On the ride back down from Camp AP, I asked my van full of volunteers how they thought the lesson plan was received. In this early stage in the program, the volunteers are usually buzzing with stories, questions and ideas on the car-ride home. “I couldn’t get this one kid to start writing… just couldn’t find something he wanted to write about,” one of my volunteers vented. “I told him to write about his dreams, plans for the future—he told me he doesn’t have any dreams. I felt so stumped; its like he didn’t even know what I meant.”
This is a painful realization that I have faced many times at camp.
There are so many blatant and obvious ways that I am different from my students: the way I speak, the color of my skin, my cultural upbringing, my socio-economic status, my gender, etc. But the seemingly more subtle differences, differences in mentality, ultimately can serve as as much if not more of a barrier than other more obvious forms of difference. I have students who have never been asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I have students who would find it senseless to plan for this thing called “ the future.” And my gut tells me that this is a tragedy.
This mentality is rooted in a difference in upbringing, environment and socialization. This is not as simple as hopelessness, apathy, a lack of motivation or any other perceived inadequacy in foresight that people might mistake it for. This is a learned pattern of thought and behavior which is developed for emotional survival and affirmed in most aspects of their lives, by their parents, at school and within their friend circles. The majority of the people closest to my students live day by day in many ways. Few people have given these young men the positive reinforcement to believe that they can succeed in any long-term plans. Ifyou have witnessed the people closest to you senselessly and abruptly wiped of the face of the earth, you might find planning for the future a cruel joke too. If the successful role models on TV, in the news and in the movies do not look, talk or live like you, it might be difficult to find affirmation for your hopes and dreams. It is hard to argue with a student who tells you these stories; how can I dispute his learned and lived experience with my idealism?
As cliché as it may sound, for many of these kids, to survive past the age of 25 is to succeed in their community. During our “Step To the Line” exercise, I ask them to step to the line if they know someone who has been killed by gang violence and they all step. I ask them to step to the line if they have witnessed the death of a family member, and almost the entire class steps. I ask them if they have ever been shot at; they all step forward. I firmly believe that something suffers inside you when you are over-exposed to the violence and inequality which festers in our society like a cancer. Something shifts inside you when you are forced to witness death in this way, when you are forced to see life as this fragile, unstable and vicious.
If you are not trained to think of and plan for your future, it is not a far cry that you might also lack perspective of or lose interest in the consequences of your actions. What drives my choices to do or not do many things is the knowledge that it will impact, impede or delay my hopeful plans for the future. Without a “future” in sight, this kind of reasoning may no longer carry such weight. It is therefore no wonder that these boys end up parents at sixteen and find themselves caught up in a culture of criminality before the age of eighteen.
This all comes in stark contrast with the mentality of the average student of a competitive private college. In fact, according to academic and radical activist bell hooks, “College education is so often geared toward the future…. College as it is envisioned by mainstream culture is seen as a stop on the journey with an endpoint that is somewhere else.” (166) Our deeply ingrained “college student” mentality is in exact opposition to the survival-based mentality of our Camp AP students. Most of society praises this forward-driven and ambitious mentality—in fact we have paid good money to attend college and be trained in this way of thinking. Even my camp students see me as destined for success, career, family, happiness, but they are cautious in projecting the same for themselves.
Despite all that society teaches us about what defines success and what kinds of life choices deserve praise or disdain, perhaps this is space where my students and I move beyond our differences to learn from one another. I believe I have something to learn from those who live day to day. As hooks puts it, with this college-student mentality, “it is difficult to teach students that the present is a place of meaning.” (165) There is something beautiful and profound about living in the “here and now” the way my students do; their understanding of the preciousness and fragility of life is in some ways much more enlightened than our blind desire for the so-called future. There must be a balanced medium between living with awareness of the consequences of our choices and maintaining hope for the future, while still remaining vigilant of and grateful for the present. Perhaps my students have taught me that.
And perhaps we can help our students begin to explore the frightening prospect of the future. Perhaps I can provide some positive reinforcement, perhaps I can give them back some of the agency they have surrendered to their day-to-day existence, and perhaps I can have hope for them until they have faith in themselves. I hope so.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Day 1
Programs have begun. Last week was our first week up and running with almost 30 college students flowing in and out of the juvenile probation camp for their first time. Prior to their first day, these students have all met with me one-on-one to be informally "interviewed" and be academically and practically briefed on the background, expectations, philosophy and logistics of the program as I have envisioned it for this semester. But little can psychologically or emotionally prepare someone for this kind of commitment. I am learning, albeit uncomfortably, that each person will undergo and processes this experience differently; I cannot ensure any specific learning outcomes or promise that the ends will justify the means. I must learn to protect against catastrophe and trust the process and the goodwill in people.
In my ethics and orientation training I speak extensively about the complicated issues which we encounter in the Camp AP classroom: privilege, disempowerment and marginalization, racism, homophobia, misogyny and gender-based objectification, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, domestic abuse or absent parents, the failures of our schools, our foster care system, our justice system, and the failures of a society claiming to be “one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all”. When we arrive at the gates of the Camps, I ask my students to remain mindful of these issues and to struggle earnestly with themselves throughout this experience. But I also ask them to walk in without expectations. Without fear, without hopes, without an agenda. I ask them to shake whatever preconceptions they might carry in and just face their classmates as peers, I ask them to just to connect as human beings above all else.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Gangsta's Paradise
High School is a complex and ever-changing minefield of cliques, in-crowds, out-crowds and bullies. But the high schools of inner-city Los Angeles are run by a different kind of clique. Cliques with guns, tattoos and turf. Your clique is not determined so much by whether you are a jock, a nerd, a preppy kid or an outcast. It has to do with race, deep history and "where you're from".
“Where’re you from?” This is the forbidden question. In gang-heavy cities, this is how turf is defended and fights are instigated. The answer is not "Los Angeles," "Pasadena, " or "the Valley." The answer to this question is more likely something like: "Hoover street Crips, where’re you from?!" or "White Fence, Boyle Heights, homie, where you from?!" I used to make the mistake of asking new students this question as a way to start conversation and get to know each other. They’d look back at me, cock their head to the side and respond: “Where’m I from? Or Where am I from?” They would chuckle and say, “Miss, I don’t think I can answer that.” I quickly learned to ask this question differently, the way they would ask me or how they would ask one another: “Where do you stay?” I find this phrasing particularly interesting, as it implies a certain kind of transience and instability inherent their situations. This suggested impermanence is often very true to their lived experience, childhoods moving in and out of broken homes, crashing with friends, being assigned to different foster families and “placements” or living “on the run”.
About 90% of my students claim a gang. It is tatted on their arms. It is tagged all over their assignments. It is etched into their desks. These gangs don’t only organize the power dynamics “on the outs” they also are fully active inside the prisons and in my classroom. On the streets, these gangs have been killing each other for years in a vicious cycle of violence. What happens when you force all of these rivalries to coexist locked up together?
This summer, I ran two five-week programs with about 40 students in each summer module. The latter of my summer programs has proven to be one of the most challenging classes I have ever taught. I’ve seen students of different races, neighborhoods and gangs coexist quite peaceably, and even form friendships. But this summer, in addition to some staffing difficulties and a rocky start on an experimental curriculum, I had one of the most overtly segregated and underhandedly hostile classes I’ve even worked with at Camp. African American students sit on one side of the room, exchange high-fives and swap boisterous stories of street victories or disturbingly debaucherous pastimes. The Latino students sit on the other side of the circle, slouched quietly or resting their heads on the desks, once in awhile listening in or dropping racially charged insults under their breath. This is the notorious “black/brown rivalry”. The moment students arrive in camp, they are sized up; they will side with their race and then subdivide into their racialized gang affiliations. The black students dominate this class only slightly in numbers but overwhelmingly in the forcefulness of their presence and in “juice”. Juice is how much pull you have with probation, camp or school staff, teachers and other wards who may have some power, such as those working on kitchen or laundry duty. (Even my students tell me “I have juice” because I am allowed to come and go freely around the camp and bring in whatever I want.) Essentially “juice” is social capital.
On a given day, a dominant Latino student or a high-ranked rival black gang member will join the class, and the power dynamics are subtly shifted. Those knocked from the top of the hierarchy act sour and those rising from the usually more subordinate group get giddy at the idea of a little taste of social revenge.
Meanwhile, I am still trying to teach a class.
But to do so without an awareness and sensitivity to these underlying factors is futile. Our curriculum is designed to address these issues head-on by teaching about conflict resolution, talking about education as a form of oppression and/or liberation, critiquing our relationship to and perpetuation of stereotypes, and attempting to build community, trust and respect in the classroom as an exercise for the wider world. We are talking about heavy issues and in a way trying address the cycles of racism, violence, and incarceration that gangs so successfully perpetuate. For me as a teacher, it is better to work with this reality than to deny or condemn its presence.
My experience goes beyond practicing an awareness of the gang culture. It is also a challenge for me to understand what this social phenomenon is all about, trying to see it from their perspective and withholding my judgment even despite my strong convictions about violence and my academic perspective on gangs.
Gangs enter in in the absence of stable families, strong communities, functioning schools or accessible and healthy alternative activities. This is taken in conjunction with the heavy marginalization that these youth experience, both in their experience of structural violence, systemic classism and racism and in some cases xenophobia.
Maybe you live in a country where your language is disparaged. Maybe you feel discriminated against because of the way you look or speak. Maybe you feel constantly disrespected by peers, employers, school principals or patrolling police.
We all experience a human need and desire for community, acceptance and social protection. In these communities, gangs serve this purpose. And for a teenager in a less-that-safe neighborhood, this protection and “family” is all the more crucial for survival. Perhaps it is just a matter of reframing how we think and talk about ”gangs” and addressing their social, economic and political causes rather than just the negative symptoms that we read splattered across the front pages.
Gangs. Gangsters. Gangbangers. OGs.
“Where’re you from?” This is the forbidden question. In gang-heavy cities, this is how turf is defended and fights are instigated. The answer is not "Los Angeles," "Pasadena, " or "the Valley." The answer to this question is more likely something like: "Hoover street Crips, where’re you from?!" or "White Fence, Boyle Heights, homie, where you from?!" I used to make the mistake of asking new students this question as a way to start conversation and get to know each other. They’d look back at me, cock their head to the side and respond: “Where’m I from? Or Where am I from?” They would chuckle and say, “Miss, I don’t think I can answer that.” I quickly learned to ask this question differently, the way they would ask me or how they would ask one another: “Where do you stay?” I find this phrasing particularly interesting, as it implies a certain kind of transience and instability inherent their situations. This suggested impermanence is often very true to their lived experience, childhoods moving in and out of broken homes, crashing with friends, being assigned to different foster families and “placements” or living “on the run”.
About 90% of my students claim a gang. It is tatted on their arms. It is tagged all over their assignments. It is etched into their desks. These gangs don’t only organize the power dynamics “on the outs” they also are fully active inside the prisons and in my classroom. On the streets, these gangs have been killing each other for years in a vicious cycle of violence. What happens when you force all of these rivalries to coexist locked up together?
This summer, I ran two five-week programs with about 40 students in each summer module. The latter of my summer programs has proven to be one of the most challenging classes I have ever taught. I’ve seen students of different races, neighborhoods and gangs coexist quite peaceably, and even form friendships. But this summer, in addition to some staffing difficulties and a rocky start on an experimental curriculum, I had one of the most overtly segregated and underhandedly hostile classes I’ve even worked with at Camp. African American students sit on one side of the room, exchange high-fives and swap boisterous stories of street victories or disturbingly debaucherous pastimes. The Latino students sit on the other side of the circle, slouched quietly or resting their heads on the desks, once in awhile listening in or dropping racially charged insults under their breath. This is the notorious “black/brown rivalry”. The moment students arrive in camp, they are sized up; they will side with their race and then subdivide into their racialized gang affiliations. The black students dominate this class only slightly in numbers but overwhelmingly in the forcefulness of their presence and in “juice”. Juice is how much pull you have with probation, camp or school staff, teachers and other wards who may have some power, such as those working on kitchen or laundry duty. (Even my students tell me “I have juice” because I am allowed to come and go freely around the camp and bring in whatever I want.) Essentially “juice” is social capital.
On a given day, a dominant Latino student or a high-ranked rival black gang member will join the class, and the power dynamics are subtly shifted. Those knocked from the top of the hierarchy act sour and those rising from the usually more subordinate group get giddy at the idea of a little taste of social revenge.
Meanwhile, I am still trying to teach a class.
But to do so without an awareness and sensitivity to these underlying factors is futile. Our curriculum is designed to address these issues head-on by teaching about conflict resolution, talking about education as a form of oppression and/or liberation, critiquing our relationship to and perpetuation of stereotypes, and attempting to build community, trust and respect in the classroom as an exercise for the wider world. We are talking about heavy issues and in a way trying address the cycles of racism, violence, and incarceration that gangs so successfully perpetuate. For me as a teacher, it is better to work with this reality than to deny or condemn its presence.
My experience goes beyond practicing an awareness of the gang culture. It is also a challenge for me to understand what this social phenomenon is all about, trying to see it from their perspective and withholding my judgment even despite my strong convictions about violence and my academic perspective on gangs.
Gangs enter in in the absence of stable families, strong communities, functioning schools or accessible and healthy alternative activities. This is taken in conjunction with the heavy marginalization that these youth experience, both in their experience of structural violence, systemic classism and racism and in some cases xenophobia.
Maybe you live in a country where your language is disparaged. Maybe you feel discriminated against because of the way you look or speak. Maybe you feel constantly disrespected by peers, employers, school principals or patrolling police.
We all experience a human need and desire for community, acceptance and social protection. In these communities, gangs serve this purpose. And for a teenager in a less-that-safe neighborhood, this protection and “family” is all the more crucial for survival. Perhaps it is just a matter of reframing how we think and talk about ”gangs” and addressing their social, economic and political causes rather than just the negative symptoms that we read splattered across the front pages.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
A Day in the Life
We pull up through a wooded area with a smoggy view over the
The Camp office operates as a buffer between the gated entrance to the facility and the actual entrance to the camp. There are always a few wards lingering around the office, the result of “write-ups” and other disciplinary measures which send them out of the classroom to waste their day away on a hot bench. We often recognize these kids as the regular “trouble makers” or students of a former class; they usually fill us in on the day’s gossip—“Heeeey, Soto went on trans, got sent to the box for jumping some vato in the dorms”. Translation: One of our students, Soto, started a fight with another ward and got sent to another camp for 24 hours lock-down in isolation.
We walk slowly through the heat. Past the baseball and soccer fields which are never used but are kept perfectly mowed. Past the asphalt lot and busted-up basketball hoop where they spend their “rec” time. Past the dorms, piled high with bunk beds. Past the American and State of
We usually arrive a little earlier than our students. We set up the room and might chat with the teacher if they are there. About a third of the time the class is overseen by a substitute who is usually pleased that we will be doing his job for the day. All the regular camp teachers know us pretty well by now. I spend time meeting, planning and debriefing our programs with them throughout the year. Certain teachers are more ambitious about how they use their class time than others, but they are always happy to scrap whatever they had planned for the next few months and hand the class over to us for the semester.
When it comes time to move the wards from class to class or from lunch to the dorms, a whole network of communication radiates from the camp office. This is to avoid having too many boys in the yard at a time. Wards are forced to run from post to post while officers supervise and bark orders, making sure that the boys make "sharp corners" as they zigzag towards the appropriate classroom or end point. Any student who does not sprint or pivot cleanly at the corners is sure to be held back for punishment and likely written up. So in the process of getting the kids to class, they often end up missing the class completely and attain a bad mark on their record. This process of running the wards is called "movement". When they reach our door, they are lined up and shuffled into the classroom into assigned rows of seats. After a quick and abrasive roll call, we join the boys in moving the desks to form a circle. This is the layout we use for all of our classes. The format breaks down the assigned seats which predetermine and pre-punish the "trouble makers" and eliminates the hierarchical dichotomy between teacher and student.
Finally, the classroom is ours. The officers are gone, the teachers bury themselves in their computers and tune out our presence. For one hour and forty-five minutes we are together and the space is ours. Amid the heat, the hurt, the hyperactivity and the good old-fashioned teenage hormones, we somehow needed to find a way to differentiate our space (and in some ways ourselves) from the camp. And so we always begin class the same way, with a moment of silence. As I always tell the boys, "This is not a prayer or a somber silence. This is just meant to shake the day off, calm our heads, leave the drama at the door, and clear the room for the journey we are about to take." A student volunteers to start us out...
"Hands flat on the desk, feet flat of the floor, back straight 'cause it feels great, clear your head and just breath." We sit in a bone-chilling and precious moment of silence until someone speaks: "Make some noise..."
Friday, July 17, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Camps Afflerbaugh-Paige
La Verne is just about 10 miles north and west of here, past the Vons grocery store and the 210 freeway. Just 35 miles east of Los Angeles, at the base of the rolling San Gabriel mountains you will find a relatively wealthy neighborhood which is 77.1% white and boasts of a median income of $46,587. A bit further up, past the golf course and Steven's Ranch, you will find the County of Los Angeles' juvenile probation camps Afflerbaugh and Paige, housing approximately 200 wards of the state at any one time. This facility incarcerates males ages 13-18 for sentences which range from 3 months to 18 months long. Camp Afflerbaugh and Paige differ in only a few ways, namely that Paige houses those incarcerated for slightly longer sentences (and hypothetically more "severe" crimes) and Afflerbaugh has a larger total population, but for the most part, these camps are operated similarly.
Within the facility wards are shuffled from the dorms to "line up" to the cafeteria, to the office or the counselors, and for about seven hours a day, these boys are required to attend high school within the camp, at the Camp AP High School. Their heads are shaved, they are all dressed in baggy denims and county-issued BC shoes and they are counted between each movement of the day. They are called wards, taggers, teenagers, minors, gangbangers, b-boys, fathers, sons, delinquents, criminals, boys and men, but when I see them, they are students.
For the next year I will be teaching at Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige and training and leading teams of college student teachers-in-training. I will be charged with preparing curricula, balancing the interests of the school, the camp students and the college students, and designing programming with an eye towards the long-term social justice implications of our work.
Despite most efforts to make the wards identical and identity-less, there are several systems of differentiation and hierarchy at play in the camp. The wards of the two camps are kept separate in most cases due to racial rivalries and neighborhood hostilities except for within the high school where students are mixed into classes together. The camp receives them from juvenile halls who receive them from the courts, who receive them from the police. Upon arrival, the school administers a series of tests and breaks the students up into fifteen "groups" according (supposedly) to their academic levels. But these tests are not without flaws. Aside from the uniforms, the harsh disciplinary measures and the fences around the facility, the high school attempts to operates just like another other LA high school. School is comprised of English or Language Arts, social students/history, science, math, and P.E.
To teach within a juvenile camp is to teach at the mercy of the penal institution. Wards are incarcerated first, students second and it is manifest in the many ways that the camp asserts power over the school. Students on work crew attend school every other day, alternating with work days clearing brush out in the hillsides or mowing the lawns on the grounds. Students come and go from groups at the discretion of the POs (probation officers). They are moved to the "box" for a week at a time for any disciplinary issue. And students who earn the pedigree to work in the kitchen crew (KPs) or laundry, show up ten minutes late to each class with bags of oranges or packaged pastries stuffed into the elastic waist of their pants. On any given day, there will be new transfers from juvenile hall or other juvenile camps, and students who have been released with the termination of their sentence. The classroom dynamic is in a state of constant flux.
Within the facility wards are shuffled from the dorms to "line up" to the cafeteria, to the office or the counselors, and for about seven hours a day, these boys are required to attend high school within the camp, at the Camp AP High School. Their heads are shaved, they are all dressed in baggy denims and county-issued BC shoes and they are counted between each movement of the day. They are called wards, taggers, teenagers, minors, gangbangers, b-boys, fathers, sons, delinquents, criminals, boys and men, but when I see them, they are students.
For the next year I will be teaching at Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige and training and leading teams of college student teachers-in-training. I will be charged with preparing curricula, balancing the interests of the school, the camp students and the college students, and designing programming with an eye towards the long-term social justice implications of our work.
Despite most efforts to make the wards identical and identity-less, there are several systems of differentiation and hierarchy at play in the camp. The wards of the two camps are kept separate in most cases due to racial rivalries and neighborhood hostilities except for within the high school where students are mixed into classes together. The camp receives them from juvenile halls who receive them from the courts, who receive them from the police. Upon arrival, the school administers a series of tests and breaks the students up into fifteen "groups" according (supposedly) to their academic levels. But these tests are not without flaws. Aside from the uniforms, the harsh disciplinary measures and the fences around the facility, the high school attempts to operates just like another other LA high school. School is comprised of English or Language Arts, social students/history, science, math, and P.E.
To teach within a juvenile camp is to teach at the mercy of the penal institution. Wards are incarcerated first, students second and it is manifest in the many ways that the camp asserts power over the school. Students on work crew attend school every other day, alternating with work days clearing brush out in the hillsides or mowing the lawns on the grounds. Students come and go from groups at the discretion of the POs (probation officers). They are moved to the "box" for a week at a time for any disciplinary issue. And students who earn the pedigree to work in the kitchen crew (KPs) or laundry, show up ten minutes late to each class with bags of oranges or packaged pastries stuffed into the elastic waist of their pants. On any given day, there will be new transfers from juvenile hall or other juvenile camps, and students who have been released with the termination of their sentence. The classroom dynamic is in a state of constant flux.
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