Summer Archives

Aidan Pace Nashville, TN - Preston Taylor Ministries

"Resilience Through Connectedness" - Aidan Pace 2017

Ingram Scholarship Program Summer Project

Preston Taylor Ministries (PTM)

“So you will be taking your group to a park two days per week?” Nicole asked as we walked to the next child’s house to distribute field trip permission forms. “The students may get tired of visiting the same park every day. That’s something to consider. Also, how soon do you expect to get these permission slips back? It will be a miracle if half of the kids turn them in within a week.” The questions made me anxious – they illuminated many facets of my program which I had not at all considered. Nicole, my behavior management supervisor, shot an arrow right through my shoddy Resilience Program curriculum every time she fired a thoughtful question.

Waltzing into PTM on the first week of intern orientation and training, I had grand ideas of how I would teach the components of resilience while instilling them in my students. I researched and obtained resilience measurement questionnaires and would use these instruments to assess the students’ development over the summer. However, while I prepared for a summer with resilience education as a focus, PTM’s vision for what they termed “Aidan’s Adventures” differed slightly.

Rather than emphasizing the concept of resilience, PTM expected resilience to be the theme of Aidan’s Adventures but the main focus to concentrate around building friendships and middle school student retention rates. I soon sensed this shift of priorities in PTM’s agenda, so I rewrote much of the material in the first weeks to focus more around student exposure to activities and games which provided unique experiences for the kids while also fostering friendship among the students.

After hashing out behavior issues through the support of staff and parents, our group began fulfilling its purpose of bonding these students into a tightly-knit group who were prepared to take on the hardships ahead using resilience and could realize the benefits of PTM as a resource in their lives. This goal was achieved through countless Google searches for “team building games,” trips to locations such as the Frist and Percy Warner Park, and our ever-present Resilience Toolbox. The Resilience Toolbox provided the students a visual reference for the components (tools) that make up our toolbox (resilience). The definitions, applications, and ways to promote these traits were discussed at the beginning and end of the program day. In addition to the afore stated major components of the program, time was also designated for the children to read and a sport was incorporated most days.

By the end of the Summer Program, the primary objective had shifted more towards PTM’s vision of the project. PTM hopes to use the basis laid out in this project to build a program specifically for rising fifth grade students in future summers. Like my program, the goals of the intended future program would be to foster team-work, cooperation and resilience among the students while augmenting student retention rates as the students advance in grade level.