Victoria Carty, Chapman University, works on a college readiness program with Juvenile Hall Correctional Facility in Orange, CA. She also works with Higher Ground Youth in Anaheim, CA, where she connects college students with elementary school students a high-poverty afterschool program. ASA asked Carty about her work:
What are the missions of the organizations? The mission of Higher Ground is primarily a gang prevention program/after school program that runs throughout the year. The main components are mentorship, tutoring, and a variety of activities with the participants in the program, as well as their parents. Some of the programs offered are sports, video production, social media literacy, dance, theater, counseling, digital arts and zumba classes among others.
The mission of the program I have established in Juvenile Hall is to assist those incarcerated who have a high school diploma to become college ready to attend a two- or four-year college or university.
Could you describe you work with Higher Ground and Juvenile Hall? At Chapman I have created a few classes with a mandatory experiential learning component for undergraduate students. Students must complete 40 hours mentoring at Higher Ground, which is located at an elementary school in one of the most impoverished areas of Anaheim, and relate their experiences and observations to the course readings and discussions. The readings are grounded in local issues involving class, race, gender, and immigration. By interacting with the kids at Higher Ground, my students—who generally come from very privileged backgrounds—learn to develop critical thinking skills and employ their sociological imagination. In their papers they demonstrate a high level of understanding how structures, systems, and institutions put certain youth “at-risk.”
At Juvenile Hall, I meet with the students every week for two hours. I teach them at the same level I would teach a 200-level class in sociology at Chapman. There are four Chapman students that are doing internships at the facility and attend the classes to help facilitate discussion and learn from a demographic that has had very different life experiences. The expectation is that in the spring of 2018 this will be a Chapman course, with both Chapman students and the incarcerated students getting college credit.
What sociological knowledge and/or skills did you use for these projects? Front and center of both projects is critical thinking and social justice pedagogy. In both projects, with the students, I discuss how to apply different sociology theories to the issues we are addressing, as well as how to employ the most useful methods to accurately understand the topic. At the Higher Ground site, undergraduate students engage in participant observation and learn how to do action-based research. Relating their observations to the readings that are assigned, they must think critically about what they are learning. This is similar at the Juvenile Hall site. As students in the correctional facility relate their own experiences to the readings, Chapman students cultivate an ability to see things from different points of view and to discuss how to resist structures that serve as obstacles to some while benefiting others.
How did you connect with these organizations? I connected with Higher Ground at a weekly community meeting that addresses social and economic issues that affect the Latinx community in Orange County. The founder of this new program was looking for mentors for underserved kids, and I saw this as a great opportunity to expand the experiential learning component of my sociology classes.
I connected with Juvenile Hall by meeting with both probation and school authorities to inquire about the possibility of teaching a post-secondary class, with Chapman and incarcerated students learning side by side within the facility.
How long were you involved in the projects? Three years
