College for Every Student
Middle-school students tackle community issues at ‘camp’
en Sarasota seventh graders are using real-world research, Legos and virtual reality to craft solutions to community issues they care about, from homelessness to food insecurity.
As members of Booker Middle School’s College for Every Student Brilliant Pathways Program, they participate in an after-school enrichment program that meets every other Friday at USF Sarasota-Manatee. The students attend Sarasota County’s only Title 1 middle school, a designation for schools with a high number of students from low-income families.
Faculty from the College of Education’s Literacy Studies Program and education doctoral students guide the middle-schoolers through an inquiry-based initiative called Camp at College. USF’s Advanced Visualization Center and the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame, founded and housed at USF, add their expertise.
“The ultimate objective is for our youth participants to consider how they can enact change to shape their community in ways that are meaningful to them,” explains Lindsay Persohn, MA ’10 and PhD ’18, Literacy Studies assistant professor. “We want every participant to know that they have a voice and that their ideas and actions matter.”
LaShawn Frost, principal of Booker Middle School, says Camp at College “fosters their spirit of discovery.”
At USF, the youngsters rotate between two stations. In one, they use tablets to research challenges they hope to solve. They might use Legos or Magna-Tiles to build, question and modify representations of their ideas for solutions.
“After just a few weeks of research, thinking, experience and conversation, they are better able to articulate their thinking around the community challenge and their ideas for a possible solution,” Persohn says.
The other station uses virtual-reality apps that foster empathy, innovation and problem-solving.
“We talk about how the virtual-reality experiences impact participants’ emotions and ideas,” Persohn says. “These experiences help them to further consider how they may refine their ideas about solutions for the community challenges.”
Booker Middle School Principal LaShawn Frost is so invested in the partnership, she drives her students to the USF campus on Fridays. Camp at College, she says, “fosters their spirit of discovery.”
Cheryl Ellerbrock, who has been teaching since 2001, says she has never seen a group of students more engaged than the Camp at College participants.
“Adolescents want to be heard, they want to problem-solve,” says Ellerbrock, campus dean of education at USF Sarasota-Manatee and professor of middle grades and general secondary education.
The 10 students will return to USF Sarasota-Manatee for a weeklong Camp at College this summer, but this time as mentors to sixth- and possibly fifth-grade students. Persohn refers to the experience as “near-peer mentoring.”
“How do we support this idea of community building, of young people supporting young people?” she says. “We want to create that sense of community within the school walls.”
Both Ellerbrock and Persohn anticipate offering a version of Camp at College next academic year.
“We feel it’s very important to respond in real time to community needs, to school needs, to student needs, to teacher needs,” Ellerbrock says.
