Our Curriculum

Why This Curriculum Matters

Many adult education programs combine English language learning with civics education. However, there is no widely available curriculum that is free, open-access, easy to use, standards-aligned, based on extensive research on knowledge acquisition, and grounded in proven teaching methods. There is also a need for well-structured, integrated activities that accomplish multiple learner goals at once, to maximize instructional time. The CILIA-T curriculum seeks to fill that gap.

How CILIA-T was Developed: Research-Based, Practitioner-Tested

The efforts to create CILIA-T started when two adult ESL instructors (Anurag Sagar and Kathy Brown) approached Aydin Durgunoğlu to collaborate to develop an integrated civics/ESL curriculum. This resulted in a 6-part CILIA curriculum, guided by CCRS and ELLP standards and was used in several Philadelphia classrooms. 

Later, with support from the Department of Education, the current team of adult education teachers and researchers extensively revised and extended this curriculum to 16 modules. Several content experts contributed to ensure that multiple voices are represented in the curriculum. The new curriculum team also developed digital standards and used technology to both support instruction and to strengthen learners’ digital literacy. Hence, the new curriculum is now called CILIA-T to reflect the technology component. 

The curriculum is informed by the existing research on knowledge acquisition, language and adult development. In addition, our own research has examined how various methods of activating background knowledge affect comprehension of complex topics and how to assess digital, civics, history and English proficiency.  

As we developed the curriculum, we continuously evaluated it. The first study evaluated the effectiveness of the parts of the digital literacy content. In the following studies, we evaluated CILIA-T as it was piloted in six classrooms. These pilot evaluation studies included classroom observations, teacher and learner focus groups and pre and post testing of the learners. 

Through extensive development and testing, the CILIA-T team refined the curriculum to ensure that it is both user-friendly and effective.

Learn More

For a detailed project description, visit the CILIA-T Support project page on the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) website. 

For further inquiries, please contact Principal Investigator Aydin Durgunoglu (adurguno@d.umn.edu).