Bridging Time and Space with Victorian Literature
Introducing high school students to the joys of reading Charles Dickens is an essential part of the Dickens Project's mission. We hope students who learn to appreciate Dickens's novels will become lifelong readers of his work and of other 19th-century writers.
Since 2015, we have partnered with the Neighborhood Academic Initiative in South Los Angeles to support a program that introduces high school AP English students to the book we study each year at the Dickens Universe. It's a unique opportunity for first-generation college-bound students to experience the academic environment at UC Santa Cruz alongside international faculty, graduate students, and Victorian literature aficionados.
But we want to do more. We want to expand this unique partnership to reach even more high school students and teachers. That's where you come in. Your support can help us continue this critical work.
Community writing mentor Hunter Dunn works with a student during the Santa Cruz Dickens Day of Writing on Charles Dickens's 212th birthday, February 7, 2024. Photo and video by West Coast Creative.In 2024, for the third consecutive year, the Dickens Project hosted an outreach initiative for high school students in Santa Cruz and in four other metro areas across the country. Called "A Dickens Day of Writing," this educational enrichment program is designed to help high school juniors and seniors improve their critical thinking and writing skills.
Working with local teachers and professors, we developed a bilingual curricular unit centered on Dickens's essay "Night Walks." The unit includes classroom discussions and observational fieldwork exercises that encourage students to reflect on issues of homelessness and poverty in their own community. Each student receives an annotated edition of "Night Walks," presented in its original English and translated into Spanish.
The program culminates in a dedicated writing retreat that brings students together with mentors from the local community for a day of focused essay writing and revision. Winning essay writers receive prizes and become eligible for scholarships to attend the Dickens Universe.
As Nirshan Perera, an English teacher at Pacific Collegiate School, notes, "[...] the students who participate in the day all have a greater sense of their capabilities as writers and thinkers; it also provides a lot of enrichment in terms of our thinking about Dickens’s work and the other work that we’re reading. [T]he idea of connecting people across time and across landscape stays with us afterwards."
Please help us expand our annual Day of Writing program to more high school students throughout the Monterey Bay Area and beyond. Your gift will provide critical support to these students and teachers and make a difference in their lives.
Thank you for considering this important cause and for joining the Friends of the Dickens Project in support of it.
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