More than a babysitter: Looking back on an effective summer enrichment program

Each summer families across the globe send their children to summer camps and daycares for what amounts to babysitting. This study takes the discussion beyond babysitting and explores a unique summer enrichment program offered to rising second through fifth grade students in a modified enrichment camp model. During the four-week program, students were engaged in standards-based academic instruction in reading, mathematics, and science designed to provide enrichment activities to better prepare them for academic success in the upcoming year. Students were pre-tested over standards from the first quarter of the upcoming year. Then, they were taught the standards and post-tested. Analysis of the pretest and posttest data suggests that the program was successful in increasing students’ content knowledge in each of the subject areas taught. The findings imply that summer programs intentionally offering standards-based academics in an enrichment camp environment can be used to provide learning opportunities that diminish academic opportunity gaps.

“These kids are rebelling”: a student-led transformation of community and critical literacy

Purpose This paper aims to consider the ways that students are shaped by and shape community and critical literacy, along with the ways that community affords student empowerment in an English class during a US high school summer enrichment program. Design/methodology/approach The qualitative methodological approach is a narrative-based descriptive case study. To provide a detailed and narrative-based discussion, the authors incorporate ethnographic observation narratives and conversational interview excerpts, and analyze the data through inductive coding. Findings Organizing the findings into two sections, “These kids are rebelling”, and “We’re trusting him to teach and do better now”, we first examine the ways that student-led rebellion reshaped the classroom community and then the ways that the teacher's response redefined critical literacy approaches and his interactions with the students. Research limitations/implications As this is a qualitative case study that is set during a summer enrichment program, its implications are not wholly generalizable to secondary English education. However, this research does suggest the importance of student agency in considerations of community and critical literacy. Practical implications This research emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and exploring ways that students' everyday interactions and agency shape educational spaces. Additionally, this research suggests the importance of community and critical literacy to all teachers, no matter their levels of experience or success. Social implications Students have tremendous potential to not only shape and define learning environments, but to transform pedagogy and teacher relationships. This research emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and exploring these implications specifically to transform community and critical literacy in a summer high school English classroom. Originality/value First, this paper examines student community as an agentive and rebellious influence within the everyday constructs of schooling, and the authors assert that critical literacy pedagogies may be student-driven as part of community-based activism. Second, this paper seeks to explore both “community” and “critical literacy” as key concepts in positioning students as influential and empowered stakeholders with capacities to reshape education.