This past summer, Pop Culture Classroom was hard at work developing and running pop-culture based workshops for diverse sites and students all throughout Colorado! These workshops are all part of PCC’s educational mission to inspire, engage and ignite students’ love of learning using the tools of pop culture – including comics, board games, cosplay and so much more!
Between June and August of 2017, PCC conducted over 100 hours of programming at 24 different libraries, schools and community centers across the Front Range.
These innovative workshops gave us the chance to work with almost 500 students over the summer. Students ranged from 2nd graders through high school seniors, and represented an incredible array of talents, interests and backgrounds.
Below are some of our favorite highlights from our summer 2017 workshops. A tremendous thank you to the many students, PCC teachers, and sites that made these workshops a success!
Greenwood Village – Art in the Park
Our summer started with lots of comics and clothe! As part of the Greenwood Village Art in the Park summer series, PCC offered two workshops – “Superhero Design” and “Cosplay 101” – for younger students 6-10. These workshops were a great way to give early childhood and elementary learners the chance to engage with pop culture and learn the ins & outs of comics and costume-making!
African Community Center – Refugee Youth Workshops
One of the most exciting new opportunities this summer was PCC’s involvement with the African Community Center and their efforts to help refugees rebuild safe, sustainable lives in Denver.
This summer, PCC participated as a partner and program provider for ACC’s OnTRAC (Training Refugees Accessing College) youth program, which seeks to support refugees by offering college literacy lessons, while honoring their identities, experiences and strengths. PCC offered 2 summer workshops as part of this innovative program, with the goal of using Storytelling Through Comics, PCC’s comics creation program, as a way to help these refugee students improve their literacy skills and prepare for college applications.
In each workshop, refugee students were tasked with creating a comic or comic strip reflecting a journey or moment of personal growth, helping them visualize and develop compelling stories to serve as the foundations for their future college applications and scholarship essays.
According to ACC’s OnTRAC coordinator Yazan Fattaleh, “Pop Culture Classroom’s comic workshop helped our students understand their own stories, and how they can articulate them in more creative ways to increase their confidence. The PCC team did a great job connecting scholarship essays and comics for our students, most of whom had never seen a comic book before.”
To be continued…