Intellectual Bootcamp

“HOOORAAAHHHH, ACCEPTED INTO PENN!!!! WOOOHOOO #UPENN2018"

This is the tweet Kudakwashe Mawunganidze, C’18, a native of Harare, Zimbabwe, sent out when he learned he had been accepted into Penn. Soon after arriving at the University, his excitement spilled over into another message, this time in the form of an email sent to Penn’s Center for Africana Studies. In it, Mawunganidze describes “one of the best weeks of my life.” What had made such a profound impact on the student a mere week after arriving at Penn?

Each July, the Center for Africana Studies Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen opens its doors to any accepted undergrad who expresses a subject area of interest that in any way touches on Africana Studies. It’s an experience Mawunganidze says he won’t ever forget. “I never thought it possible to make so many friends in so little time.” 

The intense, weeklong course of study aims to not only expand students’ intellectual horizons, but prepare them for life on campus—and in the classroom. “We get a really broad range of students in terms of their backgrounds and experiences, and in terms of what they want to do with their lives,” says Camille Charles, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies and Education, and Director of both the Center for Africana Studies and the Summer Institute for Pre-Freshmen. “All students come to college with some degree of trepidation, thinking, can I really do this? Did they make a mistake accepting me? And by the end of the week they know they can cut it because they’ve held their own in class with the faculty and in late night conversations in the dorm.”

Work begins before students ever arrive on campus. They receive their reading materials ahead of time, free of charge, and are expected to come prepared. Each day they attend two courses, taught by standing faculty. This past summer’s courses ranged from Black Women Writers on New African Diasporas, taught by Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies Tsitsi Jaji, to A Borderless Caribbean?: The Creole Geographies of Dominica’s Popular Music, taught by Professor of Music and Africana Studies Timothy Rommen.

“A lot of students come to us without a real sense of what Africana Studies really means, and they’re often getting to talk about race for the first time in any meaningful way,” says Charles, who in the past has taught Summer Institute courses on residential segregation and minorities in higher education. “Africana Studies is interdisciplinary, so students aren’t just writing an English or sociology paper. Often they’re taking classes on things like Africa and the diaspora, which they’ve never even thought about necessarily before. We do a lot to ensure academic rigor because we want them to feel prepared for Penn when they finish the week.”

Each day when classes end, students attend recitations for their morning classes. This is followed by dinner, where they are encouraged to discuss the day’s lectures, and then evening recitations for their afternoon classes. All recitation sessions are led by the program’s graduate fellows. These fellows’ relationship with the students goes above and beyond the academic. They also serve as residential advisors during the program—available 24 hours a day—and once the program ends and freshmen year begins, they pair up with students and serve as mentors.

“I have had conversations with students in CVS and over frozen yogurt ranging across subjects such as class selections, dating, stress, and nail polish,” says third-year summer institute graduate fellow Cameron Brickhouse, who credits the program with helping her re-evaluate her commitment to teaching at the collegiate level. “I love the excitement that the students exhibit when sharing details about their classes after hours during the week. I am committed to teaching and nurturing the whole student, which I think the institute strives to do. It has also allowed me to see that I am passionate about programming for students on the collegiate level.” Brickhouse, a William Fontaine Fellow of Africana Studies at the University, studies early 20th century African American women's intellectual and cultural history, representations of Black female corporeality in 19th and 20th century American expressive arts, and public history.

The institute’s commitment to continued connectedness with its students is at the core of its mission.

“We always kind of have a set of students who never really leave,” says Charles, who this year decided to host a group lunch, giving students she normally met with on an individual basis a chance to share difficult decisions. In attendance were four students who had decided to abandon pre-med. “Being together in the room and realizing that they weren't alone in this course was reassuring.”

Though the Summer Institute is entering its 29th year, this is only the fourth year it has been credit bearing. "It was a big step and a great accomplishment for us,” says Gale Garrison, Associate Director of the Center for Africana Studies, noting that the rigorous academic itinerary of the institute makes it an obvious choice. “It is good that the program has been recognized and that students are now able to receive credit for the work that they complete.” 

The inclusive nature of the institute sees it attracting incoming freshmen from all sorts of disciplines, including students from the Schools of Engineering and Applied Science and Nursing and the Wharton School. One of the program’s graduate fellows, Andrés Castro Samayoa, is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education. 

“I was encouraged to apply by my advisor, Professor of Higher Education Marybeth Gasman, who taught at the Summer Institute during the summer of 2012. I've appreciated the opportunity to serve with faculty outside of my own department, and how the institute provides a space for me to explore areas of inquiry that are beyond my own area of research,” says Samayoa. “It has also consistently reminded me of the importance of providing spaces for students as they begin their collegiate experiences."

It’s a sentiment institute graduate fellow Daniel Fryer, whose research spans subjects from African-American philosophy to bioethics, echoes. “Students often comment on how they are thankful for the experience and tell me ways in which the program has assisted them in thinking more deeply about things that they face in their personal lives or see in the media,” Fryer says. “For many students attending the institute, the subject of Africana Studies is new and they have not had a chance to talk about the topics that are discussed during the institute in an academic setting.”  

The Summer Institute’s 2015 curriculum is already starting to take shape. African Independence, to be taught by Tukufu Zuberi, Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations, Professor of Sociology, and Professor of Africana Studies, will examine African independence as part of a project to redefine what it means to be human in a world in which too much of the power and wealth remains in the hands of a very few people. Presidential Term Professor and Professor of Africana Studies Heather Williams will teach a course that introduces students to some of the men and women who were enslaved during the 19th century.

“The Summer Institute is something that the University should be really proud of. We’re the only program of its kind, minimally in the Ivy League, that I’m familiar with,” says Charles, who in the future hopes to extend the program to two weeks, allowing students to immerse themselves in additional courses. “And I think, especially right now with everything that’s going on in the country, that this program offers an opportunity for the students to learn how to be heard themselves, and how to hear other people, too. As faculty, we always learn things about the students and their generation and experiences that we didn’t know before. And so I think it’s just something that really benefits the life of the institution in so many important ways.”