcasting, artmaking). As a team of researchers and teacher-researchers, we drew from collaborative narrative inquiry (Taylor, et al., 2019) and fusion autoethnography (Mawhinney & Petchauer, 2012) to systematically reflect on the narratives teachers constructed about their teaching and learning within this program. Preliminary findings from our study of this initiative include ways that interest-driven and socially-embedded learning contexts open up space for learners and teachers to share their lives.

As quality early childhood programs benefit young children’s lives and promise improved social and economic outcomes later in life, quality early childhood education should be accessible to all children and families. To echo the need for quality early learning opportunities, the US Department of Human Services granted funding to the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services to support Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships among DFSS delegate agencies and child care sites across the City. Chicago DFSS partnered with the Center for Literacy to research the fidelity of EHS-CCP expansion in order to evaluate the program implementation and the program’s ongoing strengths and challenges.

This project is funded by the City of Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services. For more information, please contact Kira Baker-Doyle (kirabd@uic.edu) and/or Andrea Vaughan (avaugh6@uic.edu).