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- Civics/History Curriculum: An Introduction to the CILIA-T Curriculum Project
March 28, 2022
Civics/History Curriculum: An Introduction to the CILIA-T Curriculum Project
What makes a resource “teachable”, and what tells you that it just won’t work? How many instructional needs can one curriculum meet, and how ambitious should one curriculum try to be?
We have been pondering and discussing these questions and many more lately, as a team working on the CILIA-T curriculum project.
CILIA-T stands for Content-Integrated Language Instruction for Adults with Technology Support. Funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, this five-year project will build and pilot a standards-aligned, 16-module curriculum designed for intermediate-level adult English learners to broaden their academic vocabulary, morphological skills, and critical thinking application while engaging U.S. history and civics content through a thematic lens. Students will also build and practice digital literacy skills using this resource, which will be teachable in person and via hybrid and remote delivery models, both on computers and mobile devices. The best news for educators: the entire curriculum will be available online for free.
Curriculum structure
Each module will consist of two 90-minute in-class lesson plans, plus roughly one hour of independent online practice for students. Currently in early stages of development, all modules will include the following:
- content and skills-based objectives
- thematic guiding questions
- opportunities for community-building discussion/story-telling and stimulation of background knowledge
- multiple readings of a central text with a focus on U.S. history and civics topics and data
- practice with targeted domain-specific and transferable academic vocabulary and related morphology
- comparative/counternarrative engagement with additional materials (images, videos, graphic organizers incorporating data or statistics, maps, texts, quotes, etc.)
- critical analysis activities like evaluating sources, considering bias, fact vs. opinion, etc.
- project-/problem-based projects for individuals and groups
- review activities
- lots of opportunities for students to apply their life experiences to the class discussion and transfer learning to their own daily lives
Each module connects U.S. history and civics to current events, and makes space for students to shape the conversation. There will be teacher resources and videos available so that the curriculum can be used by teachers with various levels of experience.
Project leadership and input
The project is led by Aydin Durgunoglu (University of Minnesota Duluth), Daphne Greenberg and Elizabeth Tighe (Georgia State University), and Theresa Sladek (Literacy Minnesota). An exciting feature of the CILIA-T project is the strong representation of active teacher and student voices in shaping the curriculum as it is written and piloted over the next few years. Experienced adult educators in civics, U.S. history, English language instruction and digital literacy, many currently teaching in adult education settings, are collaborating on initial draft versions of the modules, and our team will gather and incorporate input from teachers and learners during our pilot, starting in 2023.
In fact, we’re already shaping our curriculum using input from the field! As our project team begins drafting CILIA-T modules, Erin recently spoke with 14 educators in various roles in adult education in MN and GA to gather their ideas for pros and cons that go into selecting curriculum resources. Erin met with professional instructors currently teaching online, in person and hybrid classes for community-based, college-based and school district programs, lead teachers, administrators, and volunteer teachers.
After walking through our project, Erin asked them what features might make them excited to try out a U.S. history/civics curriculum resource, and what barriers or drawbacks might discourage them from adopting a resource. Here’s what our brilliant colleagues had to say!
