Summer Academic Enrichment Eligible Programs

Goals

Project SUPPORT (Supporting Under-served Populations through Partnership, Opportunities, Recreations & Team-building).

With diverse cultural backgrounds, 10 cultural specialists will train 60 youth about the importance of cultural heritages, languages and cross-cultural understandings.

1) ACTIVITIES. • Split the youth into Cultural Teams – Hmong, KaRen, Oromo, and Somali for authentic language and culture learning; • Daily Lessons from Mon – Fri from 5 - 8pm to learn cultural heritages and languages, as well as time for students’ team building activities through cultural games/sports; • Hosting Cross-Cultural Story-telling events for students and families to share cultural customs through foods, cultural music/dances, students’ own creations of poems, to increase cross cultural understanding and break out COVID-19 isolation and anxiety.

2) PROJECT GOALS. • Addressing challenges of working across cultural lines, and fostering a mutual respect through Camp SUPPORT; • Promoting deeper, richer and cross-cultural dialogues for 60 BIPOC youth through learning own cultures, and sharing with each other; and • Overcoming COVID-19 barriers and to come together to learn and plan cultural games and sports.

3) PROJECT OBJECTIVE. Our Students will learn through: • Supporting youth learning heritage cultures and languages, and be proud of whom they are; • Strengthening youth’s intellectual levels with Cultural Leadership and Cultural Integration abilities; • Strengthening physical levels through warm-up, stretching exercises and cultural games with heritage languages; and • Exploring and discovering how to build team spirits, and cross-cultural collaboration.

Activities

Our Camp will support the MN World Languages’ standards: • To learn the cultures and languages through immersion learning model; • To broaden one's perspective and understanding of the world, and increase one's ability to interact with people of different backgrounds and cultures. • To investigate the acquisition of intercultural sensitivity through interactive cultural games and sports; • To provide knowledge and practices of intercultural learning, and cross-cultural understandings.

1) Linguistic and Cultural Learning: Camp SUPPORT is designed to surround learners with their heritage languages and cultures. In culture/language-focused sessions, students engage with cultural factors and histories, along with easy daily heritage language speaking in order to learn/ask questions, as well as through immersion learning to discuss youth concerns for example. At other times of the day, they may learn to play traditional cultural games or participate in a recreational sport and all use the heritage languages to give instructions and communicate the rules. In the mean times between structured activities, students talk about these experiences with instructors and parents who are native speakers. Students can develop the depth of cultural understanding from different stories and daily life examples from staff and parents with heritage languages, and from observing how their teachers navigate differences of age, culture and social activities within our multicultural team throughout the Camp. 2) Outdoor Learning: No learner should be left indoors in summer. We embrace cultural games, and sports to unplug from screens, and we encourage the team building and healthy competition through these recreational activities.

3) Learning of Bicultural Healthy Living: Help our students to better understanding the BICULTURALISM, which is a philosophy - that people, who masters the rules and norms of their new culture without abandoning their own language, and values

Program Dates

June 19 - August 18, 2023

Can students reside on campus? No

Can students commute to campus? Yes

Can students take online classes? No