In Orange County and the state, there is a need for middle and high school teachers to support bilingual and plurilingual students who speak languages other than English.
To prepare and boost the number of bilingual and multilingual teachers to teach these students, Cal State Fullerton has been awarded a $3 million U.S. Department of Education grant.
The university is one of 16 Hispanic-Serving Institutions nationwide to receive funding through the department’s Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program. The program aims to increase the number of teachers from diverse backgrounds in the nation’s underserved elementary and secondary schools.
Gavin Tierney and Kira LeeKeenan, both associate professors of secondary education, and Fernando Rodríguez-Valls, professor of secondary education, will lead Project ICARO (Ideology, Clarity, and Adaptability Responsive and Onward). The university is receiving $610,855 in first-year funding for the project.
One of the project’s goals is to prepare Latine, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander teachers who can teach subject matter in such languages as Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Mandarin.
About 70% of Orange County middle and high school students speak Spanish, and 10% speak Korean, Vietnamese or Mandarin, Tierney said.
“We’re responding to the call for more and better prepared bilingual teachers in middle and high school,” Tierney said. “Project ICARO is designed to embrace, value and include the linguistic repertoires of all candidates and how they leverage their skills to ensure linguistic inclusion and justice in classrooms.”
Tierney said there are about 100,000 English learners and emergent plurilingual students — those who maximize their multiple literacy skills when communicating with others — in Orange County schools and more than 1 million across schools in California.
Students participating in Project ICARO will enroll in the College of Education’s single subject credential program across the subject areas represented in the program.
Some students may also enroll in the university’s bilingual authorization program, which prepares secondary teacher candidates to teach in five languages: Khmer, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish and Vietnamese. Close to 400 teacher candidates have completed the program over the last four years, and two-thirds of the students in 2023 identified as Asian American, Native American Pacific Islander and Latine.
Participating students will receive stipends of $2,500 to complete their prerequisite courses and $6,000 upon completion of the credential program. LeeKeenan said the stipends are meant to offset the credential program costs and students’ living expenses.
“We know that, especially for underrepresented populations, the cost of a credential program, which requires full-time student teaching, is a financial barrier for many students,” LeeKeenan said.
Over the five years of the grant project, 105 students are anticipated to participate, with the first class of 35 students starting in fall 2025. Students will be involved for three years, beginning with taking prerequisites for the credential program.
Students will then enroll in the one-year credential program and receive guidance from teachers in the partner school districts. In the third year, students will receive additional support in their teaching careers to foster retention.
During the last two years of the project, alums will return to provide feedback on the best practices they learned in Project ICARO and the classroom.
Project ICARO is partnering with veteran teachers in Anaheim Union High School District, Garden Grove Unified School District and Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District.
Tierney said that Anaheim Union and Garden Grove Unified school districts are expanding their dual-language education programs, prompting the need for bilingual teachers who can teach subject areas in grades 7-12 in languages other than English.
As part of Project ICARO, six courses in the single subject credential program will be redesigned to better integrate learning objectives, and assignments and assessments from a culturally and linguistically sustaining framework.
“The redesigned courses will focus on supporting the learning and development of English learners and emergent plurilingual secondary students by providing opportunities for students to use their full linguistic repertoires,” Rodriguez-Valls said.