Reflections on a day at Just Community Camp

This seems to be my summer for going to camp. In June my husband and I went to Tai Chi camp at a small Catholic college in western Indiana. We played a lot of tai chi, honed our skills, made new friends, had some good laughs and got deeply immersed in the spirit of support and comradeship of fellow tai chi players.

On Friday, July 23, I had the privilege of spending most of the day with the students and counselors in the Just Community Camp at Wilmington College. I was only there for part of the day—from 11 to about 3:30, but I could tell that the group was experiencing that same level of support and comradeship that we had felt in our camp earlier. That’s probably part of the point of going away to camp: participants are outside their normal environment and able to focus whole-heartedly on the subject at hand. In the case of Just Community, the students even agreed to leave their cell phones off—a whole week unplugged! By the time I showed up, near the end of their experience, any isolation they may have suffered from being off the grid seemed to have been replaced by strong bonds with each other, by verbal communication rather than texting.

So what is JUST Community all about? Why should 33 teenagers from 15 different area high schools spend a week together on a college campus? What are they supposed to learn or experience?

Listening to them de-brief from exercises and looking over the curriculum for the week, here is my take: BRIDGES is invested in this program because it allows the participants to identify and become aware of all of the various “isms” that confront them every day. Biases that may lead to unfair treatment or bullying. Then it helps them figure out some constructive ways to confront those “isms” and to become change agents in their schools. Some of the “isms” they looked at were classism, gender/sexism, ableism, and racism. Not easy stuff to deal with in one fast week.

Posted on the walls around the large room where they met were the products of their exercises and discussions. There was a set of posters developed from the “60 Seconds” exercise on the first day where students recorded all the descriptors of terms like “white person” or “handicapped” they could come up with within a minute. The second part of the exercise was to read back the list while a person of that descriptor stood in front of you. It was pretty powerful, just reading some of the lists. Early on, students filled out a Life Map questionnaire about themselves: gifts they possessed of hands, head and heart, questions they would like to answer in their lifetime, what they would like to change in their school and their world.

These will be revisited at the end of the week. Reading the ones posted on the walls, this is an inquisitive and ambitious bunch of high schoolers.

One of the activities I got to observe was a series of role plays about how to handle conflict in school situations, for example, girls getting in a dust-up about one stealing the other’s boy friend. As someone who has spent some years studying conflict resolution and mediation, it was really heartening to see their creativity in finding ways to defuse potentially hostile situations. They were also pretty tough on themselves during de-briefing, looking for still better ways to resolve the conflicts.

After lunch, and after a very competitive game of musical chairs to see who would win a midnight snack, the first floor (girls) or second floor (boys), the students began to come up with ideas on which issues needed to be addressed in their schools and how to best approach the issues they identified.

In one way, this exercise was what the whole week had been leading up to…how to take what they had learned and apply it in their lives back in the “real world.” The issues they identified were tough: gay-baiting, disrespect for teachers in the classroom, racism, picking on anyone who was different. Some of the solutions were creative, others were sort of tried and true. All of them have the potential for success because the students will act as agents for change within their schools.

They will be the voices speaking up and the bodies standing up to call out the bullies and the disrespectful. The kids know it won’t be an easy task. But they have acquired the tools. They also know that staff from the Just Community program will be available to support them and help make sure school administrators work together to address the issues. They know they have absorbed the lessons of the week at camp. They have the ideas and the tools to make their schools better places to learn and grow. They have the ability to make permanent changes for the better in their communities. That’s what Just Community Camp is all about and why it is worth every penny.

WRITTEN BY BETSY SATO