Spencer Project

Designing Meaningful Learning Across Languages, Disciplines, and Communities

A School–University Partnership for Translingual, Disciplinary Learning in the Age of Generative AI

Our project, sponsored by a Spencer Foundation Large Grant, brings together K–12 teachers, students, and university researchers to design more engaging and effective approaches to literacy and learning in Spanish, English Language Arts, science, and social studies. We are also interested in exploring the affordances of generative AI, but this is not simply an AI project. We ask: How can we design learning in which students use their linguistic, cultural, intellectual, and technological resources to understand the world and create something meaningful within it?

Learning across boundaries

Students already move among languages, communities, media, identities, and ways of knowing. The syncretic approach proposed for the learning process treats these resources as strengths, bringing academic and everyday knowledge, multiple languages, and traditional and multimodal forms of communication into productive interaction. For multilingual learners, this means drawing on their full linguistic repertoires while developing the specialized language, genres, and ways of thinking valued across disciplines. Our goal is for students to become active knowledge-makers who connect new learning to what they already know, analyze ideas and perspectives critically, and apply their learning to meaningful problems and audiences.

Where does generative AI fit?

In this project, generative AI is a tool for learning and an object of critical inquiry, not a substitute for student thinking. The project will adapt CyberScholar, a pedagogical platform designed by University of Illinois researchers that provides multilingual generative AI support and allows us to examine how students use and learn from that support. Students will use this instructional resource to explore ideas, receive feedback, revise writing, compare perspectives, and experiment with ways of communicating while also questioning AI-generated language, perspectives, and feedback. The goal is not faster or less demanding writing, but more thoughtful, purposeful, and critical writing in which learners retain intellectual agency.

Teachers are designers, not recipients of a technology

Participating teachers will design curriculum units based on their students’ needs, disciplines, standards, and local contexts, with the researchers’ support. The project is deliberately collaborative: teachers’ knowledge of their students, communities, curricular goals, and classroom realities guides the design of the teaching and learning experiences. 

Project Team

• Mary Kalantzis, Ph.D. (Principal Investigator), Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

• Kris D. Gutiérrez, Ph.D. (Co-Principal Investigator), Carol Liu Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley

• Gabriela C. Zapata, Ph.D. (Co-Principal Investigator), Associate Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham 

• John Jones, Ph.D. (Co-Investigator), Assistant Professor in Childhood Education at SUNY Cortland

• Bill Cope, Ph.D. (Supporting Researcher), Professor at UIUC 

• Michele Galla, Ph.D. (Supporting Researcher), Postdoctoral Research Associate at UIUC

• Anastasia-Olga (Olnancy) Tzirides, Ph.D. (Supporting Researcher), Research Scientist at UIUC

• Duane Searsmith (Supporting Researcher), Software and AI Developer at UIUC

• Patrick A. Bolger, Ph.D. (Supporting Researcher), Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University