Project Description
Building Bridges through Stories is an innovative digital storytelling project that harnesses the power of family narratives to connect multilingual learners (MLs), their teachers, and their peers. With more than 15% of U.S. kindergarten and first-grade students identified as MLs, many teachers face challenges engaging families who speak languages other than English at home.
This project develops a digital book-building platform that allows children and their families to co-create bilingual stories aligned with school curricula and state literacy standards. Using AI-assisted translation and design tools, families craft stories in their home language, which teachers can then integrate into classroom instruction in English. The platform aligns with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Learning Commons framework, ensuring coherence with academic goals while amplifying cultural and linguistic diversity. Through field testing and pilot studies, researchers will examine how sharing family stories enhances literacy development, cross-linguistic transfer, teacher-student relationships, and social-emotional well-being. The project will culminate in a scalable, evidence-based digital tool that empowers families and educators to collaborate in fostering belonging and learning through storytelling.
Project Goals
- Design, develop, and test a digital storybook platform that enables multilingual students and their families to co-create curriculum-connected storybooks in their home languages.
- Examine how teachers integrate family-created digital storybooks into early literacy instruction and how access to these stories influences teachers’ instructional practices and relationships with multilingual students and their families.
- Assess the impact of classroom use of digital storybooks on multilingual students’ literacy growth, cross-linguistic transfer, and social-emotional well-being.