Literacy among Latino children at Murchison Street School in East Los Angeles improved after teachers there started working with a UC Davis professor on using writers' workshops and gifted-student instructional techniques in their classrooms. State education officials are hoping the same methods -- the result of a decade of research by UC Davis education professor Richard Figueroa -- can foster similar academic success for thousands of migrant children, who are among California's most disadvantaged, at-risk students. The California Department of Education last spring selected Figueroa's Optimal Learning Environment Project as a model for training educators to teach migrant children to read and write Figueroa and his collaborators at California State University, Sacramento, where the project is based, conducted training institutes for 263 migrant education teachers in Sacramento and Los Angeles over the summer. "From the 1920s to the early 1990s, the educational neglect of migrant students has been ubiquitous," Figueroa said. "These children have had little academic achievement because the instructional program has seldom been effective." Now with the selection of the project for training migrant-education teachers, Figueroa said, "We have a golden opportunity to link UC Davis, CSUS, the California Department of Education and migrant educators to do something for children that have been left out for so many years." Figueroa and CSU-Sacramento professors Nadeen Ruiz and Jose Cintrón started the project a decade ago to teach reading and writing to bilingual learning-handicapped students. Ruiz and Cintrón direct the project. The project was unique in that it provided predominantly learning-disabled pupils with an instructional setting that is more typically associated with programs for gifted students. It has since been used successfully with students who speak a variety of languages -- including Chinese, Spanish, English and American Sign Language -- and in varied instructional settings from an upper middle class school in Mexico City to classes for the deaf, blind and severely learning-handicapped. Sonia Hernandez, state education deputy superintendent in charge of migrant education, selected the project last March for its focus on the literacy development in bilingual children and because teachers have found success in using its methods. As a researcher and evaluator for the next three years, Figueroa will document the program's impact on migrant students' literacy achievement. Figueroa said principles and strategies taught in the institutes are hardly experimental. He and his collaborators thoroughly investigated which instructional strategies turn students into effective readers and writers. Teachers who attend the project's institutes learn effective principles for creating curriculum and instructional contexts. Those principles include: Balancing "teaching to memory" with "teaching to meaning"-or rote memorization with contextual learning; Placing emphasis more on creating a stimulating classroom environment than on diagnosing students' learning disabilities; and Using children's own interests, home learning and existing knowledge as a jumping-off point for academic thinking and learning. Special education classes historically have tended to rely almost exclusively on traditional drill and memorization, with poor literacy development being the result. The project's teachers do "teach to memory" but always within the context of meaning. For example, while teaching literature, these teachers present vocabulary words that students encounter in their reading. Figueroa said learning problems in reading and writing can be difficult to diagnose or even misdiagnosed, particularly in bilingual students. Because of these assessment difficulties, English learners are often over-represented in special education classes. "Instead of relying blindly on traditional assessment, we concentrate on engineering the environment so that it becomes optimal for learning," he said. "In these contexts we can see individual differences with greater clarity than through a set of biased scores." Figueroa said children taught lessons based on their existing knowledge and interests write, read and achieve more. The traditional method of "trying to pour information into minority children's heads has been unsuccessful for decades," he said. The project has used both English and students' native languages for learning. Figueroa predicted California voters' passage of Proposition 227, which limits students to one year of bilingual instruction, will prove "a disaster for teachers who will be held accountable for the results from teaching in the student's weaker language, a set-back for California's higher education eligibility rates for Latino students, and the likely return to the documented underachievement levels of bilingual children before bilingual education." He said research shows that when students have a strong foundation in their primary language, both in terms of oral and literacy development, that language knowledge helps them better learn to read and write English. "In our enriched literacy classrooms, we found that children were able to manage literacy in two languages much earlier than expected," he said. Teachers around the state are already using some of the project's methods. For example, two teachers at East Los Angeles' Murchison Street School engage students by responding in writing to their journal entries. This strategy, called interactive journals, leads to discussions about the students' ideas, projects and writing skills. The teachers interact with the students about their interests. Then students discuss and choose their own topics for writing. Using the strategy of writers' workshop, the teacher takes the students through the process of how writers actually write, including an editorial phase where other students help critique and correct the text. The school may serve as a demonstration site in the Los Angeles Unified School District's reform of special and general education programs.