PROGRAM STRUCTURE
(or how we organize the summer learning experience)
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A Revolutionary Summer is a stress- and trauma-informed learning community. Our curriculum is grounded in brain science and compassion.
Because we understand the importance of the family/kinship system to Black children’s well-being, we require family participation, including parents and guardians attending the same restorative and social-emotional trainings provided to our staff each year.
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Dr. Joan Lessen-Firestone reminds us that "the relationship among fear, cortisol, and learning exists throughout life." Children must be calm and alert, must feel safe in their bodies and relationships to learn. The following core components ensure that we create the conditions under which learning is possible.
Greetings +
Nourishment
A stress-informed, consistent way of welcoming participants and families to all gatherings and contributing to their physiological needs for nourishing sustenance and connection to others.
Yoga +
Mindfulness
Movement and technique designed to open the body’s pathway to presence and healing. Deliberate practice of paying attention, on purpose, in the moment, without judgment. Every Sunday workshop begins or ends with yoga.
Opening +
Closing Circles
Fundamental elements of ARS. Designed to build trust and attunement and to aid the release of oxytocin from the brain; used to develop and support participants’ connections to coordinators and especially to each other. Circles support the development of social emotional awareness and improve communication.
Political
Education
When discussing personal and collective liberation, as we do through the study of each of our media selections, it’s important to ground ourselves in data, research and evidence. The Political Education component is a brief presentation on a relevant organizational theory illustrated in the text/media under study. PE is to ensure we don’t get lost in our opinions and that we understand the forces, oppressive and otherwise, organizing our lives.
Readers'
Workshop
These are participant-directed literature circles. The space within which we deeply discuss the week’s artistic work and engage in the critical analysis of complex, worthy texts. Sometimes gently guided by coordinators and youth leaders, but only if some invigorating questions are needed to kick things off or keep the conversation going.
Project-Based assignments
One year in Sunday workshop, we wrote diss tracks to rappers who had disparaged Black women or promoted harm in our communities, both to honor our rage and practice relevant literary devices. Project-based assignments are authentic, personal applications of something we’ve learned through the media under study. They help participants contextualize and deepen their understanding of the world and themselves.
Writing Workshops + coaching​
Our craft, peer, and small group workshops aim to strengthen participants’ existing writing skills and to cultivate the budding ones. Craft topics range from sentence construction to plot development and always incorporate the texts under study. Peer workshops allow participants to provide and benefit from feedback from fellow writers, to practice their listening and speaking skills, with a primary goal being to communicate criticism clearly and compassionately. Our individual coaching sessions support the drafting, editing, revising, and publishing of a single piece of writing. This method centers connection, is stress-informed, and demonstrates the importance and value of “go slow to go fast.” Participants often report understanding language, their own thinking, and the writing process on a more comprehensive level after a summer with ARS.
End-of-Summer
Product/
Presentation
Our annual creative gift to our community. Our end-of-summer product/presentation is tied to all other components and is grounded in liberation. Through it, we strive to explore ways Black and other forcibly marginalized people might get free.
