The article claims that teens like authentic experiences from which they can connect. These experiences fuel curiosity about the world and connect them with their community, helping them with new information or to an open door for more opportunities they did not know existed.
Planning it, though, takes a lot of time from the facilitator and does not happen by accident. The school library is a space of formal and informal learning. Administrators and teachers are familiar with formal learning, but informal is not always comfortable with informal ones. Sometimes it looks chaotic, but nonetheless, learning is happening. When one walks into a classroom, he can pick up a piece of work a student has produced to show what has been taught. Couri (2015) explains that using a student’s piece of work can also tell a learning story. Research skills can be hard to asses, but asking a student to reflect on their learning and tell about the processes is a way to bring the story of learning to the surface.
In the past and most of the time now, public libraries based success on numbers: the amount of materials circulated and how many participants there are. Now, they are moving forward and looking at the impact. They are interested in what teens and others come away with after attending their programs, not only focusing on statistics but also on the story, the learning and growing from the summer.
I enjoyed this article, because first of all, I enjoy the inquiry process, which, in this article, is described as playing and learning. Secondly, it extends it into the summer. The inquiry search process is the most motivating for students, because it focuses on what each of them wants to learn, not a list of objectives or someone else's goals.
Couri, S. (2015). TRANSFORMING SUMMERS. Knowledge Quest, 43(5), 70-75.