Grant Summary
$50,000 over 24 months. Sarah Lawrence College partnered with Prep for Prep to offer a program that builds on the distinctive Sarah Lawrence pedagogy—a combination of seminar teaching with one-on-one faculty-student conferences—to a group of rising Prep for Prep sophomores. Designed to help students develop fluency and ease of writing, and to spark (renewed) interest in and awareness of language, this four-week program explored a range of writing genres (personal essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, argument, and expository writing). It also gave students the opportunity to practice their oral presentation skills, and to undertake theater exercises that help to create a feeling of ensemble, break down barriers and resistance, and establish good working relationships within the group. Plans for the next two years of the program include refinements to the current structure. Sarah Lawrence and Prep for Prep will offer a shorter, but more intense, summer session that will double the number of class hours. With more time, the number of conferences, as well as the number of in-class writing assignments, will also increase. The Prep students will also spend a week with another group of high school students enrolled in a similar summer writing program on the Sarah Lawrence campus in order to bring them into a larger community of writers.