Partners

Duke University is committed to the advancement of K-12 education and to civic engagement and service learning for its undergraduate students. The Spring Creek Literacy Project extends these commitments with an initiative focused on children and youth in rural Appalachia. Duke's Program in Education is the administrative home for the SCLP within the wider University. The Program in Education provides administrative oversight for the management of grants and donations to the SCLP. It helps create important links between the SCLP and academic departments and students across campus.

A team of Duke University undergraduates comes to Spring Creek each summer to live and work for eight weeks. The students receive funding through DukeEngage, a program that supports undergraduates who wish to pursue immersive summer service of benefit to local communities. In Spring Creek, the college students serve as mentors and literacy teachers for the middle school program participants and for a smaller number of high school interns, all from the local communities. The SCLP partnership has created an educational experience that is transformative not only for Appalachian girls, but also for the undergraduate students who teach and mentor them.

The Madison County School System welcomes the collaboration and has pledged its support to ensure the success of the project. Girls from the nearby town of Hot Springs and the tiny mountain hamlet of Laurel receive free daily bus transportation to Spring Creek for six weeks each summer. Teachers from Madison County benefit from opportunities to learn from and contribute to the project. One local English teacher will join the SCLP team in 2011 for advanced training, so that by 2012 she can become one of two lead summer teachers. The project's interactive website will offer further opportunities for Madison County teachers and educators from across the state and around the world to become involved with this rural demonstration project.

The Spring Creek Community Center connects the project to the region's rich local heritage and the needs of its people. The transformation of the old Spring Creek school into a center for arts, culture, and regional development demonstrates the community's commitment to change and renewal. By helping girls and young women achieve academic success, complete high school, and matriculate into college, this site-based program will boost efforts by local leaders and regional partners to help an economically depressed region prosper.

Project Director

Project director Deborah Hicks was raised in a small Appalachian town in North Carolina. Educated in public schools, she earned a doctorate in Education and Human Development from Harvard University in 1988. She has been an educator, researcher, and writer for two decades, focusing on children in America's poor and working-class communities. A well-known voice in the education community for her writings about literacy, Hicks has published two books, including Reading Lives (Teacher's College Press), along with numerous journal and magazine articles. She is currently working on a memoir of teaching, The Road Out, to be published by the University of California Press. In 1989, Hicks was selected as a National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow, a prestigious national award given annually to twenty early career educational scholars. She is a Research Scholar in the Program in Education at Duke University.