Creating and Sustaining a Partnership with the Dr. Bernard C. Watson Academy for Boys through Collaborative Inquiry into Literacy and Engagement

Gerald Campano, Assistant Professor, Language Education
Ethan Yazzie-Mintz, Assistant Research Scientist, CEEP

The Watson Academy for Boys is a public, gendered elementary school which focuses on literacy and engagement, attempting to both challenge and transcend stereotypes that urban males do not like to read or write. In a grassroots reform effort, the committed faculty at the school, many themselves Gary natives, decided to refurbish an old classroom into a Writers House, where the students could both create and go public with their literary, artistic, and creative forms of cultural expression.

The students’ work in the Writers House has provided compelling evidence that students may be engaged in literacy if provided rich, culturally relevant, and challenging learning experiences and curricula. It is important to note that the Writers House, and the important professional development and curricular work that undergirds it was the result of a partnership that was carefully forged through a consensus model of inter-institutional collaboration between Indiana University, Bloomington faculty/staff and administrators, and teachers in the Gary School Corporation. We now propose to build on this initial partnership and create a long-term collaboration with the teachers and administrators at the Watson Academy for Boys, focused on supporting the K-6 teachers as they develop comprehensive and engaging literacy curricula with the students. The partnership is designed to complement the district curricular work and respond to the expressed needs of the school, providing professional development, collaborative inquiry, and shared development of engaging curricula and pedagogy.