CRADEL:
Consortium for Research, Assessment, and Development of Engaged Literacies
The work of CRADEL draws on methods and data generated by the principle investigators during the past seven years in projects conducted for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the National Writing Project, and an array of public school systems and networks. CRADEL's projects draw on the Carnegie Foundation's principles of personalization and academic rigor, on Linda Darling-Hammond's work on authentic assessment, on Fred Newmann et al.'s studies of authentic intellectual achievement and school restructuring, and on several research reports from the Consortium for Chicago School Research.
Principle Investigators
Dr. Carmen Manning, Asst. Professor |
Dr. David Jolliffe, Professor Dr. Kendra Sisserson, Asst. Professor
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Background
The work of the Consortium for Research, Assessment and Development of Engaged Literacies (CRADEL) emerges from a rich definition: Students and educators participate in engaged literacies when they are involved in literate activities--those involving reading, writing, speaking, listening, and interacting with media--that demonstrate four features:
- Authentic intellectual and socio-cultural engagement
- Construction of knowledge
- Genuine purposes, audiences, and genres
- Elaborated, coherent, and conventionally appropriate communication
Operating with this definition, CRADEL has a three-fold mission:
- To study the range of strategies, phenomena, and techniques involved in promoting engaged literacies among students of all ages in a variety of educational settings.
- To support educators in presenting to students engaging, intellectually challenging, and authentic situations that require reading, writing, speaking, listening, and interacting with media.
- To help educators, as they create these situations, to assess their own work and their students' emerging literate abilities and to plan and revise curriculum and instruction on the basis of this on-going assessment.
The work of CRADEL draws on methods and data generated by the principal investigators during the past seven years in projects conducted for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the National Writing Project, and an array of public school systems and networks. CRADEL's projects draw on the Carnegie Foundation's principles of personalization and academic rigor, on Linda Darling-Hammond's work on authentic assessment, on Fred Newman et al.'s studies of authentic intellectual achievement and school restructuring, and on several research reports from the Consortium for Chicago School of Research.