Honors in Action: Research at Camp
Honors Students at camp. L-R: Mariah Arnett, Delaney Grim, Seth Davis, Niesha Bell, Sarah Martinez, and Christina Sartain.
In what has become a spring break tradition, Camp Blue Skies comes to Camp Twin Lakes in Rutledge, Georgia—a camp especially designed to support campers who face medical, adaptive, and other life challenges. Dr. Jerri Kropp and Dr. Brent Wolfe led a group of 16 students to volunteer as cabin counselors and activity leaders for participants in Camp Blue Skies, a camp for adults with developmental disabilities. Our students go through some intensive pre-camp training, including training on-site a couple weeks before camp.
This year’s group featured a mix of new volunteers and seasoned returners, including Delaney Grimm (recreation ’20), who used this year’s camp to conduct research for her honors thesis. Her thesis will be the third honors thesis connected to research about the camp. Her project utilized PhotoVoice to give campers the opportunity to voice their opinion on what they have learned at camp, which Delaney will analyze in order to assess, she said, “what domains of recreational therapy (physical, emotional, spiritual, social, cognitive, and leisure) are being achieved by Camp Blue Skies and how they can improve activities in the future.”
PhotoVoice is a method that gives the participants a voice in deciding what issues are important in the study and puts cameras in their hands so they can identify those issues visually as well as through focus groups. “Being able to use Camp Blue Skies as the focus for my thesis project has helped expand my experience with the population, create meaningful interactions, and advocate for an amazing population that usually gets underestimated,” Grimm said. “There is truly no place like camp.”
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