The Bronx Council on the Arts is an umbrella organization for various visual, performing, and creative writing programs within the Bronx borough. During the spring of 2000, the BCA Development Corporation implemented their first season of the Book Arts Career Development Program. The Book Arts Program seeks to introduce 50 youth, ages 14-19 and living in Tier II transitional homeless shelters, to careers in book arts programs and creative writing by providing four of these homeless shelters with poets-in-residence who work with the students two days a week.

As a teacher in the Book Arts Program, I was asked to facilitate the further development of literacy skills in my students, expose them to different poets and styles of poetry, and help them learn about careers in the book arts and publishing worlds. Subsequently, they would be placed in an internship program that would assist them in fighting homelessness and poverty. The program forced me to expand my role as an artist to encompass an evolved understanding of how a writer can use her or his medium to make an impact on local communities.

The program sought to place these students in entry-level internship positions within the field of book arts. Students needed to fulfill the obligation of attending weekly workshops in order to qualify for an internship slot. They came to the workshop for multiple reasons. Some came because they wanted to learn to be better poets. Poetry workshops afforded some students with a respite from family and personal obligations. However, all of them attended because they needed access to a job in order to pay for food and find alternatives to the unemployment and homelessness in the shelter.

The students who find themselves at the Tier II homeless shelters are from marginalized backgrounds. Most of these youth are homeless because of unfair eviction, drug use (by one or both parents), and/or domestic violence. All of my students attended public school in the Bronx, and most were often unmotivated to attend school. Many of these students were unemployed while living in the shelters. Being forced to address these daily issues affects a young person's sense of stability, esteem, and self-determination.

Of the ten students in my workshop, there were three with whom I worked the most closely. John (all of the names are aliases), a 15-year-old, attended public school in the Bronx. He seemed uninterested in the workshop, and he could rarely sit still in his seat. He was interested in distracting his friends, and his behavior reminded me of other young people I had previously worked with in a domestic violence shelter. I enjoyed working with him, though I felt that he needed to take all his energy and aggression and write about them; however, he appeared to lack the self-esteem to do so. When I requested that the class free-write during the first 10 minutes of workshop, he would get distracted and talk loudly, run around, and over-dramatize everything. His poems were initially the best in the classroom, and he constantly wrote outside of the workshop. Unfortunately, he left the group before the end of the workshop because he found another job. If we had had the chance to work together for a longer period of time, I feel he would have begun to tap into this sense of empowerment.

A 14-year-old named Dolores was extremely angry and violent. She yelled all the time and picked fights with her sister, but she smiled as she yelled. She didn't know my name. Instead, she would address me by yelling out, "Miss!" By the end of the term, it was, "Miss Mariana." She didn't think she could write very well, but I would request that the students read their work aloud to the rest of the class. I felt it gave them an opportunity to practice speaking and owning their words. Though she didn't like to do this, her face would light up after she read, and her smile was more at ease. I tried to use positive feedback to help them realize how smart they were and what talented writers they were. When we finished the spring workshop, she really wanted to continue in the fall.

Maxine, the third young person with whom I worked, was mature and independently motivated. She and her family had been evicted from their home under false pretenses. They were then forced to live with an uncle who was abusive. They couldn't stay with him and were homeless, and consequently found themselves at the shelter. Maxine attended school regularly and has a fraternal twin brother. She was the only student in the group of 10 who wanted to attend college. She was diligent with her school work and a committed poet. She had written poetry prior to attending the workshop and really worked on her craft during class. Her work reflected inter-personal relationships, specifically the relationship with her boyfriend who was also in the writing group. She represented the exquisite burn of adolescence with poetry that described her subjugated loneliness. Her presence was calming to the other students and to myself, and she seemed to have a stronger sense of herself as a poet by the end of the term.

These three examples indicate that each student came with a set of issues that were separate from their cognitive abilities, but that impacted access to their own voice. This was not a normal teaching environment; sometimes it would take an hour to get class started. Instead of being frustrated and angry, I tried to learn how life worked at the shelter, and spoke with the students, tenants, and staff support. I also listened closely to how my students related to one another, and tried to set up rules or guidelines that we could maintain collectively. I wanted to create a safe working space, but I also recognized that violence-both verbal and physical—was an aspect of the way the students communicated with each other.

Using information from my previous work as an activist, I employed a student-centered approach to teaching. When I was an activist with a Latina-based domestic violence agency, we based our philosophy on an oppression/privilege model, the tenets of which are that those who have access to privilege and power can use this privilege to oppress. As a teacher, my focus was to cultivate the habit and practice of writing two days a week during two-hour sessions; as an activist, I used this oppression-based model to enable the teaching process. Concentrating on the idea that young people suffer from ageism in our society, I focused my practice on a student-centered philosophy. In other words I observed and listened to my students, validated their work and efforts, respected their individuality and unique use of language, and tried to limit the boundaries within the workshop to basic rules governing respect and violence. I assigned readings I thought they could relate to, especially artists I knew they weren't reading in school, such as Junot Diaz and Sapphire. Flexibility and letting go of all expectations were the most important assets.

The impact of this program on youth cannot always be measured quantifiably outside of the issues of increased job skills and employment. However, there are moments when an artist can clearly see that the goal of contributing to a student's positive self-determination is being achieved. My plan was to assist young people—especially young people lacking opportunities for empowerment—by providing them with a space where they could explore their own voice, needs, and critical capacities. My hope was that this voice could then be translated into an instrument with which they could effect change for themselves and within their communities. The convergence of artist as teacher and activist is meant to enable an imaginative and socially-informed pedagogy. Within this context, an artist is an activist on a grass-roots level, helping young people find their internal creative voice and gain a level of consciousness that poses challenges to, and partially liberates them from, larger oppressive systems.

For this reason, local communities frequently benefit from artists willing to share their talents with groups of people in these communities. Business-owners and politicians obviously make an impact on their communities, but when an artist is asked to share her or his mentoring abilities with local communities, the results can be a kind of grassroots activism aimed at empowering and giving voice to a wide range of people.

Understanding a community's needs, and imaginatively using grant money in an effort to address those needs, the Bronx Writers Center has created a practical and relevant link between art and activism. The program has created a dual set of tasks for the artist-in-residence. She or he has the capacity to relate to the student as a guide or teacher, while simultaneously cultivating a sense of empowerment through the creation of, and access to, art.

A strong argument can be made that budget cuts to arts programs threaten the material and spiritual livelihood of local communities. At one level, these budget cuts impact the creation of art and limit the possibilities for personal and collective expression. At another level, these cutbacks decrease the opportunities for exposure to the arts. Granting and funding agencies have responded to this situation by making money available to less conventional art and education programs for young people. At the same time, many of these programs follow the more traditional pattern of placing visual artists and writers in dialogue with students in an effort to promote and encourage an interest in the arts.

Mariana Ruiz Firmat is a writer living in Brooklyn. She taught in the Book Arts Career Development Program in the spring of 2000.