Borrowed Voices

In 1999, Pitzer College first developed its partnership to the Camps with a program called Borrowed Voices. This program has since evolved through many staff people, many institutional changes and through hundreds of Pitzer volunteers and Camp AP high schoolers. We continue to adapt and expand upon this programming and develop additional programming in collaboration with our students and the teachers and staff.

In the Borrowed Voices community-based learning program students of Pitzer College teach a ten-week poetry workshop to the incarcerated juveniles of Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige High School (Camp AP). The program culminates with a final performance wherein Pitzer students perform the writing of their Camp students, borrowing their voices for a night to share their stories. Over the past few years, the relationship with the probation staff has been so strong that the Camp has released up to ten of our students to come to Pitzer and take part in the event. They are able to take the mic for themselves and their peers who are stuck locked up for the night. This provides a unique venue to publish and publicly perform all the work that is developed over the ten weeks and to give voice to a population which is usually kept hidden and silent. Through the Borrowed Voices performance event, the writing and the stories developed throughout the program can be shared with a broader audience and the impact of the program is extended beyond just its participants.

The fundamental goal of the program is to create space for humanity, creativity and self-expression in an unjust and failing system of marginalization, discrimination and dehumanization. By bringing together university students and incarcerated youth, Borrowed Voices facilitates mutually educational and beneficial relationships between these typically separated populations. The philosophy of the Pitzer program allows both the youth and Pitzer facilitators to be teachers for, and pupils of, one another. This empowering process is based around exchanging of life experiences, creating empathy across boundaries and validating different kinds of knowledge and learning.

A second goal of the Borrowed Voices program is to introduce and practice literacy, writing, performance and public speaking. These curricula serve academically but also build confidence, self-awareness, and life-skills for success outside of the correctional institution. For students who have been failed by the school system, this serves as a second chance to re-engage and re-define their education. The curriculum allows the youth to play a role in designing the structure and content of the classes, encourages them to teach one another and share their common and individual experiences. The program teaches them to practice different forms of creative expression including poetry, spoken word, art and music. Student facilitators run classes in small groups, incorporating lessons on alliteration, metaphor, allusion, hyperbole, and other literary devices while drawing parallels between hip-hop and modern and classic literature. As relationships and trust develop between participants, this can subvert traditional patterns of marginalization and inequality, empowering students to see themselves differently.

Over the past year, we have turned this program down a newly political path. We have added curricula which speak directly to issues of marginalization, community organizing, racism and cycles of structural violence. We taught lessons on the presidential election, local propositions, and political processes which lead to legislature and policy change. We introduced organizations and LA-based activists who organize local community movements and provide progressive services to traditionally under served populations. We asked our students to reflect and write creatively about manhood, conflict resolution, their education, and their home community's assets and deficits.

Alongside Borrowed Voices, we have introduced other types of programming: art, cartooning, theater, life-planning/college prep, yoga, gardening meditation, and others. This creative programming is developed according to the particular skills of the Pitzer facilitators and the interests of the Camp AP teachers and students.

In addition to strengthening classroom curricula, I am working to develop two new branches of the Camps which will hopefully live long beyond my time teaching there: a prison library to give them access to relevant and interesting reading materials and a re-entry program to maintain the level of learning and maturity that the boys develop in our classes when they return to their home communities.

Teaching and developing programs at the Camps is always an unpredictable process, but I have high hopes for the long-term potential of what we do. It is frustrating to walk up this seemingly never ending hill, knowing full well we might fall to the bottom before we reach any notable view points, but in working in the California correctional system, it is all there is to do. I suppose we can enjoy the view along the way.