I work in a Massachusetts program for probationers called Changing Lives
Through Literature.  (See our website: cltl at umassd.edu )  Started in
1991 in a single court, it has spread to a number of jurisdictions in
Massachusetts and to six other states.  I can speak for the men's
program in Dorchester, the busiest criminal court in the state, where we
have the experience of a dozen years - perhaps 250 graduates of our
ten-week program offered every semester.  We are currently involved in a
study of recidivism in five jurisdictions, but the results will not be
available for quite some time.  For the moment, I can say that the
probationers themselves believe that they change during this short
period of intense focus on a few texts, and a set of concerns that are
central in their lives.  Our primary text is Frederick Douglass's
Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, which serves as the starting
point for discussion of problems faced by the students themselves -
poverty and racism, the struggle for social  justice, family breakdown,
the weakening of community bonds and thinning out of spiritual
sustenance.  Short supplementary readings by other authors - black and
white, American and foreign, contemporary and classic - clarify issues
Douglass raises by putting them in a broader context, and a writing
assignment helps us focus on their relevance today.  For example, after
reading how Douglass describes his childhood, and how Malcolm X, Bill
Russell, Maxim Gorky, or Leo Tolstoy describe theirs, students are asked
to state their own opinion of what is necessary for a "normal"
childhood, and who has the responsibility to provide it.  What was your
childhood like?  What kind of a father do you want to be?  Those are the
implied questions.  We also ask how a man like Frederick Douglass or
Malcolm X finds himself.  "Where do people get their courage,
self-esteem, and righteousness?"

With men like those I work with, it's probably better to concentrate on
the literacy skills they already possess - a complicated mix of street
smarts and a colloquial eloquence among friends and family - than to
imagine that we are going to "improve" their reading, writing, or
talking.  To speak in their own voices in a public setting like our
classroom, where we talk about serious issues that affect their lives,
is the best training in literacy we can offer them.  

One of our aims is to demystify the whole realm of social control,
schooling, and literacy.  All their lives our students have been told
they are incompetent readers and writers, and this tends to make them
so.  But the incompetence is superficial in most cases.  Their speech
skills are usually more than adequate, and often superb.  In fact, their
failure in school has protected them from certain kinds of glibness and
beating about the bush.  

All students, including ours, have the right to success in a truly
democratic classroom - not just an opportunity to learn, but active
exercise of language, taste, and ethics, in order to explore their own
individual powers and ideals in relation to a growing sense of how
others speak and judge and evaluate.  "Success" means both discovering
and making standards, rather than merely living up to them.  "Failure"
means being left out of the most essential aspects of civic life.  Often
the schools fail to do this important work, through a misguided notion
of what kind of education is appropriate in an egalitarian society.  The
men we meet in Changing Lives typically think of themselves as failures.

>From their earliest experiences in schooling to the regimen of

incarceration and probation, they have stubbornly resisted demands and
admonishments, have been labeled incorrigible, and have little or no
sense of what it might mean to be part of a democratic forum deciding
matters of concern for their own lives.  We want to establish such a
classroom, in which no one will be left out.

Our aim is to give each man a chance to think better of himself, while
simultaneously dispelling the illusion that success in school is the
only route to respectability.  We aren't trying to get people back on
the educational track, but to let them judge for themselves what it
would mean to return to school, or to decide not to go that route, a
question that asks them to assess their own lives - Who am I, really,
and what kind of future do I want for myself?

 

Taylor Stoehr, English Department

University of Massachusetts - Boston

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