New program fosters English language development, career readiness for high school students

A new program for newly arrived multilingual learners in the Clarke County School District, with support from the Mary Frances Early College of Education, strengthens newcomer high school students’ English skills, content knowledge, and career readiness.

The Center for Readiness in English and Career Education started in fall 2024 and was created by David Forker, coordinator of English learner language programs (EL, ESOL, and Title III) in Clarke County School District (CCSD) and an alumnus of the College of Education’s Department of Language and Literacy Education.

The program serves newly arrived high school students who are developing their language and literacy knowledge and may have experienced limited or interrupted formal education before arriving in Clarke County. Known as CRECE (pronounced ‘creh-say’), the acronym is a form of the Spanish verb ‘crecer’ and means ‘it grows.’

“Most of our students are Spanish speakers, and so I thought that it would really be a great word to name the program that’s helping them as they’re making their transition to United States and U.S. schools,” Forker said.

Roughly 50 students from CCSD’s high schools attend CRECE, with Cedar Shoals students attending in the morning and Clarke Central students attending in the afternoon. Students are admitted on a rolling basis and stay in the program for up to two semesters, where they spend half the day at CRECE learning communication skills and math and the other half at their home school.

CRECE centers students in its curriculum and incorporates tenets of youth participatory action research (YPAR), an approach where young people play a role in development of solutions to problems they face. Before launching CRECE, Forker researched similar programs for newcomer multilingual learners for five years and brought on his doctoral advisor, Ruth Harman, as part of the planning team.

“The aim is to support our learners in thinking about their future careers, along with their language and literacy development through use of a range of different modalities such as computational thinking, music making, and environment design practices,” said Harman, a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education (LLED). “So it’s not just reading and writing— it’s visual, it’s multimodal, it’s action.”

A team of UGA researchers attends the morning advisement period at CRECE each week to support students and teachers, collect data, and co-develop curriculum using place-based and context-based learning. Researchers include Ceren Ocak, an assistant professor of instructional technology at Georgia Southern University and alumna of the College’s learning, design, and technology program, as well as Seon Ja Chang and Maki Shinzato, doctoral and master’s students in LLED. Collaborators also include Khanh Bui and Jennifer Starnes, the two ESOL teachers at CRECE.

To support a student-centered approach, the team surveyed students about their interests to learn more about them. It developed activities and games incorporating photography, music, improv, and computer science for students to explore their interests and how they might inform their future careers.

A photography project called Photovoice: Future Me, led by Chang, tasked students with taking or searching photos that represented their current and future selves along with writing descriptions in English. Computer science projects developed by Ocak introduced students to technologies like coding, robotics, and virtual reality, which provided them with the opportunity to explore a new interest as well as gain computational language to express themselves.

“We’re just meaningfully bringing technology into the class and then supporting students in building connections between language learning, language literacy, and technology,” Ocak said.

In its first year, CRECE has fostered an environment where students feel welcomed and extends the feeling to new students entering the program.

“As we’ve gotten new students over the course of last semester into this semester, the students who have been with us longer are very welcoming to new students—they’ll bring them in, they’ll give them a handshake to introduce themselves on their own accord,” Forker said. “I think it really speaks to how you can purposely put things in place for students to be successful, and then they can help other students be successful.”