News

By Kelsey Davis

The learning experience is as life altering for the professors as it is for the pupils when the classrooms are set in prisons across central and northern Alabama.

Seeds for The Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project were planted in 2001 when Kyes Stevens, founder and director, received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to begin the program.  Photo courtesy family.auburn.edu 

After Stevens received the grant, she began teaching poetry in a correctional facility, and quickly developed a passion for her incarcerated students.

“Just think to yourself, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your life?” said Stevens. “Would you want to be measured by that for all of eternity? That’s not the sum total of who you are, it isn’t for all of these people.

“They’re mothers, they’re fathers, they’re brothers, they’re sisters. They like Christmas, they want to be at their kids’ birthdays, to go to their mother’s funeral, to be around their family. They want the same things we want. They’re not different.”

By Jean Cowden Moore

Like many young men his age, Daniel Ayala has high hopes for his future. Ayala, a college student with a brilliant smile, wants to be a history teacher.

There’s just one thing holding him back. Right now, Ayala is incarcerated.  Image courtesy digplanet.com

But for the past six weeks, Ayala, 18, has been working with a group of nine students at CSU Channel Islands who come to the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo on Thursday and Friday evenings to tutor, teach and mentor about a dozen young men there. They’re tutoring the young men in such basic skills as taking notes and writing a short essay — and giving them advice on college life.

The experience has encouraged Ayala to continue with his college education, he said.

“I like to learn about history — that’s where we come from,” Ayala said, sitting in a classroom on a recent evening, going over an essay with a tutor. “And I like teaching other people. Why learn something and keep it to yourself?”

The Camarillo university introduced the Prison Education Project this year. The project reflects Channel Islands’ focus on service learning, said Lindsay Scott, a lecturer in liberal arts. At Channel Islands, that can take the form of classes in which students do volunteer work that has included monitoring water quality and tutoring elementary students.

The idea of the project is to build empathy and help incarcerated young men get an education, said Scott, who helped organize the program at Channel Islands.

Angela Romansky

Kristian Kohler sat alone in the bathroom of a youth correctional facility in Bordentown with fearful tears in his eyes. Wondering what he had got himself into, he recalled the past ten minutes. He had been searched, stripped of his pencils, spiral notebooks and cell phone, and led through three levels of metal doors by a prison guard. He had never expected that his college career would take him behind prison walls, but here he stood trying to gather enough courage to teach a music lesson to a room full of inmates.  Kristian Kohler / Courtesy the ridernews.com

It all began two years ago when Music Education and Sacred Music major Kristian Kohler ’13 was approached by classmate and fellow Music Education major Miranda Rowland ’13 and asked if he would be interested in participating in a worthwhile community program that she referred to as “Prison Choir.” After gathering a few more details and verifying that it fit into his schedule, Kohler signed himself up to be one of the two music educators who would travel to the correctional facility on Wednesday nights at 7:30.     

He studied the game plan that Rowland developed when the program began. Each lesson would begin with a community-building prayer or discussion, followed by some type of warm-up that involved either body percussion or chairs, since they weren’t permitted to use instruments. They would then rehearse a few pieces.

 “The goal wasn’t to rehearse for a performance, so it was really just for the group itself to learn and grow as individuals and as community members,” said Kohler.

However, all of the studying in the world could not have prepared him for that first night.