This article describes an educator's experience in engaging reluctant male students in writing by leading an afterschool writing program. Write After School offers choice within structure and encourages interaction in ways designed to engage reluctant writers, allowing them to choose their own topics, receive feedback, and talk about their work.
Students will apply themselves to learning if the context interests them. Focusing on a subject close to middle school students' hearts, such as fashion, rather than on specific academic tasks such as writing or researching, builds intrinsic motivation for learning. This article explores the Fabulous Fashions program, which engages students in mathematics and literacy through the context of their interest in fashion.
A vivid portrait of a little girl, her mother, and their experience at a neighborhood agency demonstrates how stories taken from the field can illustrate the power of peer education and motivate staff toward more inspired educational after school programming.
A program that combines sports and literature can improve students’ reading, writing, and comprehension skills. What’s more, it promotes children’s personal development and selfesteem, and forges a link between sports, literature, and their daily lives.
At a family service agency in the North Bronx, staff members have drawn a vital connection between community and literacy. The authors explain how their literacy program evolved from a basic tutoring opportunity into a curriculum using themes and information gleaned from the young participants’ immediate community surroundings.
Multilingual and multimodal literacy practices in a out-of-school migrant education program support Cambodian (ethnic Khmer) youth in using diverse modes of communication, revealing the intimate connections among literacy, language, culture, and identity.
African-American adolescent girls who expressed little interest in literacy activities nevertheless enthusiastically engaged in reading and writing around a topic that mattered to them—doing hair—particularly when they were allowed to determine the format of the literacy activities. The program aimed to carve out free spaces for self-directed learning.
A unique afterschool class in making comic strips and comic books, taught by a professional comic artist, encourages both literacy development and identity development in adolescent participants.
Out-of-school time (OST) programs can benefit the growing population of English learners in U.S. public schools by giving them the gift of time in which to learn both English and subject matter content.
Pairing age-appropriate novels with thematic units on the civil rights movement and the presidential election allows one afterschool practitioner to bring democracy to life for inner-city middle school students.
Adult facilitators in afterschool programs can work with LGBTQ youth to construct a safe space in which the youth can validate their identities in the process of doing literacy work.
This study uses an innovative data source--the Youth Data Archive--to follow elementary and middle school students from a single school district over four academic years to discern any links between their afterschool program participation and English language development. Students attending the program had greater rates of gain in English development, but they did not necessarily achieve proficiency gains or redesignation as "fluent English proficient" sooner than non-participating students. These results point to the need for increased examination of the link between in-school and out-of
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Rebecca LondonOded GurantzJon Norman