Summer Bridge Spotlight: Alex Jacobs
Meet Alex Jacobs, one of five participants selected for the 2025 Summer Bridge program. A Ph.D. student in history, Jacobs worked with Middle School for Boys.
How have you applied your humanistic training to advance the mission of the community organization?
The mission of the Middle School for Boys is to support education based in curiosity, diversity, compassion, and community. They are committed to experiential, place-based, and community-engaged education that links academics to local spaces and real-world challenges. They are working to open a small middle school for boys by the 2026–2027 academic year that centers these principles and pedagogical methods.
I am using my training as a historian and my previous experiences facilitating undergraduate service-learning to support these goals. I have researched community-engaged and place-based humanities education practices and models to develop a resource list and annotated bibliography of examples, resources, and potential projects on which the school’s future educators can draw. I am also planning a one-day event that will put some of these methods into practice and serve as a recruiting opportunity for the school. The event will introduce a group of fourth through sixth graders to methods of historical inquiry and how things get remembered by discussing the histories of their favorite places in Champaign-Urbana. I am collecting primary sources about places central to the history of Champaign-Urbana that students will use to create a page explaining the history and context of those places and their development over time. We will be discussing how to read primary sources, how places relate to each other historically and today, and why history is important.
How has this experience contributed to your career development? What skills have you gained or developed?
This experience has allowed me to think about the realities of working in K-12 education and to focus on pedagogical approaches and methods in K-12 settings. I am interested in potentially teaching history after I complete my degree, but I have not been involved in primary or secondary education since I was in high school myself. Working with Middle School for Boys has provided me with an opportunity to practice how I might engage with K-12 education in a way that aligns with the commitments to ethical, community-engaged, and place-informed education that I have developed in my time as an undergraduate and early graduate student. I have developed skills in compiling and summarizing academic resources for non-academic audiences, in creating lesson plans, and in thinking through how to share my love of and belief in the necessity of studying history with young students.
What have you learned from working with this community organization?
Much of what I’ve learned so far this summer from working with Jenny, Sisa, and the rest of the team fits into two categories. First, my research contributing to a resource list and my planning for our event has given me a deep knowledge of community-engaged and place-based humanities education practices. While I had previous knowledge of service-learning in the university classroom and undergraduate experience, I have learned a lot about how educators build similar programs for much younger students. The underlying educational and ethical commitments are generally the same, but applying these frameworks to activities for upper elementary and middle school students has allowed me to better understand how such practices require different work for and have different impacts upon students of all ages.
Second, my more limited engagement with other members of the board and their ongoing planning efforts have taught me about the range of processes that go into creating a school, particularly a school with guiding moral, ethical, and community-engaged principles. From completing my own and observing others’ work, I am learning about how to communicate the necessity of place-based and experiential humanities education to a range of audiences, from young students to parents to grant providers.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your Summer Bridge program experience?
I have loved my Summer Bridge experience so far and everyone from Humanities Without Walls, the Humanities Research Institute, and Middle School for Boys has been incredibly supportive and helpful. This is a unique and important opportunity to break down the barriers between the university and community, to develop and apply humanities skills in support of a community organization, and to explore nontraditional academic positions. Being part of a cohort of graduate students who are interested in these types of sustainable, impactful academic-community partnerships and are asking the same questions about how to build these relationships has allowed us to have insightful and helpful conversations across our disciplines. I would like to thank everyone involved in the Summer Bridge Program as a whole and in my experience working with Middle School for Boys.