By Claire Neiberg, English Major / ARYSE Intern
My official title for my internship is the PRYSE Academy Curriculum Committee Coordinator. PRYSE Academy is a summer camp through ARYSE that builds curriculum to help refugee and immigrant youth improve their literacy skills and prepare for the upcoming school year.
I just had my first meeting with the Curriculum Committee, and the purpose of this meeting was to read through the Common Core standards and talk about the ones we want to implement in our PRYSE Academy and the ones that do not apply to our group of students.
The United States does not have a national education curriculum, but Common Core helps gives schools a framework as to what types of curriculum to implement. However, it is not specifically designed to tackle racial, socioeconomic, and colonial barriers that present themselves in education.
Because of this, ARYSE does not use Common Core in the way schools do, but Common Core still outlines standards that we can take away. During the meeting, we read through the Reading, Writing, and Speaking & Listening standards.
The ones that stood out to me the most were the Writing standards because while I love to write and help others with their writing every day, I have not done an in-depth study of writing techniques for youth. I admired that PRYSE places such a heavy emphasis on how reading and writing goes together, and we discussed as a committee how we can get students excited to write.
This excitement comes from reading, and we discussed further how we can promote a love for reading by not making reading an outside assignment but rather an activity that bring kids together.
Building Bridges 