Within and Beyond a Grow-Your-Own Program

• In Event: Lessons From an Encompassing Teacher Preparation/Diversification Project

Abstract

This coauthored case study chronicles the experience of the project’s first-ever summer ‘bridge program’, which brought 15 new full scholarship recipients—13 first-year students and two community college transfers—to a two-week summer experience that included a ‘first’ college course (or at least a first at this university), orientation to the campus (both geographic and to various offices, like student employment), cohort-building, and an overnight field trip to Topeka and Kansas City that included ‘Civil Rights’ stops at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and the Shawnee Mission, plus time at baseball game and art museum. The experience also included four ‘near peers’, current students of color in the teacher education pathway who could share their experiences regarding how to best negotiate campus.
This paper will highlight both the challenges and opportunities from the perspective of two adult staff members who worked closely with the scholarship recipients to move from high school into university life (or transition from small community colleges to a large university). Given the demographics of the students recruited to this program, there are two main ideas in play when creating the summer bridge programming. First, since the students are from underrepresented minoritized racial/ethnic backgrounds and first-generation students, among other minoritized identities, it was of utmost importance to foster a sense of mattering/belonging (Dueñas & Gloria, 2020; Quaye et al., 2020; Winterer et al., 2020). Second, the students come from a variety of high school backgrounds from across the state. Some schools are located in towns of less than 2,000 people and others located in cities of more than 200,000. Since some students came from rural areas where students are less likely to choose higher education (Irvin et al., 2011) or from racially minoritized groups where access to college preparatory information and courses may have been restricted (Cammarota, 2006; Casanova, 2024; Madrigal-Garcia & Acevedo-Gil, 2016). In addition to support through the recruitment and enrollment process at the university, the activities for the summer bridge program were chosen specifically to fill in the educational gaps that may be missing from the students’ high school experiences, highlight relevant services such as tutoring and peer mentorship, and foster a sense of belonging on campus. The paper walks through the recruitment and enrollment of each scholarship student and acknowledges the project’s challenges (so far) to recruit (for the scholarship) the overlapping but not synonymous categories of students born in Guatemala and students who so far lack US Social Security numbers.

Authors

• Courtney Johnson, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Irvin Ramirez-Benavides, University of Nebraska - Lincoln