Clemson researchers combine professional development for literacy teachers with a fun camp environment for multilingual learners that encourages literacy skills.
Efrain Pineda Reyes is happy to let his students determine the course for instruction, especially in a camp setting. This week, the conversation kept returning to food, so he knew it would be futile to fight it.
“Food. We all love food, so today we’re just writing about their favorite food, you know?” Reyes said. “We read ‘¡Vamos! Vamos a Comer (Let’s Go Eat!), and the discussion and writing were all about their favorite foods. We all love to eat!”
Reyes grew up in the Saluda, South Carolina, community and attended elementary through high school in the Saluda County School District. He was motivated to return to his community to serve a growing population of Hispanic students and to advocate for all multilingual learners.
Reyes currently serves as a multilingual learner provider for grades 9-12 at Saluda High School, and he is one of several educators who recently spent two weeks at Camp MARC (Multilingual Authoring Rural Camp), a professional development and student learning experience hosted by Clemson researchers Lindsey Rowe and Emily Howell.
The camp began with virtual professional development sessions with Saluda educators during the first week in June, before transitioning into a second week of student camp that allowed educators to put new tools to use with students. The bulk of the camp took place at Saluda Elementary school before culminating in a full-day experience for students and teachers at Clemson University.
One of the many strategies Rowe and Howell encourage educators to employ is to allow students’ interests and creativity to spark their desire to read and write — and what they read and write about. Reyes used students’ interests to create an interactive lesson on food, and students were soon showcasing their interests and preferred orders at food trucks, using oral and written methods in two languages.
“I think I have learned this week that it’s powerful to just let students express themselves, either orally or in writing, in English or another language they are comfortable with,” Reyes said. “These students are holding so much information, and sometimes they don’t know how to get a start, so I think we’re all learning how to create a space for them to feel comfortable and express themselves.”
Clemson researchers combined their expertise to build teachers’ confidence during the camp and structured it so teachers could immediately practice new skills with students in a fun, educational environment. The camp exposed many teachers and students to Clemson for the first time and allowed researchers to serve a community and increase teacher efficacy and student achievement.
But it wasn’t all reading and writing and sitting in classrooms. On a particularly hot day in June, students mixed learning with everything from soccer to volleyball on Bowman Field.
Constructing confidence
The camp originated from seed grants initiated by the College of Education, and Rowe and Howell spent nearly a year developing the concept, which was a blend of Howell’s focus on literacy via writing through the Upstate Writing Project and both researchers’ shared interest and research expertise in teacher preparation and literacy practices for multilingual students.
The pair connected with Christi Dickenson, student services coordinator in the Saluda County School District, to launch the camp within the district, given its rural context and large multilingual learner population.
“The camp is both teacher- and student-focused,” Rowe said. “We wanted to find what teachers value when teaching writing to multilingual learners and also discover how students use different forms of composing to write, tell stories and digitally compose their experiences.”
According to Dickenson, approximately 43% of district students are multilingual learners, and unlike larger school districts, Saluda has fewer instructional resources and support systems. She saw the Clemson partnership as a valuable opportunity to bring high-quality professional development and literacy support to teachers and students. In the long term, Dickenson sees exposure to Clemson’s campus as an experience for students that will stay with them long after the camp week.
“Many students don’t get the opportunity to even visit a college campus, so allowing them to see themselves there really opens a door,” Dickenson said. “When the opportunity came to have Clemson come to us and then have us visit the campus, we had to jump on it.”
Howell said one of the camp’s focuses is helping teachers see themselves as writers, increasing their confidence in writing instruction so that the same confidence can cascade down to their students. This confidence-building, along with narrative writing instruction, multilingual literacy strategies, oral language development and technology integration, all combined into lessons modeled for teachers that they could immediately use and adapt with students.
Howell said the initial work is all about building a foundation; when teachers experience these lessons first as learners, they can more effectively deliver them to students the following week. She said the week of professional development also encouraged teachers to get out of their comfort zones or get a little more creative with their approach to lesson design.
“We encouraged them to move beyond scripted curriculum models, and it was great to see them gradually become more confident as designers of instruction,” Howell said. “We encouraged them to take these lessons back to kick off their school year in this way to get to know their new students and build a community of writers in their classrooms.”
Building — literally — the literacy lesson
Teachers got to play the role of students, and the very next week, they worked directly with students to try out new skills. Rowe said she was a little concerned about both the researchers and the teachers finding the balance between literacy activities and the play-oriented camp environment, but early in the week, she was already seeing teachers letting students take the lead.
“It can be hard because we are focusing on lesson plans, but we also want to give teachers permission to essentially loosen the constraints of the school day,” Rowe said. “By the second day, we were already seeing students creating these really cool scenes with Lego bricks, so teachers were obviously giving them time to explore.”
Lego bricks — lots of them — played a big role in helping students build the stories they had to tell. Howell likes to think of them as “pathways to storytelling,” so teachers were instructed on how to help students build first and tell a story about their creation second.
Students were prompted to generate a story, and for some writers who may struggle to put the first words on paper, it was easier to start a story about a house by building one out of Lego bricks. Then, creating a story around a tangible object becomes a more attainable goal.
“Lindsey and I both have SUVs, and they were packed to the brim with Lego kits,” Howell said. “Kids learn through play, and it’s going to be far more effective to have them play with objects they understand to learn the concepts of character or plot or overall narrative when you start from that place.”
Where possible, Howell and Rowe designed lessons so that tools built upon each other; once a Lego creation was finished, students could use Book Creator, a digital publishing app, to take photos of their creation and incorporate the photos into their written story.
Ali Stigall, an elementary art teacher in the Saluda County School District, said she was surprised by how effective this approach was with students and how it helped them expand simple sentences into richer narratives. She saw students using Lego scenes to add descriptions, settings and even characterization to a prompt as simple as “the dog jumped.”
“It really helped them elaborate on their writing, especially when they were asked to provide more information or descriptions,” Stigall said.
The researchers and teachers managed to make “sentence building” fun, but the camp also made time for pure play. During the camp’s last day, the students took over Bowman field to play kickball, volleyball and soccer, rotating with other groups for art activities in Tillman Hall and Godfrey Hall throughout the day.
“The main goal was to have students come for experiences in writing and literacy, and leave having had fun,” Rowe said. “They made serious progress toward finding their own voice as writers, and thanks to play and a fun atmosphere, they’ll reflect even more positively on the experience.”
A foundation for more
Now that the camp is over, Rowe and Howell will measure teacher and student feedback obtained in the field through surveys and in post-camp interviews. They can contrast this feedback with pre-surveys conducted before the professional development week started.
Both researchers hope this is a starting point for their work with the Saluda County School District and as proof of concept that will allow it to expand to other districts in the future. Howell said the team will measure success through student confidence, teacher growth and in community relationships; the camp was an intentional subversion of how students learn, and she feels it puts teachers and students in a good place to start an academic year.
“What we did was an intentional reversal of literacy instruction where we put rules, grammar and mechanics last and focused on creativity, voice, and allowing students to write from their funds of knowledge,” Howell said. “We started with imagination, storytelling and play, and we know that drives engagement with reading and writing and supports literacy growth.”
This approach also values multilingualism, showing students that it is an asset rather than something to “overcome” in school. Dickenson said the camp helped teachers recognize that students can use their cultural knowledge, personal experiences and the language spoken at home to create a great story or piece of writing.
Dickenson said she and her fellow teachers saw the immediate value in applying camp strategies to their own teaching, and they plan to share lessons and practices across the district as the new academic year begins. She has also incorporated camp activities into future lesson plans and has discussed expanding activities such as name poems, gallery walks and cultural identity projects throughout the school building.
“These strategies benefit all students, not only multilingual learners,” Dickenson said. “When you tell a student that they can use whatever skills and background knowledge they can bring to the table to tell or write a story, it really opens the possibilities, and it makes the work more important to them. That’s powerful in any language.”
