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By CAROLINA MURILLO
The Brunswick News
When students at Southside Performance Learning Center in Brunswick pick up their pens and notebooks, the results are powerful reading.
They are using writing as a way to reflect on their own personal events.
English teacher Henry Wright is helping his 16 pupils learn more by encouraging them to write about their problems using the Freedom Writers technique.
"They are using writing as a way to free themselves and visualize that they can do anything that they desire," he said.
In their writings, students open up about past relationships, love, school, God and dealing with their own battles.
Created by Erin Gruwell, a California teacher, the method teaches pupils enrolled in the nontraditional high school program to write journal entries about their feelings and read them out loud to their classmates.
Gruwell used the method with a group of unteachable at-risk students.
The success of the technique was turned into a movie called "Freedom Writers."
Almost 3,000 miles away, students at the Performance Learning Center are showing positive results. The technique has empowered them.
Kayla Wright, 17, believes writing has helped her get in touch with herself.
"It is helping me express myself better and even improve the way I talk," she said. "Through my work, I feel people can contemplate my inside instead of looking at me from the outside."
For her, writing has also been soothing following the death of her father last year, she said.
Alex McNeall, 18, also has found an outlet in writing.
"I needed to let things out about past relationships," he said. "And it also inspires me to draw."
McNeall says the writing sessions have brought the students, who discuss their stories or share their entries, together. Many of the sessions have ended in tears and hugs.
"We discovered we are not that different and we share the same problems," he said.
CoCo Harris, a diarist and author, says journal writing has had a healing effect on the students.
"They are writing from the heart, letting their anger, their stress, their emotions out and for them it has been therapeutic," she said.
In the process the students have also blossomed as writers. They will soon publish a collection of their works with the Golden Isles Art Association.
The book, titled "Writing for the Life of It," is still being drafted.
The students are learning more writing techniques and exploring other creative outlets such as illustrative entries, which combine words and pictures.
For Harris these tools will help inside the classroom and serve a life purpose.
"Life is an exchange of people and lessons learned," she said. "They'll look back some day, reflect on these events and ask themselves, 'Did we learn our lesson?'
"I think writing now is a good start for them."
Excerpts from the project:
"I'm the girl who cries when no one is watching, not because I'm in pain, but because I don't know what else to do."
"You say you love me, you say you miss me, but action speaks louder than words. Drugs and money was always more important than your little girl. I don't want any of your money for child support. All I wanted is someone to call Dad."
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