The MCOE Living Text project was founded on the idea that Literacy is a key equity lever to support student access to educational and professional opportunities. It integrates STEAM principles in concert with close reading strategies and performing arts to support a deep understanding of culturally rich and important literature. 

 

Students collaboratively co-design and produce characters and settings from stories through the use of digital fabrication, coding and practical arts processes based on a deep reading of the role of those elements within the story and their impact on the narrative. They are supported in performing the story in a performance based Reader’s Theater model with an authentic audience. 

 

The process teaches students routines for deep reading and the metacognition around story elements and structures that serve to improve reading strategies for future texts by internalizing what is essential about the elements as they both design and perform them. 

 

STEAM skills are both leveraged and deepened as students collaborate around design and problem solving while ultimately positioning themselves as successful creators using tools that align significantly with 21st Century skill sets and begin to open access into a world where creativity and problem solving, as an identity, can serve to propel them forward.