During a sabbatical semester in Fall 2018, "Community Literacy Journal (CLJ)" co-editor Paul Feigenbaum volunteered as a "Scholar-in-Residence" at Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a nonprofit established in 1994 that is based in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Guided by its mission "to create hope out of…

Tyrone Howard is Professor of Education at UCLA; Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion; and former Director of Center X, which is where UCLA's teacher education program is housed. Center X provides a unique setting where researchers and practitioners collaborate to design and conduct programs that prepare and support K-12 teachers and…

The commentaries on Downey and Condron found in this issue help advance an overdue conversation about schools and inequality. This paper considers two questions that are prompted by the comments from the authors' colleagues: (1) Would we make more progress reducing socio-economic and racial achievement gaps by reforming schools or by reforming the…

New England's long winter and seemingly interminable wait for spring has this author thinking about what colleges could do with their campuses during the summer. The options are almost infinite, although the cost-benefit analysis clearly varies. For some students, being on campus in the summer is preferable to going home, where the environments…

Summer is the time to take full advantage of the myriad wonders of nature--and all the outdoor play spaces--with children and toddlers. In this article, the author presents several outdoor summer activities for infants and toddlers.

In the United States and around the rest of the world, there is a renewed focus on ensuring that schools are providing students with the skills necessary to compete in the global economy. High-quality summer learning programs are an ideal vehicle to help students gain content knowledge and develop innovative skills: they provide time for…

Discusses the role that feminist issues played in a summer institute at the Literature Institute for Teachers and the role of feminist theory in teacher education. Shares thoughts about the role of feminist theory in the classroom. (MG)

The author describes her experiences at a five-week summer institute designed to train 25 selected teachers to disseminate the University of Oregon Writing Project, an offshoot of the California Bay Area Writing Project. (SJL)

Offers an "unabashed hymn of praise" to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its Summer Seminars for Secondary Teachers. Describes the pleasures, discoveries, and enriching conversations that have taken place at these seminars over the last 11 years. (TB)

Draws on both workplace and academic sources to offer a flexible technical communication education model (TC model). Describes 10 attributes that meet industry's changing needs, and describes a recent National Science Foundation technical communication summer program that used the TC model. (SR)

Describes the Orange Summer Shakespeare Festival, which offers teenagers from New Jersey (most of them African American) the opportunity to perform Shakespeare for their community and to cocreate an exemplary piece of theater that serves as a forum for the cast to transmute their stories and express their dreams, fears, rage, and joy. (SR)

Even in early grades, a large gap in skills exists between students from economically advantaged and disadvantaged families. Evidence suggests that a substantial share of this skills gap emerges during the summer months, when school is not in session. Children from disadvantaged families experience greater losses in skills during summer vacations…

The parent of a trainable mentally retarded adolescent describes his need for a summer school program and the successful efforts of organized parents to obtain summer educational services. (DB)

Considered are advantages of summer science programs limited to young high school women. Same sex courses are seen to eliminate unconscious gender bias in instruction and counter tendencies for female students to be less involved in science, mathematics, and computer activities. Four specific programs are briefly described. (DB)

Describes a science teacher's personal experiences at an Earthwatch summer workshop in Costa Rica on caterpillars and their predators in the dry tropical forest. (YDS)