Learning About Learning Education Foundation

Led by Trinity faculty member Jearnine Wagner, this initiative brought Trinity students into public schools to explore experimental and bilingual teaching practices. Highlighted in local media, these programs emphasized the power of "dreaming big" in public education and served as models for immersive teacher training.

Learning About Learning began their start into bilingual learning investigations with a program called Unlimited Potential. Unlimited Potential partnered with the San Antonio Independent School District to evaluate and create teacher training within the district. 

What they found was that teachers were:
- unaware of what takes place within the learning process of people.
- unaware that value systems were relative to environmental and societal conditions.

Through training and workshops Unlimited Potential encouraged teachers to use activitives that were open ended and didn't yield right and wrong answers. This encourged students to develop habits of investigation and created an environment where different ideas were accepted and encouraged.  Activites had teaching aids such as audio recorders.  For students who had difficulty writing, they could use audio recorders to records their thoughts and ideas. In transcribing what they said, the student could then have a different approach to spelling and grammar.  Through their work with SAISD, Learning About Learning created dozens of workbooks for elementary school children and produced some in Spanish. Here is an example of one workbook, the Me Book, or the Yo Libro.

This innovative program challenged traditional education models by emphasizing metacognition, child-centered learning, and the teacher as researcher. Developed in collaboration with Trinity University faculty and students, Learning About Learning encouraged reflective teaching practices and contributed to a broader, more holistic and ethnographic, rethinking of curriculum design in bilingual and multicultural classrooms.