Abstract
Teams from the Center for Equity for English Learners (CEEL) and the Center for Urban Resilience (CURes) at Loyola Marymount University collaborated on multi-year projects to implement the Urban Ecology for English Learners Projects designed to implement a professional learning and curriculum model to explicitly engage students in experiences where they learn science content through investigations of their local schoolyards and neighborhoods while simultaneously advancing language and literacy skills. This partnership empowers educators to leverage the interdisciplinary science of urban ecology and resilience as a way to democratize access and opportunity for English Learner students in diverse urban settings.
Highlights
Urbanization represents the single biggest demographic transition in modern human history (United Nations 2019)
Our Urban Ecology for English Learners project presents an opportunity to implement a professional learning and curriculum model that integrates the interdisciplinary science of urban ecology and resilience to address science education as the new civil rights agenda for diverse urban students (Tate 2001)
The strategy for implementing the Urban Ecology for ELs projects consisted of several components: (1) system and site-level leadership technical assistance and collaboration; (2) identification and development of teacher leaders across designated school sites to support implementation; and (3) sustained, recurring professional development focused on integrated science and language teaching; and (4) classroom observation and peer coaching
Summary
Urbanization represents the single biggest demographic transition in modern human history (United Nations 2019). The ecosystems created by the building of cities have transformed the social, economic, political and biological characteristics of the way in which the majority of the world’s populations live (Pickett et al 2020). Understanding this phenomenon as an extant ecological reality is a crucial challenge for the 21st-century. We view the opportunity to use urban ecology as a content focus for engaging English Learners as intellectually robust, potentially transformative, and a cornerstone in protecting the democratic participatory process. We believe that the novel use of urban ecology in service to language instruction helps to ameliorate this problem
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