The College of Education and Human Sciences recently completed its 12th annual Literacy Across the Curriculum Institute.Delta State University’s College of Education and Human Sciences recently completed its 12th annual Literacy Across the Curriculum Institute on campus, which ran from June 1-28.
LACI is provided through the support of the No Child Left Behind Act: Improving Teacher Quality State Grant.
In total, 18 content area teachers from across Mississippi attended the 20-day institute. The intensive training included a variety of topics, lectures, activities and presentations on a wealth of relevant topics for today’s educators. The most heavily embedded topics of the institute included word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension skills and how to actively incorporate them in their content areas.
The teachers attended sessions related to literacy and college readiness skills to better prepare their students for not only major assessments, but also for their futures.
The goal of LACI was to enhance the participants’ repertoire of literacy knowledge, skills and dispositions to not only improve their students’ academic performance, but also to act as change agents within their schools and districts.
The director of this year’s program was Dr. Merideth Van Namen.
“Our 18 participants were eager to grow professionally and played an active role in learning new literacy strategies to enhance their classrooms,” said Van Namen. “The instructors were deeply vested in helping the participants learn how to increase students’ literacy skills and overall academic achievement. The combination of wonderful participants and knowledgeable instructors made for an extremely successful institute.”
Upon completing the institute, the teachers will provide staff development for their schools on their newly learned literacy skills, in addition to completing an extensive Teacher Work Sample and collecting evidence of student learning in their classrooms. The teachers will reconvene for two additional follow-up sessions in the fall and spring to continue evaluating their planning, instruction and assessment, as well as to continue learning valuable literacy practices.
Along with Van Namen, the LACI administrative team included Dr. Janet Parker, instructor, and Pam Maxwell, instructor.
For more information on LACI, contact Van Namen at mvannamen@deltastate.edu or 662-846-4412.
