University partnership creates Trenton literacy program

The roots of the project were planted when Rodney Lofton, Trenton schools superintendent, reached out to the African American studies center to ask if the University could help design interventions “that would make a measurable difference” in Trenton schools, explained SVC director David Brown.

The center, in turn, devised a freshman seminar to research the issue and paired with the SVC to create a student group interested in building a tutoring program based on the research. The seminar — FRS 154: Our Struggling Schools: Race, Culture, and Urban Education — was taught last spring by African American studies professor Noliwe Rooks and centered on urban studies, allowing students to perform research to answer Lofton’s challenge.

Jason Klugman, director of the Princeton University Preparatory Program and a lecturer in teacher preparation, assisted the students by helping them identify educational products they could incorporate into their curriculum.

After conducting their research in groups, members of the seminar presented results directly to Lofton, who was excited by the work.

“He wanted to get started with the structured tutoring curriculum and approached one of the principals in one of the K-8 schools in Trenton about becoming a trial site,” Noliwe said.

One SVC program already sent Princeton students to the Trenton schools to help schoolchildren with their homework. Two volunteers in that program, Alexandra Gecker ’12 and Alexander Craig ’12, helped start the imPACT student group to carry out the new plan.

Though their previous tutoring sessions seemed valuable for both themselves and their students, the pair wanted to make a bigger difference.

“It was a good program, but we knew it could be much better,” explained Craig, adding that they realized homework help was not “effective in producing long term, sustained impacts for the students whom we were tutoring.”

Gecker and Craig joined with Aaron Lin ’13 and Derek Wu ’13 to form imPACT, which stands for Princeton Academic Curriculum Tutoring. Operating as part of a grant-funded study in the Center for African American Studies, the group uses the seminar’s research to train tutors to teach a curriculum focused on improving literacy among middle school students. Lessons range from phonetics and pronunciation to reading comprehension and vocabulary.

Brown noted that this project took place at a time when the Pace Center was “transforming our education projects to make sure they are generated by the community, follow researched best practices and have measurable outcomes. This project proposal had all three.”

After finalizing the curriculum and finding a partner school, the program is now up and running. The students emphasize the parts of the program that cannot be found in the classroom or in other student volunteer programs.

“Each session is framed in the context of a larger, well-visualized goal. ImPACT is not a homework-help, drop-in program,” Craig said.

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Entering urban classrooms discussed in University coursework has helped the volunteers “to escape Princeton’s comfortable borders and tangibly explore a domain that few of us had been previously exposed to,” Wu said.

And each day of volunteering motivates the students to build on their program.

“It’s impossible to sit down with a fourth-grader who can barely read and not want to do something about that,” Gecker said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Jason Klugman is the director of the teacher preparation program, when he is in fact director of the Princeton University Preparatory Program and a lecturer in teacher preparation.