Project Description
The Critical In-Depth Reading and Wellbeing (CIDR) project is a five-year, school-based research and professional learning initiative designed to strengthen adolescent well-being through literacy education. Grounded in the integration of social-emotional learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, and critical literacy, CIDR equips middle and high school English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers with evidence-based tools to better support students from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. Many of these students experience significant stressors, including linguistic barriers, social isolation, and systemic inequities, which can undermine both academic engagement and emotional wellbeing. Through identity-affirming texts, complex textual analysis, and interactive literacy practices, teachers learn to build classrooms that foster belonging, connection, and resilience.
CIDR is intentionally designed as a community-engaged initiative, developed in close collaboration with North Carolina educators, instructional leaders, and district partners. Rather than a fixed intervention, the professional learning model will be iteratively co-developed and refined through cycles of implementation, feedback, and adaptation, ensuring responsiveness to local contexts and educator expertise.
Partnering with North Carolina school districts, the project will work with 60 teachers and approximately 600 students over two cohorts. Using a mixed-methods, quasi-experimental design, CIDR will examine how participation in the professional learning model influences teacher beliefs, instructional practices, and student outcomes over time, including comparisons with similar classrooms not participating in the intervention. Qualitative inquiry will further document how teachers and students experience the model, with particular attention to issues of identity, belonging, and wellbeing. Together, these approaches support the development of a flexible, contextually grounded, and scalable model for advancing literacy and well-being across diverse educational settings.
Project Goals
- Strengthen adolescent wellbeing through literacy instruction
Support immigrant- and refugee-background middle and high school students’ social, emotional, and academic wellbeing by integrating critical, identity-affirming reading practices into ESL classrooms. - Equip teachers with evidence-based, humanizing instructional practices
Build ESL teachers’ capacity to implement critical in-depth reading strategies that foster belonging, agency, and emotional safety while also advancing rigorous academic literacy. - Develop and study a scalable, partnership-driven professional learning model
Co-design, implement, and iteratively refine a sustained, school-based professional learning model in collaboration with educators, integrating critical literacy, culturally responsive pedagogy, and wellbeing supports. - Generate actionable, practice-centered research to inform policy and practice
Produce rigorous mixed-methods evidence, including findings from a quasi-experimental design, on how literacy instruction can function as a lever for adolescent wellbeing, with implications for secondary ESL instruction, teacher preparation, and district- and state-level policy.