PORTFOLIO
TEENS OF COLOR ABROAD (TOCA)
ABOUT TOCA
Founded in 2018 by Lamar Shambley, TOCA is a non-profit organization that delivers language learning courses in Spanish, Arabic, and French to high school students of color. Along with its cultural enrichment programs, TOCA enrolls students from high schools around the United States.
THE BRIEF
TOCA has offered Spanish and Arabic language classes through its partnership with NaTaKallam since its inception. The team felt it was time to expand its program and provide new curricula to its incoming cohort. Essential requirements were for vigorous project-based curricula for their new French program, a straightforward application process, and a program evaluation strategy to measure the effectiveness of its language programs. Rather than students sitting in an hour-long class practicing French, the new curricula encourage intercultural learning and provide students with research and project management skills for college success.
TOCA wanted to design French curricula supporting language proficiency development and intercultural growth. Because the classes were short—ten, one-hour classes that took place three times a week—the challenge was developing an assessment to measure learning and evaluate the program's quality.
One of our key goals was to standardize TOCA's French curricula to match the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL)'s world language standards. Then, we identified project-based learning as the standard for co-creating experiences that foster intercultural growth and support language development.
The primary focus of the curricula design process was to create learning experiences that encouraged critical thinking and created a fun learning environment for its students.
PLANNING
DESIGN
TOCA's new project-based learning (PBL) French curricula are supported by evidence-based research in second language acquisition, intercultural learning theory, and assessment practices to enrich students' learning experiences.
TOCA had an existing French digital library we built upon to create experiential learning opportunities where students connect vocabulary and grammar to their research projects about a francophone-speaking country. Keeping things engaging for new students who have never learned a language before was one of our goals with the design.
DEVELOPMENT
We designed this French curriculum in Google's learning management system (LMS), then created a syllabus for the students and a curricula map for the language teacher.
Each curricular activity incorporated digital technologies, such as Duolingo, Quizlet, Flipgrid, and Mentimeter, to make online language learning fun for the students. In addition, we invited the French program director for input and made adjustments as needed. Finally, our team created training materials for TOCA's language teachers at NaTaKallam to help them with the new French PBL curricula.
LOOKING AHEAD *
Our team will continue to support TOCA— We'll provide technical support to the TOCA's team to help them facilitate the new project-based curricula. With the program's growth, we are using the data collected pre-, during-, and post-program to redesign the program and curricula for incoming classes.
