Summer Community Outreach with Emerging Scholars Academy and CAMINOS

As part of our summer outreach efforts, the Special Collections Research Center teamed up with our colleagues in the Learning Spaces & Services Department to provide workshops to two pre-college summer preparation programs: Emerging Scholars Academy (ESA) and CAMINOS.

Emerging Scholars Academy (ESA) is a pre-college summer preparation program designed for rising 11th grade students that identify as Black/African American or have an interest in Black/African American culture. The program "presents future scholars to opportunities within and around higher education while reinforcing cultural identity and community ties." This summer, there were a total of 90 students who were accepted into the program where one of the prerequisites is having a cumulative unweighted GPA of a 3.4 or higher. Some of the goals identified by Adam Rogers, Head of Making & Innovation Studio and of the Libraries team for the students’ visit, was to offer a fun, engaging experience of the Libraries, connecting scholars with the Black student experience at NC State, highlight the great resources the Libraries offers our students, and to advocate for students to build relationships with their college library and librarians wherever they attend college.

ESA students in D. H. Hill Jr. Library's Auditorium.
Photo credit: Jose Tapia, NC State Division of Enrollment Management and Services

ESA students rotated around six Libraries spaces and activities such as making circuit pins with the Makerspace team, visiting the Virtual Reality (VR) Studio and Digital Media Lab, as well as exploring our new Library spaces, the Visualization Studio and Innovation Studio. Victor Betts, Student Success Librarian for Special Collections and Erin Willett, Graduate Extension Assistant, welcomed students to the Innovation Studio, a new type of learning space for the Libraries that focuses on showcasing the innovative work of NC State’s students and faculty and teaching innovation methods to the campus community. ESA students learned about the digital platforms that use a novel interactive projection experience and hand motion detection technology as a new way to showcase curated digital exhibits and scholarly content. 

ESA students exploring the exhibits showcased in the Innovation Studio.
Photo credit: Jose Tapia, NC State Division of Enrollment Management and Services

Betts talked about each of the exhibits, which utilized primary sources and historical records from the archives as a way to connect scholars to the Black student experience at NC State University. The featured digital exhibits included: Existence as Resistance: The Magic in Blackness (2020), (Re)Imagining Black Futures Through the Archives (2020), the W.E.B. Du Bois Visualization Exhibit (2021), and Stories of Solidarity and Change: the Legacy of MLK Jr. at NC State (2022). Betts co-curated the exhibits on display in the Innovation Studio with the exception of the W.E.B. Du Bois Visualization Exhibit and talked about the collaboration process with campus partners, as well as the value of experiential learning through interdisciplinary projects such as the ones showcased in the Libraries. Students were engaged and connected with the content of the exhibit as they interacted with this new form of technology they had not seen before.

CAMINOS students watching a presentation in the North Forum, located in D.H. Hill Jr. Library.
Photo credit: Jose Tapia, NC State Division of Enrollment Management and Services

CAMINOS is a pre-college summer preparation program for rising high school juniors and seniors in the Latinx/Hispanic community and presents future scholars to opportunities within and around higher education while reinforcing cultural identity and community ties. This program has similar application requirements for participation as the ESA program, which led to a total of seventy students for the in-person experience. The Libraries’ Alex Valencia, Student Success Librarian, and Betts, along with Marcela Torres-Cervantes, Assistant Director of the Carolina Latinx Center at UNC Chapel Hill hosted the students in one of the newly renovated spaces in D. H. Hill Jr. Library, the North Forum. The trio led a presentation and group activities with students covering a variety of topics related to the Latinx experience as it relates to higher education, archives, the importance of finding and using your voice to tell your own stories, and the power of storytelling. 

“Archives 101” presentation to CAMINOS students.
Photo credit: Alex Valencia, Student Success Librarian

As a special collections librarian, Betts had the students reflect about their own experience with archives and how it can help people explore and research their own cultural heritage. Students were able to critically think about archival materials broadly and how it could take a variety of forms such as oral histories, blogs, journals, letters, photographs, art, etc. The students resonated with the StoryCorps videos of animated oral stories that were selected by Betts, which reflected their own experiences as Latinx students. The Special Collections Research Center has a similar oral history project called Wolf Tales that seeks to collect and preserve the stories of the NC State community, past and present.

View our growing Wolf Tales archive where you can find stories from NC State community members sharing their memories of the events, people, and places that shaped their time at NC State. Also consider adding your voice to the historical record of NC State by making a 10-minute audio or video recording from anywhere. The Special Collections Research Center contains a growing collection which can be accessed by searching our digitized collections and online collection guides.