The CIE Lab

A community for teachers, readers, writers, and neighbors.

What We Do.

We help high school English teachers develop their literary and literacy instructional practice in order to provide equitable and evidence based literacy education to their students.

We curate literary events for the study, discussion, and celebration of culture, literature, and thought.

Culturally Intentional Education

CIE is an interdisciplinary framework for the instruction of high school English.

To be culturally intentional is to approach the art of teaching high school English through continuous reflective inquiry, deliberate curricular design, and explicit literacy instruction.

Our tenets.

The teacher practices continuous reflective inquiry to understand themselves as English teachers and their relationships to the literature and students they teach.
Curriculum design includes deliberate canon selection, artistic and socio - political context, and explicit literacy instruction
Communal learning through spoken intellect, memory, and storytelling.

Our Framework follows our three tenets which support our approach to teacher education and curriculum design.

Culturally Intentional Curriculum.

We design and work with schools to design culturally intentional lessons and units that include

The Year of Zora.

This year our professional learning centers Zora Neale Hurston to coincide with the 90th anniversary of her magnum opus Their Eyes Were Watching God.

We believe that Zora is a central literary figure and deserves to be centered in high school English curriculum. We believe her words should be placed in the hands of all students.

For the 2026 - 2027 academic calendar, we will offer professional learning to support teachers in the reading and instruction of Zora’s work.

Learn more

The CIE Lab Goes to SXSWEDU.

We’ll be hosting our workshop Zora & AP Lit.: Designing a Culturally Intentional Canon at this year’s SXSWEDU. The workshop centers Their Eyes Were Watching God and the CIE Framework as a means to develop an AP aligned lesson.