David Bethea envisioned three fundamental goals for the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature’s Pushkin Summer Institute, a pre-college enrichment program: building command of the Russian language; honing critical-thinking skills; and cultivating writing ability. But there was one outcome Bethea could not have imagined: students’ deeply emotional response to the experience.
Bethea, the Vilas Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature, watched with pride and amazement during the Institute’s closing ceremony as some of the high school students who had participated in the inaugural session shed tears.
“They had become so attached and they felt that this was really a life-changing, transformative experience for them,” recalls Bethea, the program’s academic director. (To hear more from Bethea and the students, watch the above video.)
The program’s first cohort of students all came from Pritzker College Prep, a Chicago charter school with a predominantly Hispanic student population. The 12 students, all seniors-to-be, spent six weeks on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus last summer getting a sneak peek at the college experience and studying the Russian language and celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. They took daily language classes, attended weekly lectures on Pushkin and participated in writing consultations and workshops.
The results were pretty remarkable.
All of the students improved one sublevel on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Proficiency Guidelines for speaking. All but one of the students advanced from the novice mid sublevel to novice high, the equivalent of having completed a first-year college Russian course. The one outlier entered the program speaking at novice high level and improved to intermediate low.
The students also made a significant jump in their reading scores on the ACT exam, which Pritzker administers to all of its students in the spring of their junior year and the fall of their senior year. While the average scores of the student body remained the same, those of the Pushkin students increased nearly three points.
Bethea also saw marked improvement in the students’ writing and critical-thinking skills throughout the summer.
“These students were reading Pushkin texts and, with a little preparation, were asking very intelligent and sophisticated questions about some pretty complicated and high-level issues,” he says.
Planning is already underway for the second summer, when the program will add students from Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts in East Orange, N.J., as well as additional schools in Chicago’s Noble Network of Charter Schools (of which Pritzker is a member). Bethea plans to tweak the program to emphasize listening comprehension and dial back the number of scheduled extracurricular activities to allow for sufficient study time.
He also has grand plans to expand the program, which receives support from the College of Letters & Science, to two summers: students would come to Madison in the summer after their sophomore year and have the opportunity to travel to Russia the following summer. But such a change is dependent on obtaining additional financial support.
Bethea also doesn’t want to sacrifice quality as the program grows. The hallmark of the first summer, after all, was the powerful relationships forged between the students and the staff, from residential counselors Ryan Prinz and Kristen Hendrickson to Russian language teachers Anna Borovskaya and Anna Nesterchouk.
“We were so fortunate to have a staff that was absolutely outstanding across the board, and the kids were wonderful, too,” Bethea says. “It was really beyond our wildest expectations.”
Pushkin Summer Institute students practice their Russian speaking and comprehension skills during a question-and-answer exercise. (Sarah Morton, College of Letters & Science)