My first week was relatively short due to the 4th of July holiday, so I will be combining it with week 2. The first few days were mainly for me to get acclimated with the environment and begin reading about the current Act for Change curriculum that I will be working on modifying for the next few weeks. Act for Change is a program created by CCE Ulster County and 4-H to bring together teens across New York and encourage in anti-racist dialogue across multiple identities. My main goals for this internship are to adapt the current high-school virtual curriculum for in-person middle schoolers and to add a greater emphasis on performing and visual arts into the program. For the first week, I read the current facilitator’s guide for the 12 session Act for Change program as well as notes from previous facilitators and began to brainstorm some changes to make.
During week 2, I began to flesh out these brainstormed ideas to create a more finalized session schedule for this new in-person middle school version of the program. I was also able to meet with the faculty sponsor of this internship, Danielle Russo, and the Act for Change co-founders, Melanie Forstrom and Malinda Ware, for their perspectives and input on exercises and activities that can be added with their performing arts and education backgrounds. This conversation was very eye-opening and helpful in creating more concrete ideas of activities and showcase ideas for the curriculum. We also began talking about a possible performing or visual arts activity for the Ulster County fair at the end of the month that CCE and 4-H will be helping to organize. I discussed some of these ideas with the 4-H program leader, Andrew Ruiz, to figure out logistics and allotted space at the fair. I also started to design flyers and quarter cards to be handed out at the fair to promote both 4-H and Act for Change.
Along with Act for Change, during my second week of the internship, the 3-week Rise to 5 summer school began, of which 4-H was a community partner. We would have 40-minute sessions with a group of incoming 5th graders from Monday through Thursday to teach them about topics from animal adaptations to nutrition, eventually culminating in a project they would display at the fair. This was the first week of that program, where I went in for one of the days to help out with the 4-H activity. For this lesson, we taught the students about animal adaptations, and they started their project of creating mythical creature clay sculptures. It was great being able to experience teaching students in a classroom setting and learning how to accommodate different learning styles.
Overall, my first 2 weeks at the internship had many great meetings and discussions to introduce CCE and 4-H and their goals, and I was able to refine some ideas that will hopefully be applied during the fair and in future Act for Change sessions.