Activities

Collaborative Action Research

During the first year of the project, under the directorship of Dr. Bradley A. U. Levinson, researchers met with school teachers from various Latino-impacted school corporations across Indiana to discuss the challenges they faced when working with Latino students. These meetings provided a wealth of information about the specific needs of schools, as well as the types of training and resources necessary to effectively address the various educational needs of this population.  Researchers also provided teachers with information and resources about Latin America and the plight of Latino communities in the United States. In addition, IPLACC sponsored and disseminated a series of research and policy-briefs to key decision-makers in the state surrounding the conditions of Latino language minority students in Indiana (Levinson et al, 2007).

In August of 2007, IPLACC’s new director, Dr. Gerardo R. López, decided to take the project in a new direction: partnering with a large school corporation in the Indianapolis area to provide a research-based/solutions-oriented approach to developing cultural competency in schools.  Under Lopez’s leadership, IPLACC has been conducting research on Latina/o students and their parents—as well as the teachers who work with these individuals on a daily basis-- at four different schools in the corporation.  The ultimate goal of the research project is to develop tangible solutions that emerge from actual research conducted within these schools.  Thus far, López and his research team have surveyed over 250 Latino students, 50 Latino parents, and over 150 teachers, and are currently in the process of conducting interviews with these individuals.  Once their data collection is finished, they will analyze the results, share their findings with key stakeholders in the school corporation, and create professional development activities for teachers that directly emerge from their research findings.

This “grounded,” research-based approach to teacher training and professional development is a dramatic shift from the way in which professional development has been delivered to teachers in the past.  Typically, school corporations look for “best practices” in the field, send a group of teacher-leaders to neighboring school corporations facing similar circumstances (upon their return, these teachers “train” their peers at their home school about what they learned), or hire outside consultants altogether to train teachers in the latest approaches and classroom techniques. Rarely is professional development grounded in actual research that is conducted at the local site, and therefore connected to the specific needs of that particular school corporation. The IPLACC project, under the guidance of Dr. López, hopes to re-define the ways in which professional development unfolds at schools, particularly with respect to issues of cultural competency

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For more information about IPLACC, please contact Gerardo R. Lopez (lopezg@indiana.edu), or visit their website http://www.indiana.edu/~iplacc.