Amanda van Scoyoc

I’m happy to say last week I talked to Roca’s administration, the healthy families youth workers, and the young people, and I am now going to be teaching journaling with the young mothers every week. Together, the young women and I, came up with a loose weekly routine which includes turning in rolls of film, completing an opening journaling/creative exercise, talking, writing about a topic and drawing/journaling. Every other week I will be the only one teaching which will allow me the space to bring in some audio pieces about teen pregnancy to discuss. I am excited and the girls seem excited to have a bit more structure and routine to the class. I gave them cameras for the holidays and can’t wait to develop the film.

I am so relieved that I was able to make this change. I had started to feel like continuing to work on the paintings with healthy families was exploitative because I was not in touch with the young women frequently enough to be certain that my work was serving its intended purpose. I felt that without the time to have conversations about how these paintings portray them and how they would like to be portrayed, I could be doing an injustice to the women. I feel much better having had the time and space to talk about some of this with them and knowing this will not be a problem in the future.