Daraja partners with Outside the Lens to help girls practice self-expression through art.

This past month, Daraja Academy partnered with Outside the Lens, a San Diego-based youth literacy program whose mission is to celebrate the vision and voices of children around the world and across cultures. OTL project director Debi Spindelman worked with the students weekly during WISH class to teach media, literacy and self-reflection tools through a participatory photography project.

One of her projects included an assignment entitled “Here I Am”. After the students received lessons on photo viewing skills, photography and creative writing, they were encouraged to focus on two things: the self within the context of where they are from and what experiences they have had to make them who they are today. The assignment required students to write a poem and partner with a friend to photograph their self-portrait.

The images and poems created during OTL’s project will be exchanged with high school students in San Diego who are working on the same project. There will be an exhibit in San Diego this winter profiling the exchange.

“It has exceeded my expectations how quickly and genuinely the girls were able to open up and draw on their experiences, especially in the writing component,” explains Debi.

Below is an entry taken from the project’s blog. It describes an assignment entitled “Pieces of Me” and showcases a sample poem as produced by Form 2 student Hadijah. This particular assignment’s goal was to combine a lesson in self-awareness and photography.

“Combining self-portraiture with a simpler poetry assignment, Form 2 girls spent the afternoon brainstorming about their favorite piece of themselves and sketching out the way they wanted to portray it. After dinner, I met with the girls again to write poems about their favorite pieces- always a powerful experience when working with teenaged girls, no matter what continent.”