Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching Centers

The Department of Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching has several community engagement opportunities where faculty, students, and/or staff can participate within their programs or as volunteers.

Our Center for the Inquiry of Transformative Literacies houses La Plaza de Lectura: The Reading Place, which was founded in 1999. The original mission of La Plaza was twofold:

1. To facilitate a literacy mentoring program implemented by UTSA preservice and in-service teachers for children in the community surrounding the downtown UTSA campus, and
2. To provide a setting for scaffolded field experiences for preservice and in-service teachers.

This mentoring program is now known as the Roadrunner Readers Mentoring Program. Over the 20 years of its existence, the program has provided services to approximately 2600+ children from the community.

Our Center for the Inquiry of Transformative Literacies’ La Plaza de Lectura also sponsors the following:

• HEB Read 3 - Families participating in HEB Read 3 receive home lessons, recipes, and most importantly, books. Through our partnership, La Plaza provides a pre-service component to the program, partnering with early childhood undergraduate courses to support and facilitate read-alouds and activities in up to 14 HEB Read 3 sites.
• Newcomer Teachers of San Antonio Network - We have created a network of Kindergarten through 12th-grade newcomer teachers from multiple school districts across the city. This network addresses the unique needs of newcomer classrooms by providing professional development focusing on English language acquisition and literacy development as well as the social and emotional needs of learners who have little or no formal education.
• Young Writers’ Camp - Young Writers’ Camp is a place where emerging and fluent writers can practice and refine their writing skills, share with others, and grow as artisans and thinkers. The camp focuses on the developmental nature of writing, stages in the writing process, and writing in different genres. Each day, students are investigating the art of writing, applying the craft to their own writing, and celebrating what they have done with fellow campers. Camps are full-day (9 a.m. – 4 p.m.) and welcome writers ages 9–18 (rising 4th–12th grade).
• San Antonio Writing Project

If you have questions about the Center for the Inquiry of Transformative Literacies, please contact us at la.plaza@utsa.edu.