I spent ten years teaching creative writing at Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, CA, the largest juvenile detention center in the country. California is a state with more prisons than anywhere in the world along with a school to prison pipeline epidemic; I quickly learned that most of my students were functionally illiterate, part of Special Education in their home schools, or considered Below Basic in California State Standards. As a group, we explored poetry by women, people of color, and at times I sprinkled in William Blake and Charles Bukowski. We used the topics of these literary figures as a beginning structure to build their own writing.
The goal was not to make everyone a poet; my class was about developing the tools to express and be self-reflective which allowed them to see themselves for the first time on a page, and their relationship to the world, in a new way. In my experience, as the students began to open up to the writing process, they genuinely gained a love for poetry and language. The participants began to read on their own time, and to create writing pieces that exposed deep trauma. It was like poetry therapy—which I later found was a real field in psychology. I am not trained as a psychotherapist, but I created a space where they could see themselves as humans—not the last name that the staff called them. They reflected, came to understanding, cried in public, spoke their truths, found resolutions, craved change, and healed each other, sometimes. Literacy levels unexpectedly improved. Their critical thinking skills and writing exercises, in my short two hour a week classes, had an effect that produced confidence and mostly the love for words. Imagine a room of about fifteen gang members, some from rival gangs, battling in a spelling bee! This happened. Because I have seen severely traumatized young men and women gain tools to build resilience and literacy, I know that my teaching skills could be transferred to classrooms.
It is important to note that I do not take credit for somehow “saving” or “liberating” these youth; in contrast, they slowly did it themselves through their willingness to be vulnerable in a classroom setting. At times this liberation meant they were okay with being considered intelligent, and this did not take away from their tough identities. Other times it meant they could write poems about absent fathers or their abuse. They learned to conceptualize the disparity, institutions, and systems that affected them. They were empowered and had what Dr. Duncan Andrade would call
critical hope
, via Cornel West, which “stands in solidarity with urban communities, sharing the burden of their undeserved suffering as a manifestation of a humanizing hope in our collective capacity for healing.”
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I must add from these severely traumatized and incarcerated youth, I learned social emotional health was directly tied to education and this was before I became a credentialed classroom teacher. The knowledge that language can change lives is what inspired me to teach. I saw the results of what literacy can do to a mind even when the body is subjugated. I saw imprisoned youth of color socialized to be racist towards each other discuss and connect to poems by people different from them. I knew that as Dwayne Betts, a formerly incarcerated youth, and Yale School of Law graduate, stated in a meeting with my Yale seminar: “literature is a free elixir.”
This idea of free can simply mean to shape one’s own identity, to realize connections between people, or to be resilient when facing challenges. I am working under conditions that strongly focus on new Common Core Standards testing, and so this idea of healing in the classroom is not the priority. Although some school systems have figured a way to deal with the whole child and provide wraparound services, many do not. At my school, we have one full-time counselor, a part-time counselor, a part-time psychologist, and a part time social worker to serve about 650 children ages 4-14. My students do not have sufficient social/emotional support unless their teachers attempt to create a safe space to consider all their needs.
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I am approaching my unit as if my classroom is the place where my students will understand why literacy, literature, and healing are crucial for their growth and humanity.
