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Abstract

Empirical research documents the benefits of summer camps for young people, including disability-specific or medical-speciality residential camps. Using an ethnographic approach which utilized observation and individual and group discussions with the visually impaired young people who attended a summer camp, their parents, and school teachers who staffed the summer camp, we build on the extant research here by exploring, for the first time, the purpose and value of a summer camp for visually impaired young people. The qualitative data generated from our research were subjected to thematic analysis. We discuss the summer camp in relation to the following themes: (1) The summer camp facilitates peer interactions and relationship development; (2) the mixing of age groups facilitates the development of life skills; and (3) the summer camp supports the recruitment of visually impaired young people to Fieldway School [pseudonym].

Keywords

Belonging ethnography life skills relationships summer camp visual impairment

Introduction

Significant empirical evidence documents the benefits of summer camp attendance for young people (McCole et al., 2019), including opportunities to develop confidence and self-esteem, social skills and community building, independence and leadership qualities, and a willingness to try new things (Bialeschki et al., 2007; Henderson et al., 2007; McCole et al., 2019; Wilson et al., 2019). These benefits extend to those who attend disability-specific or medical-speciality residential camps, a context where disabled campers, or those with unique medical needs, are provided a distinct opportunity to learn and improve skills, such as gaining opportunities to develop independent living, communication, and social interaction skills (Goodwin & Staples, 2005; Knapp et al., 2015). These camps, according to Knapp and colleagues (2015), can help to provide a ‘normalizing’ community for disabled youth to enjoy and thrive within, while working with others who understand the particularities associated with their disability, impairment, or medical diagnoses.

While research examining the camp experiences of disabled youth has grown, research specifically exploring the purpose and value of camps for blind and visually impaired youth is limited. Within this area of inquiry, much is based specifically on and in sports camps, focusing on the development of motor competence (Brian et al., 2018), perceived motor competence (Shapiro et al., 2008; Stribing et al., 2022), as well as the relationship between physical activity, self-perceptions, and motor skill competence (Brian et al., 2022). Interestingly, though, most of the research being conducted at sports camps for visually impaired youth is not directly related to the purpose, value, or benefits of the sports camps for youth (Caron et al., 2023; Furtado et al., 2016). Rather, and as noted by Caron and colleagues (2023), these camps are used as a ‘research laboratory’ or ‘research vehicle’ to test innovations or adaptations to exercise-based interventions (Morelli et al., 2010), instructional strategies (Furtado et al., 2016), or measurement instruments (e.g. Lieberman et al., 2006; Stribing et al., 2021).

In addition to research harnessing sports camps as a vehicle to collect data on visually impaired youth, there have been several studies that have examined potential benefits, outcomes, and experiences associated with participation in such camps (e.g. Goodwin et al., 2011; McMahon et al., 2019). For example, in a secondary analysis of data taken from sports education camps in the United States in 1989, 1996, and 2000–2010, McMahon and colleagues (2019) found one sport camp model (i.e., Sports Education Camps) to be highly effective short-term interventions to help teach basic sports skills and improve physical performance for visually impaired youth. Other research has explored the meaning and value that sports camps can have for visually impaired athletes as well as staff. For example, Goodwin and colleagues (2011) explored the social meaning visually impaired youth ascribed to their participation in a sports camp, and described feelings associated with connectedness among visually impaired participants, as well as opportunities to explore one’s personal limits, as key benefits of the experience. More recently, Wilson and colleagues (2020) explored the benefits of camps for staff or volunteers, noting the opportunities for professional growth and developing close relationships with visually impaired athletes that are facilitated during such programmes (Wilson et al., 2020). Collectively, this area of inquiry has provided some support describing potential benefits, outcomes, and experiences associated with sports camp participation for visually impaired youth.

Despite the positive outcomes previously explored, there are several limitations of research exploring the purpose, value, and benefits of camps for visually impaired youth. Notably, much of the research, to date, has taken place at sports-specific camps for visually impaired youth that are geographically located within the United States. With that, much less is known about the purpose, value, or culture of camps generally, and for visually impaired youth specifically, in other contexts, such as the United Kingdom (Yang et al., 2021). Importantly, as well, these camps, those of which much of this research has been conducted, tend to take place on university campuses or recreational facilities that are retrofitted to the needs of visually impaired youth, where considerable effort must be taken to ensure that participants have access to existing facilities and physical activity opportunities. Moreover, much of the extant research relating to summer camps is conducted by those who organize and deliver them (see, for a review, Caron et al., 2023), thus meaning that there may be a lack of critical distance between researchers and camp attendees. With these limitations in mind, we turn our attention to exploring the purpose and value of an overnight summer camp that takes place at a residential school for blind or visually impaired students that is geographically located in England. Notably, while this particular camp was originally conceptualized as a sports camp, it has since expanded considerably to include a variety of lifestyle activities (e.g., horticulture) that extend the scope (and potential value) of the programme beyond sports/physical activity.

Given these unique particularities, gaining an understanding of the purpose and value of a programme like this from the perspective of those considered expert knowers (Fricker, 2007) because of their lived, embodied experiences of summer camp planning and delivery and within a unique geographic context and within facilities specifically designed for this population, may contribute to our understanding of how, what, and where to host these types of events. Indeed, we argue that researchers and camp organizers need to know this so that summer camps can be tailored to the needs, capabilities, and preferences of the blind and visually impaired young people that they are supposed to serve rather than the research scholars who often deliver them. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to explore the purpose and value of a summer camp for visually impaired young people, parents, and staff. We achieve this by first exploring and justifying our methodological decisions, then representing our findings via thick descriptions of views and experiences, before drawing on extant research to discuss the significance and implications of what we found for future summer camp research and practice.

Methodology

Philosophical positioning

Our research was informed by an interpretivist ontology and social constructivist epistemology (Bryman, 2015) in that we were interested in capturing the ways and extent to which our participants individually and collectively made sense of and construct meaning about the purpose and value of summer camps for visually impaired young people. To do this, Anthony performed what Atkinson (2015) would consider a mini-ethnographic study by immersing himself in the culture of the summer camp to get a sense of its established ideologies, discourses, logics, practices, and behaviours to better understand its purpose and value according to visually impaired young people, parents, and staff to capture the nuance and complexity of the summer camp from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By talking to these stakeholders and observing the delivery of the summer camp, Anthony as a sighted researcher was able to better understand the research setting through cultural assimilation as an ‘outsider’ (Atkinson, 2015) when it came to the school as a research setting and the young people, parents, and staff entangled within it. Indeed, the mini-ethnographic approach enabled Anthony to gain a firsthand account of the summer camp and become a ‘known person’ to blind and visually impaired young people, their parents, and staff, which was important for developing trust and rapport prior to interviewing them (Bryman, 2015).

Research setting

The summer camp is for visually impaired young people and had been set up by and delivered in Fieldway School [pseudonym] over 10 years prior to our research being conducted in July 2022. Fieldway School specializes in providing a comprehensive education for visually impaired young people, aiming to maximize academic achievement, personal development, independence, and self-worth. Located in the North of England, Fieldway School exists in a complex of buildings/facilities that is designed specifically with visually impaired young people in mind. Originally, the summer camp was set up as a sports camp but had expanded over the years to now include art and design, music and music production, cooking and catering, information technology, horticulture, as well as sports. The camp uses Fieldway School’s purpose-built facilities and runs for 1 week (10 am to 3 pm, Monday to Friday) over the school summer holidays. Those who attend the summer camp are mostly students from Fieldway School, but some come from other schools in the United Kingdom. The number of attendees varies each year but is generally between 25 and 45. Thirty-five students attended the July 2022 summer camp, which is the focus of the research reported in this article. Teaching and support staff from Fieldway School, all of whom are specially trained and qualified to work with visually impaired young people, which is another unique feature of this camp and thus our research, delivered the summer camp.

Methods

The research received full approval from a university research ethics committee before data were generated. In keeping with the mini-ethnographic approach, Anthony assumed multiple and transitionary roles and identities as researcher-participant-observer of the summer camp (Atkinson, 2015). As such, Anthony kept daily written reflective diary entries that captured what he saw, heard, and thought about his experiences as an active participant in the summer camp. While these diary entries are used elsewhere – rather than here – as a data source, they did influence the development of the interview schedules. This involved Anthony reflecting on diary entries in relation to the significance of what he observed when it came to the purpose and value of summer camps, before sharing these with Justin and David prior to the collective construction of interview schedules. In this respect, individual interviews were conducted with parents and staff because it was difficult arranging group discussions because of work, family, and other commitments. On the other hand, focus group discussions were used with visually impaired young people because this method has been found to disrupt power imbalances between adult researchers and young people as participants, which can enable thicker, richer, qualitative data to be generated through more open and dynamic conversations (Bryman, 2015). All questions were open, and expansion, clarification and justification questions were added to generate the thick descriptions of views and experiences that are considered a hallmark of quality in qualitative research (Tracy, 2010).

Data analysis

Data analysis was led by Anthony and inspired by the reflexive thematic analysis approach because it enabled us to construct patterns and threads of meaning systematically and rigorously across the entire dataset (Braun & Clarke, 2022). First, Anthony read the interview transcripts to immerse himself in these data so that he became intimately familiar with them. Next, he assigned descriptive, analytical, and theoretical notes to chunks of the text that he deemed salient before clustering codes together to establish candidate themes. Notes, codes, and themes were then sent to Justin, who acted as critical friend (Tracy, 2010) to check and challenge Anthony construction of knowledge, which supported knowledge crystallization (Smith & McGannon, 2018). During a series of conversations between Anthony and Justin, codes were selectively removed, collapsed, shifted between themes, and theme names edited so that they more accurately reflected the textual representation of participant views and experiences. Accordingly, themes became more firmly established and were entitled: (1) The summer camp facilitates peer interactions and relationship development; (2) The mixing of age groups facilitates the development of life skills; and (3) The summer camp supports the recruitment of visually impaired young people to Fieldway School. Themes have been used to structure the ‘Findings’ section. When presenting the voices of participants, we often begin with those of visually impaired young people as part of our endeavour to centring their experiences and amplifying their voices.

Findings

The summer camp facilitates peer interactions and relationship development

The visually impaired young people in our research suggested that the main purpose of the summer camp and its inherent value was that it provided opportunities for them to socialize with their school friends. For instance, Harry (young person) said:

I came to summer camp because I think it’s good to see your friends in the summer and it’s good to do activities together, because if we’re at home with our mums and dads, we think, oh, I miss my friends and then along came the summer camp.

Similarly, Max (young person) said: ‘I like the camp because I get to see my friends. I’m friends with Olivia and I haven’t seen her since school broke up’. Like visually impaired young people, parents emphasized the important role that the summer camp played in re-connecting young people during the long summer holidays, especially given that most had few or no friends outside of school. For instance, Susan (Nathan’s mum) said:

Nathan likes this school [Fieldway School]. Sometimes, it’s hard to find friends for kids like Nathan. We live in a different city [from the school], so he can’t meet the friends when it’s summer holiday and all his school friends live far away, so the camp is good.

For the staff who we interviewed, opportunities for social interaction were especially important given that this was the first camp since COVID-19 physical and social restrictions were lifted in England:

I think that the pupils need the space that the summer camp provides. Some have few friends and are isolated in their communities. Now I’m not going to go into too much detail about mental health and pre-pandemic and lockdowns, but what we did observe during the pandemic was that a lot of our students struggled with isolation and the school being closed. So, I think you need that space and the value of the camp allows them to be able to go and be with their peers to develop those relationships and have fun (James, staff)

The summer camp enabled children who were either considering joining Fieldway School or due to join it later that year to interact with and develop relationships with other visually impaired young people. For example, Poppy (young person) said:

I’m coming here [Fieldway School] in September. I have been to enrichment days before [at Fieldway School] but this is my first summer camp. I wanted to see the school again and make friends. The best part of the summer camp has been making friends with [Jack].

In a similar vein, some staff suggested that working at the summer camp enabled them to learn more about the young people who were joining them later in that year:

Obviously when we come back and we’ve worked at the school before you kind of know some of the kids. But also, we see kids that aren’t from the school, some of them who potentially might have come to the school as well. It’s good to get an idea of some of the kids that might come to the school (Rob, staff).

According to Sharon (Noah’s mum), who had attended the summer camp to learn more about Fieldway School so that she could decide whether to apply to attend the school, Noah (young person) had limited experience of interacting with other visually impaired young people:

The summer camp is great because he [Noah] has met other kids with VI and become friends with them. He has just been a bit more social with his peers because that’s what he finds difficult. He can talk to adults but struggles with his peers. Adults always assume that he has lots of friends because of how chatty he is, but he’s not usually like that with other kids.

Interestingly, Sharon (Noah’s mum) suggested that Noah had developed his knowledge and understanding of visual impairment by interacting with young people with different types of visual impairment during the summer camp:

He [Noah] loves it [the summer camp]. He was with two of the other young boys on the first day and I obviously don’t know the ins and outs but it appeared that they were more severe than Noah in terms of the sight condition. He was going, ‘Oh, just go over there to the swings’ and it was like, ‘No, you’ve got to get up, get their hand and walk them to it’. He hadn’t realised that they may need guiding, so he learned a lot about VI from those boys.

The mixing of age groups facilitates the development of life skills

A key point of interest related to older and younger children was them being able to interact and socialize with each other during the summer camp. Often, there were children as young as 6 or 7 years old participating with children who were 15 or 16 years of age. This was deemed to be mutually beneficial in that it helped them to develop core life skills such as confidence: ‘I think it’s good because people can socialize with different age groups, the older ones can help out with the younger ones. It’s just good to get experience in helping younger kids and building their confidence’ (Casey, young person). This same claim was repeated numerous times, by many of those interviewed, including Kevin (Noah’s dad): ‘The camp just builds their confidence. I have seen Noah’s confidence grow massively throughout the week. He’s doing the activities with confidence and talking to all the older kids with confidence’. According to Caleb (young person), the mixing of ages enabled the older kids to act as role models so that the younger kids had someone to aspire to:

I think the pros are being that role model, that person who they’re looking up to, so whatever activity that you’re doing, they get to spend time with you in a normal school day, they probably wouldn’t spend time with you in class. I think it’s definitely that role of being able to inspire the younger children.

This perspective was shared by some of the staff, who mentioned the importance of developing social and communication skills through peer interactions:

A lot of our children, when they leave school or when they step outside of school, whether that be on a school trip or mobility lesson, they’re not used to talking to members of the public. So, the more that they talk and communicate with as many different people, including older and younger people, the better (James, staff).

Leadership was also mentioned as an important skill developed through the mixing of age groups, as articulated by Owen (staff):

We’ve got a completely different dynamic than a mainstream summer camp or school. We are a small school so all our kids know each other and see each other. It’s great during the summer camp because the older kids get that important experience of leading the young ones, developing those leadership skills, and the confidence of the young ones just grows and grows.

Even though every participant that was interviewed advocated for the mixing of age groups, Emma (young person) did mention a potential limitation of it, when she said:

I do like the way we can be together in a mixed aged group setting. Us older children could be a role model for the younger children. The only thing I’d say that is negative about it is the fact that whenever we hang out in a social setting, like in the youth club; this is why our age groups are separate because sometimes, if the older people are having a conversation that’s not necessarily appropriate for younger people.

Despite the notable benefits of mixing age groups during activities, it was noted that this was more because of the relatively small number of children that participated in each activity rather than being specifically designed to develop such life skills:

So, one of the issues is numbers. I hope we can one day, but we’re never going to have summer camp for VI kids where there’s going to be 100 participants, I can’t see that any time soon. So, for the numbers we had there, and the age range, and also the VI conditions and other needs, I think you have to mix it (Charlotte, staff).

The summer camp supports the recruitment of visually impaired young people to Fieldway School

For staff in particular, a key purpose of the summer camp is to showcase the school to prospective parents so that they can recruit students. For instance, Sophie (staff) said:

The camp helps us recruit pupils. Maybe potential pupils come and have a little look at us and see what we do to see if you like it. It's about bringing new pupils in as well.

Similar comments were expressed by James (staff), who emphasized the importance of parents visiting Fieldway School and summer camp rather than reading about it:

It’s about bringing children in who don’t come to [Fieldway School], showing them what we’re about, showing the parents what we’re about, what we can offer, because it’s quite hard to get that out there on a piece of paper, what we can deliver if you’ve walked through the door.

In this regard, Sharon (Noah’s mum) talked openly about her motive for attending the summer camp, which was to help her and her husband to decide whether to send Noah to Fieldway School:

At the end of year six [end of primary/elementary school], we don’t know whether to send him [Noah] to a mainstream school, like he’s in, or send him here [Fieldway School]. That’s why we are here, to see what the school is like and talk to the staff about it. It’s a really tough decision. If it’s here, we want that transition to be as natural as possible for him, when everybody else goes onto the next key stage.

For Kevin (Noah’s dad), who was also visually impaired, it was hoped that the summer camp would also help to ‘integrate [Noah] into the VI community’. He then expanded thus:

[Noah] has me. We both have VI so that’s normal for him. His gran has VI, so he is used to it. We talk about it all the time. But, he doesn’t know any kids with VI. He doesn’t have a VI community like that. And that is tough for him. I went to a mainstream school when I was a lad and had a bad time of it. I wanted [Noah] to come here to become friends with other VI kids.

There was evidence that the summer camp had helped to recruit students in the past and integrate them into a community of visually impaired young people, which was provided by Poppy (young person) who was due to join Fieldway School in September that year:

I’m really excited to join [Fieldway School] in September. I’m excited to be with [Jack]. I’ve been here before, to the camp and enrichment day. I came to check the school out, to see what it was like. To make some friends. I’ve already got friends here now so I can’t wait to join.

Discussion and conclusion

In this article, we explored the purpose and value of a summer camp according to visually impaired young people, parents, and staff, and several salient findings were identified. Some of these findings are reminiscent of those found in prior research exploring the experiences of disabled people in residential camps, as well as blind or visually impaired young people in sport-oriented camps. For example, our participants explained that part of the purpose and value of camp for them was the opportunities to socialize with others who experienced impairments like their own. This was deemed to be especially crucial in the context of the social isolation experienced by the young people because of COVID-19 restrictions, the ramifications of which were still being felt by the young people, their parents, and staff. These findings support prior assertions from Knapp et al. (2015) who described the importance of normalizing communities for disabled youth through residential sport camps.

While the concept of normal or normalizing has been unpicked elsewhere as potentially supporting ability-disability binaries that promote normality over diversity and are strongly rooted in medical model thinking (Haegele et al., 2022; Spencer et al., 2020), the conversation here is focused more so on participants feeling a sense of belonging and acceptance among their peers because they are doing and can do what others did without feeling ‘different’ because of their impairment (Lundberg et al., 2011). In this respect, the participants noted feelings of inclusion, as defined as an (inter)subjective experience featuring feelings of acceptance, belonging, and being valued (Haegele & Maher, 2023), because having a visual impairment was ‘normal’ within this unique, supportive context. It seems logical, to us, to assert that this feeling of being ‘normal’ among other blind and visually impaired students may be difficult to elucidate in other camp contexts with one or few blind and visually impaired peers, or in physical settings not designed specifically for visually impaired youth. This assertion is reflected in other physical settings, such as mainstream physical education classes within schools, where visually impaired students have reported that despite a desire to feel included (Keene et al., 2024) or be treated as a ‘normal’ student, these feelings were largely unavailable because of how (nondisabled) others viewed and treated them (Haegele et al., 2022), the ableist philosophies that underpin activities within those spaces (Alves et al., 2024; Giese et al., 2023) and the hierarchical nature within integrated social contexts like these (Giese et al., 2021; Meier et al., 2023)

The importance of being accepted and feeling ‘normal’ appeared to be a salient feature across each of the findings of this article. For example, the mixing of ages and development of role model roles within the camp context were considered, by some, as mechanisms to build confidence and demonstrate to younger campers that they were accepted and ‘normal’ among their peers. This may be unsurprising, given that a sound body of research supports these assertions, and has previously identified positive social benefits of having positive role models or mentees who experience similar impairments and disability (Bell, 2012; O’Mally & Antonelli, 2016). While some sport camps for blind and visually impaired youth implement a formal mentoring model in the form of counsellor-in-training programmes (Lieberman et al., 2021), the use of mixed age campers in this particular model allows for older youth to remain campers and derive benefits as participants while also helping to mentor younger campers. In addition, the acceptance and confidence built throughout the camp helped provide a sense of comfort for visually impaired youth and their parents, helping them to make the decision to enrol their children at Fieldway School in the future. Since this research, it is noteworthy that both Poppy and Noah have joined the school from a mainstream setting. This has not, to the best of our knowledge, been reported elsewhere in research and thus is a novel finding that may be of value for other schools for visually impaired young people who run or are considering running a summer camp. We end this article by noting that none of the extant research, our own included, gathers data about or with those blind and visually impaired young people who do not attend summer camp. Hence, we recommend that future research does so to better understand what can be done to encourage and support those young people to attend summer camp.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Anthony J Maher

Justin A Haegele

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The purpose and value of a summer camp for visually impaired young people

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Methodology

Philosophical positioning

Research setting

Methods

Data analysis

Findings

The summer camp facilitates peer interactions and relationship development

The mixing of age groups facilitates the development of life skills

The summer camp supports the recruitment of visually impaired young people to Fieldway School

Discussion and conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

References