Inside-Out alumni and the Serbu Book Club, Take Two!

Katie D.

October 16, 2010 - 5:21 PM

This summer, four UO students piloted a book club with the juveniles in the Pheonix Program at Serbu Juvenile Detention Center. The UO students were part of the Inside-Out Alumni: students who had participated in Inside-Out in the past, and who were now looking to apply those experiences and all they had learned to a new and ongoing program.

This summer's pilot project was a great experience. We learned so much about working with youth, about program development, outreach, and class planning. We held training sessions with Inside-Out Assistant National Director Melissa Crabbe, who helped us think through dialogue facilitation, best practices, troubleshooting, and class planning. The four of us met with the youth at Serbu five times during the summer. We chose to read comic books for this project to level the playing field as far as academic experience with the topic, to differentiate ourselves from other schoolwork, and to stretch into new and exciting areas of discussion and educational experiences. Over the summer, we read The Ultimate Spider-Man, which was a great success and lead to a great deal of involved discussion.

The overall experience was an incredibly positive one. We used ice breaking games each week to both become comfortable with each other and to get into the mood of the class. About twelve youth joined us for the class, giving up time spent in their rooms for a new and experimental program. The staff at Serbu were incredibly helpful and encouraging of this project, and worked with us to be sure that the project was successful.

I am happily announcing the successful second meeting of our Fall Term book club! We are working with twelve youth (including five from the summer) and nine Inside-Out alumni from the UO. We are reading Calvin and Hobbs together: a fabulous combination of the easily-accessed simplicity of the Sunday comic with a variety of complex ideas.

Each week we spend a little more than two and a half hours of our Friday afternoons together. The youth express a variety of reasons from being there, from "liking books" to "being bored in my room." That's fine by us. I'd say we all have our own reasons as well. We want to be in dialogue with folks we don't usually get to talk to. We want to push ourselves to new ideas and new possibilities. We want to be in conversation with youth who are in a bad place right now, in the hopes that we can be a part of getting to a good place, just as we hope to be improved by this experience as well.

I love this program. I am amazed and inspired that it is working, and expanding.

The youth in the group are fabulous kids. They have a wide variety of experiences and histories, and are at Serbu for a variety of reasons. The Phoenix program is a treatment group that includes drug/alcohol classes, counseling, and work with the families of the youth to encourage new ways of behaving in the world.

The goal of the book club is much simpler than that. It is simply to be together, talking about a comic book. We want to contemplate the idea of fate, as proposed by a stuffed tiger. We want to use Calvin's imaginary adventures to explore the realities of growing up. And we hope to use the lens of the book to allow for some glimpse at the lives of these others, both from the UO and from Serbu.

I'll keep you posted. It's going to continue to be a fabulous adventure.