About

Screen Shot 2013-11-16 at 1.30.40 PMThe ACCELA Alliance was established in 2002 under the leadership of Dr. Jerri Willett, now Professor Emerita. The program is housed in the   Language Literacy and Culture program in the Department of Teacher Education and Curriculum Studies at UMass Amherst.  The program’s purpose is to support teachers, administrators, community members, teacher educators, researchers, and policymakers in more fully understanding and critically responding to the combined influences of contemporary school reforms, including the adoption of state-wide curriculum frameworks, the passage of anti-bilingual education measures, changes in licensure requirements for teachers, mandates for high-stakes testing practices for both students and teachers, and the implementation of No Child Left Behind legislation. ??Educators and other stakeholders committed to equitable public education, who live and work in communities experiencing rapid social, economic, and demographic changes are often keenly aware of the positive and negative implications of these collective reforms.

The ACCELA Alliance professional development program is unlike other teacher education programs in a number of ways:

  1. Critical praxis orientation – The program is grounded in a perspective of teaching, learning, assessment, and school change that highlights the necessity for educators to draw on students’ linguistic and cultural resources in designing curriculum and instruction, reflect on assessment practices, and develop students’ abilities to use school-based literacy practices to accomplish academic, social, and political work that matters to them and the communities to which they belong.
  2. On-site delivery – ACCELA courses meet at local schools and community organizations, and are organized in part around participants’ emerging and evolving research questions about the work they do in their communities and/or student learning in their classrooms.
  3. Data-driven – Participants are supported by UMass faculty and doctoral students in conducting inquiry projects where they develop research questions responsive to local issues, collect and analyze various kinds of qualitative and quantitative data, and create action plans for future work. Data sources include scholarly literature, interviews with community members, surveys, digital video of teaching and learning practices, transcriptions of classroom interactions, samples of students’ work, and classroom, district, and state assessment data.
  4. Collaborative – Members of the ACCELA Alliance regularly present their work to colleagues, principals, and other stakeholders as part of their ACCELA course work, and many participate in regional and national conferences. These presentations allow participants to reflect on the implications of their work for student learning and to build on their collective efforts to act as change-agents (see the Research tab for a list of past publications and presentations).