Dartmouth students used to making the daily walk from Reed Hall to Dartmouth Hall for class now have a longer trek to negotiate when they travel to the Southeast State Correctional Facility in Windsor, Vt., for the new course "Inside Out: Prison, Women and Performance."
The course stems from a community service project founded by Pati Hernandez in 2005, in which students helped women inmates write and act in plays based on the inmates' own experiences.
"The women were amazingly articulate about where their lives got off -track and the social factors that led them to be where they are," Caroline Roth '08, a volunteer last year, said. "It turned all my preconceived notions about inmates upside down."
Hernandez sought to bring this experience to a broader audience by building her program into a course. With the help of Ivy Schweitzer, a professor of english and women and gender studies, Hernandez organized a 13-person course that meets twice a week.
Students spend one day in the classroom studying the sociology and history of prisons and discussing the theories behind prison and oppression. They spend their other class period at the prison working with inmates to write their plays. The students help the women choose the themes of their plays and show them how to structure and write the scenes.
"I wanted the class to be dominated by the inmates, and they are really the column of this whole thing," Hernandez said. "It's their voice, they should dominate the course."
Some students in the new class were surprised how at how easy it was to connect with the inmates.
"Most of the time you don't even sense you're at the facility," Anthony Garcia, MALS candidate, said. "It's just like interacting with friends, they're really laid back about interacting with us. There's not really any separation between the women and students."
Hernandez said the inspiration for the program came from her experience teaching Latin-American women on welfare how to read and write in English in the mid-1990s, when she "discovered the power of theater to give voice to people."
With that in mind, she started a theater program for the inmates at the Newport Correctional Facility after moving to Vermont in 1998. When she then moved to the Upper Valley in 2005, she brought the program with her.
"It's definitely more than a regular class in that for us to have a positive impact on the women we pretty much have to involve ourselves emotionally and psychologically and really be there for the women," Case Hathaway-Zepeda '09 said. "In that sense, it's not a typical course. You have to put your entire being into it."
For many of the students in the class, the service-based curriculum was the main draw.
"Everyone should have the opportunity to experience a service-based course," Hathaway-Zepeda said. "I run Prison Project through [the Tucker Foundation], and I'm constantly seeing the same fifty people volunteering. It's nice to infuse the system with a whole bunch of new people. The people in my class now want to keep going."
This year, the inmates chose eight words to provide the themes for their eight short plays. The plays will be performed today and Friday for a limited audience.
