Changing Lives Through Literature Program Receives Excellence Award

By Anne-Marie Kent

For the past ten years, UMass Boston English professor Taylor Stoehr has worked with other college professors, probation officers, judges, and people from the local community in the Changing Lives Through Literature program at Dorchester District Court. Designed to engender a new sense of purpose in the lives of probationers, the program offers small, supportive groups of participants innovative explorations of ideas using carefully chosen texts.

As a volunteer, Professor Stoehr has seen firsthand the value of the program, which received new recognition last month when the New England Board of Higher Education awarded Changing Lives Through Literature its annual award for excellence. Last year, the program received an Innovations in Education grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a website and training materials to expand its reach.

The program was founded in 1991 by UMass Dartmouth Professor Robert Waxler and Judge Robert Kane. By the summer of 1993, forty men had completed the course, with recidivism rates half of what would be expected. The Dorchester program was founded in 1994 by Presiding Justice Sydney Hanlon, along with Probation Officers Deirdre Kennedy, Teresa Owens, John Christopher, John Owens, and James "Bobby" Spencer, as well as Professors Brian Murphy and Taylor Stoehr. Stoehr's group currently uses Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of an American Slave along with other supplementary texts.

Stoehr says that the crucial discoveries come during the intense conversations the readings provoke each week, the back-and-forth that goes on in small group discussions. "Students profit most of all from the simple act of coming together to talk about their own plight as citizens judged lacking in the virtues that give society its coherence and stability. Struggling to understand what the world offers, demands, owes, or withholds from them, and sharing their opinions with growing respect for other voices and views, they can learn to take themselves seriously in a new way. If they do, their lives will have changed," says Stoehr.

The students themselves confirm the value of the program. Says one spring 2002 student, "It seems like before I came to this program I was going numb. I can't remember the last time I picked up a book to read it or even skim through it. I also have a better relationship with my girlfriend. I try to think about other people's feelings now. It just isn't about me anymore." His classmate adds, "The most important thing that I've learned is that I really can learn. All these years I've been thinking that I could not read or write."

Image: Taylor Stoehr, professor of English, has worked with the Changing Lives Through Literature Program at the Dorchester District Court for ten years. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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