Swain County GEAR UP Coordinator, Taylor Dodge, takes over the blog today to tell us all about how she helped to inspire students during summer school with the help of a nationally recognized, best-selling, local, young adult author!
This blog post is just a meandering account of the evolution of an idea which started in Swain County, swelled to include Graham and Clay, united major community partners, and ultimately changed the course of our summer school program.
The context of this story is one we are all familiar with by now:
On the heels of one of the most tumultuous academic years in living memory, educators across North Carolina knew that the population of students in our summer remedial programs would be larger than ever. Then, in late spring, House Bill 82 was passed, significantly expanding summer school offerings. Many districts were left scrambling with little time and few resources to fulfill the new expectations.
Partnership between the district and GEAR UP to enhance the summer school program and meet HB 82 guidelines was both natural and crucial, but what would it look like? As a new GEAR UP Coordinator, I was struggling to answer this question. Eventually, I was tasked with planning enrichment activities and several field trips for the summer school students, but where to start? Where would my efforts be most meaningful? I spoke with Swain County Superintendent Mark Sale, and he told me about the district’s recent drive to improve students’ reading comprehension and literacy. He felt that students’ greatest obstacle to comprehension was lack of context. “It’s going to be harder for students to understand the concept of an escalator if they’ve never seen one,” he illustrated.
Now, I majored in English and minored in creative writing, so you can imagine this struck a chord. Our summer school population would include students who score lowest on state tests and who are at risk for falling through the cracks entirely. What could I do to engage them with reading and not just give them assignments, but genuinely capture their interest and increase their comprehension by helping them make connections between texts and the real world around them?
If students have historically struggled with reading, then we must start by encouraging their intrinsic investment in the activity. Students are naturally most invested in the things they already know and care about. With limited lived experiences to draw from, students cannot be expected to build context about unfamiliar concepts by working backwards from comprehension. We must meet them where they’re at, plant the seed in familiar soil, and watch it grow toward understanding.
One way to do that would be to find a relevant book that students could read during the summer program, one that students could relate to on a personal level and build extracurricular experiences around it. In brainstorming, I thought about my 7th grade niece. She loves to read, so what books really captured her imagination as a student in rural North Carolina? Willa of the Wood by Robert Beatty was the obvious answer. This young adult novel is set in the Smoky Mountain National Park at the turn of the 21st century. It is loosely based on the Cherokee legend of the Little People and is about a young Faeran girl named Willa who must contend with changing forests as settlers and loggers move into the mountains, while also confronting the questionable evolution of her own people’s ideologies. The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is one of Swain’s key geographical features. Our students grow up surrounded and shadowed by it. Swain is also home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and many of the students in our summer school program are tribal members themselves so the relevance of this book to our students’ lives is unquestionable. I discussed the idea with the summer school teachers and they readily agreed to make reading the book a cornerstone of their ELA instruction, leaving me to figure out how to bring this book to life, enhance students’ comprehension, and give them opportunities they might not have otherwise.
Well, Mr. Beatty is an Asheville native, and I’ve always been a “shoot for the moon” kind of thinker so why the heck not? After a quick Google search, I reached out to Mr. Beatty via his agent, explained what I was trying to do, and asked if he would be willing to come speak to our students. Lo and behold, he was more than happy to help! Suddenly Swain students were going to have the opportunity to meet the book’s nationally best-selling author, discuss the story, and ask questions. Opportunities like this are true rarities and should be shared as broadly as possible. Mr. Sale’s comments about lack of context aren’t just relevant to the students of Swain. The student populations of neighboring counties Graham and Clay are demographically and experientially similar so whatever opportunity benefits one, will likely benefit us all. As a result, we decided to work together. The GEAR UP Coordinators of Clay and Graham also approached their faculty about incorporating the book and worked to purchase class sets.
Since the book takes place in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, contacting park representatives was a natural next step because educational experiences in the park would help contextualize the story for our students. Upon reaching out to the park’s Education Department, I learned that most of the rangers had read the book and were eager to help me craft experiences around it. They were so excited by the prospect of the author-driven event that they asked if they could attend alongside the students so they could meet him themselves. We collaborated on two events. The first was a trip for Swain students to the Spruce Fir Nature trail near Clingman’s Dome. This area of forest is specifically mentioned in Willa of the Wood, so students were able to take a short hike through some of the same scenes that the characters saw as rangers taught them about the ecosystem while drawing connections back to the book.
The summer culminated in a trip to Cherokee, NC where students from Swain, Graham, and Clay got to meet author Robert Beatty, learn about his writing journey, and ask him questions about the book and his career. Following our discussion, Mr. Beatty would join us for lunch and then we would all move into the Smoky Mountain National Park for additional activities with the park rangers.
On the day of this final trip, I was nervous. I was not in the classroom when the students read Willa outloud and, while I hoped that the book was capturing their interest, I had only vague reports from the teachers that they were enjoying it. I wanted to have realistic expectations.
My anxiety was needless. Mr. Beatty surprised us with some partners of his own, a live wolf and crow named Spock and Pan who helped animate his words. The group from Swain with whom I had worked daily for six weeks and witnessed their struggle with focus and attention, was rapt. They listened as Mr. Beatty told his story, told them how he kept writing through rejection (it took 38 years before his first success), told them about the inspiration for Willa of the Wood, and how hard, yet rewarding the process can be. The students asked him questions for nearly 45 minutes. They asked if he has ever wanted to quit, what his own favorite book is, and whether there are any movies in the works from his books (there are). They asked what he loved most about writing and what other careers he had considered and why he set the story in the Great Smoky Mountains. One young lady told Mr. Beatty that she’s writing a book and asked him how he handles writer’s block!
Whether we know it or not, students succeed or fail by what we believe them capable of. Pre and post testing revealed that many of Swain’s summer school participants’ reading levels increased dramatically. In fact, most showed at least 1.5 years growth, and some showed as much as 3 grade levels improvement! Now, reading a book and talking to the author did not accomplish all that, a dedicated staff of teachers and a lot of intentional work did; however, this GEAR UP-led experience was part of that effort, part of making a difference to some of our most vulnerable students. One of the teachers later told me that it was the only time in her career that a student had ever asked her, even begged her, to keep reading. Many of them sought autographs that day and, in the absence of books of their own, they had Mr. Beatty sign shirts, masks, scraps of paper, whatever they could find. This experience meant something to them…in a way that maybe a book or an author never has before.
Best-selling author and North Carolina native, Robert Beatty presents to students from Swain, Clay, and Graham in the Smoky Mountain National Park.
Spruce Fir Trail in SMNP
Students read Beatty’s young adult book Willa of the Wood, participated in educational trips to Smoky Mountain National Park, and met with the author in-person during 20201 summer school.
Best-selling author and North Carolina native, Robert Beatty presents to students from Swain, Clay, and Graham in the Smoky Mountain National Park.
