All images © Rob Amberg

Spring Creek: A Rural Mountain Community

The project is located in Spring Creek Township, a cluster of nine small mountain communities in beautiful Madison County, North Carolina. It will be housed in the old Spring Creek school, built in the 1920s with stone provided by local farmers. Local residents have reclaimed the school as a community center where they can gather at GRITS (Girls Raised in the South) cafe to share food and talk, check out books from a community library, or participate in arts, music, and crafts activities.

The Program

The project’s cornerstone will be a six-week summer enrichment program. Girls in grades six-nine can attend the free all-day literacy program for four consecutive summers. In the mornings, girls will read novels, receive remedial reading instruction if they are in need of it, and produce a glossy magazine with their own stories, photographs, and journalistic articles. In the afternoons, students will study new digital literacies and compose digital stories about their lives. The learning spaces will offer state-of-the-art technology and will be designed to allow girls to move freely between writing stories, reading books, and exploring new forms of literacy.

Also joining the SCLP team will be a smaller group of interns selected through a competitive application process open to girls attending Madison County High School. The interns will receive mentoring and college application guidance from DukeEngage undergraduates. The high school interns will in turn become mentors and teachers for their younger peers. This design will create a culture of expectation for middle school girls: The pathway to college can become my future too.

Powerful educational experiences like these can inspire girls to become leaders and catalysts for change in their communities. The Spring Creek Literacy Project represents a vision of what rural education and girls’ education could accomplish in 21st century America, given the right resources, technologies, and teacher expertise.