About Camp

The camp will take place at Riverside Middle School, giving students the chance to get familiar in the new building before the start of the school year. The purpose of the camp is to set them up with the greatest chances of a successful start to their middle school journey. We will be looking to build confidence, provide a head start on 6th grade reading in a fun, approachable way, and foster invaluable academic and personal skills.

The camp will take place at Riverside Middle School, giving students the chance to get familiar in the new building before the start of the school year. The purpose of the camp is to set them up with the greatest chances of a successful start to their middle school journey.  We will be looking to build confidence, provide a head start on 6th grade reading in a fun, approachable way, and foster invaluable academic and personal skills.

Through Harvard University's Cultural Agents Initiative, Creative Roots Collective has been chosen to be a part of their summer internship to help expand sustainable programming. We are so excited to be able to offer a summer camp for rising 6th grade students this summer through this partnership (and many others!) and to welcome Sophie Brown onto our team!

Sophie is a PhD student at the University of Guelph in Ontario, studying music, creativity and community engagement. She has been partnered with Creative Roots Collective through an internship with Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative. As part of this internship, she will be getting trained in an innovative arts-based literacy teaching tool, which she will bring to the camp along with teaching experience in India and the UK.  She is a harpist and a music graduate of Durham University in the UK. She is very excited to be part of this summer camp, and we look forward to welcoming her ideas, experience and enthusiasm. 

Pre-Texts is an educational, train-the-trainers program that is run out of Cultural Agents, an NGO founded in 2015 by Professors Doris Sommer (Harvard University) and Jose Falconi (Brandeis University) with the mission to develop recognition of the arts as resources for positive change, and apply them in society. Inspired by a range of popular Latin American creative practices, from reading in tobacco factories and performing stories, to hanging poetry on a clothesline and improvising poetic duels, the Pre-Texts pedagogical protocol treats texts as raw material for creating art. Its prompt, “make art from this text and reflect on the process,” works like acupuncture by touching creative and intellectual nerves to stimulate cognitive and emotional growth. Proven to enhance work in education, literacy, public health, violence prevention, and more, Pre-Texts has become a platform for international ministries of culture and education, musicians, schools, and indigenous historic preservation offices to revive a long humanistic tradition that combines arts and research in the service of civic development. See here for a glimpse of the reach and impact of Pre-Texts.