Summer collaborations: PWR and the Stanford Summer Fellows Program

Since before the pandemic, PWR has offered a limited roster of classes that fulfill the second year writing requirement (WR 2) during the summer months. Filled with athletes, rising sophomores, and students who need to fulfill PWR 2 in the summer for other reasons, these classes offer students the opportunity to cultivate their writing and speaking skills over 8 intensive weeks during June, July, and August.  This year, PWR and Oral Comm did something new: collaborating with the new Stanford Summer Fellows Program (SSFP) to offer classes designed specifically to support SSFP students in fulfilling the WR 2 requirement. 

Now in its second pilot year, the SSFP program was originally developed under the leadership of Edith Wu, Susie Morales, Jazmin Reyes, and Bethlehem “Betty” Aynalem. Funded by VPUE’s Leveling the Learning Landscape (L3) initiative, the Summer Fellows Program is a residential cohort-building program for first-generation and low-income (FLI) students. It offers them opportunities for research, coursework, and experiential learning in the summer between their first and second years. The program offers these students full financial support (for tuition and room and board) as well as a stipend. 

All Summer Fellows participate in four components during their summer experience:

• A four-week research experience with Stanford faculty where students receive mentorship and hands-on experience in a rigorous research environment. Past partners include the Stanford School of Medicine, the Deliberative Democracy Lab, SLAC, and the Department of African and African American Studies. 
• A four-week “intro-ship,” which is a mini-internship introduction with a community partner that provides fellows the opportunity to build transferable skills, make professional connections, and gain additional experience working in a professional setting. In the past, students have worked with organizations such as Tesla, Zoom, Precursor Ventures,, the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, and Artemis Connection. 
• One 8-week Stanford course, which, for most, is a course that fulfills their WR 2 requirement
• Weekly professional development workshops led by the SSFP Team and various campus partners such as CareerEd’s Belonging, Access, and Career Equity (BACE) coaching team and the Office for Inclusion, Belonging, and Intergroup Communication (IBIC). Workshops included Interview Skill Building, Reframing Networking, and De/Re-constructing Professionalism. 

Assistant Director Susie envisions SSFP as a growing community where FLI students not only gain knowledge but also become mentors for future cohorts. "Storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool," she says, "and I'm excited to see how our Fellows will inspire each other by sharing their journeys." As SSFP approaches its third year, the team is dedicated to strengthening mentorship, enhancing preparation through a seminar course, and expanding community outreach with Stanford Alumni, all aimed at creating a more enriching and impactful experience for all Fellows.

This summer, the two principal WR 2 options included Arturo Heredia’s “Ethnic Narrative and the Rhetoric of American Identity” (PWR 2AH) and Tom Freeland’s “Performance of Power: Oratory and Authority from the Ancient World to the Postmodern” (Oralcomm 177).  Their classes were filled almost exclusively with SSFP students; Arturo taught an early morning class and Tom a late day class to accommodate the students’ varying intro-ship schedules. Ruth Starkman also welcomed a few SSFP students into her summer online PWR 2 class; the SSFP students who joined her ever-popular course, “Ethics and AI” (PWR 1STA) were unable to attend an in-person writing or speaking class because of the location or the nature of the work hours for their intro-ship.

Arturo’s course theme definitely resonated with the SSFP FLI students. With its focus on personal narratives by authors reflecting on the multicultural challenges they experienced in defining their sense of their American identity, the class invited students to perform similar reflections in relation to their own lives.  Students pursued research topics tied to their own ethnic and social backgrounds, including issues connected to assimilation, acculturation, bicultural and biracial identity, and transnational identity.  Arturo noted in particular that “several students were interested in exploring what it means to have an American identity when you live along the U.S.-Mexico border.” Arturo also commented on the strong connection he fostered with these summer students: “Since I too come from a similar [FLI] background, I felt a strong sense of identification with their academic challenges; and I am glad that I was able to help them practice the essential skills of research, critical thinking, and public speaking, which they can use in the rest of their academic and professional lives.”

Tom’s oral comm class likewise invited students to engage with highly relevant issues. As a class about the “performance of power,” the topic was well-suited to conversations emerging out of today’s social and political landscape. Tom reflected that:

We cannot avoid occasional discussion of current performances of power in the news, so when Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, I invited the class to find the best Kamala memes (which proliferated with astonishing speed when she became the nominee). My students leapt to the task with great gusto.

In their research projects, students tapped into broader narratives of performance and power; Tom shared that “one student studied Churchill's wartime radio speeches; another wrote about how nowadays everyone is a DJ, and can program their friends' listening when they get hold of the aux cable in the car; another wrote about the alarming persistence of ‘sundown towns’ (where non-white people are warned that if they stay in the town past sundown they will risk injury or death).” 

When asked about teaching students from the SSFP program, Tom commented specifically on how dedicated students were to the class: “I have to say that this was one of the most diligent groups I have had for many years. Very little in the way of absences or missed deadlines. These kids are serious.”

Interested in social justice, pre-law, civil engineering, and film-making, Ruth’s SSFP students took on projects such as the use of AI virtual reality in the criminal justice system; industrial clean-up in Seattle; and VR gaming. One student with a project on AI, copyright, and filmmaking has joined other former PWR 2STA students who researched a similar topic to collaborate on an article that they are submitting to a journal outside of Stanford. Like Tom, Ruth was impressed by her SSFP students, remarking that “FLI students always shine and give 300%. I knew they also were juggling internships, but they showed up and put their best foot forward every day. It was so great to see."

PWR has long valued its work with FLI students, and this year's collaboration builds on the work we do in collaborates with University partners like the Leland Scholars Program and SOAR to offer us the opportunity to support first-gen, low income students even beyond the first year.  We look forward to continuing this work over future summers, for years to come.

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