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Articles Conference Reviews |
F.8 Prison Writing PedagogyF.8 Teaching Writing on the Inside: Rethinking Prison Writing Pedagogy Though this might come as a surprise to some readers of this review, I have only attended two CCCC sessions (one last year in San Francisco and one this year in Louisville) in which audience members were asked to move their chairs from the static nature of classroom-like rows into circles that encouraged participants to talk to each other. In both instances, these sessions continued informally long after they had officially ended; in San Francisco, this session was the last one of the day (in fact, the last of the conference on Saturday afternoon), yet audience members and presenters alike remained even past the removal of the audio-visual equipment. The subject of both of these sessions was prison teaching. In session F.08 in Louisville 2010, the three presenters used their circle talk to offer session attendees an opportunity to listen and reflect on the experience of teaching in carceral environments. Rosann Simeroth, Scripps College, “Writing About Writing in Prison: Incarceration and the Problem of Autobiography”Rosann Simeroth, the first speaker of the panel, explored the difficulty of engaging incarcerated writers in autobiographical writing and offered a solution drawn from the work of medieval philosopher Boethius. Smith, who found herself unexpectedly teaching at a California men’s prison, was initially puzzled by her inmate students’ reluctance to participate in the kind of autobiographical writing she routinely assigned to her on-campus students. After engaging her students in a conversation about the difficulties they had in writing about painful experiences in an environment in which their bodies are “written” or inscribed by the prison environment, Smith, who was writing a dissertation on the work of medieval philosopher Boethius, himself imprisoned (and eventually executed) brought Boethius’s “The Consolation of Philosophy” to her prison students in an effort to address the inmate writers’ difficulties. She discovered that the use of Boethius’ work, which confronts issues of autobiography and authorship, artifice and allegory, allowed her students to distance themselves from their material as well as to dramatize and critique both their autobiographies and the way they had been “written” by the prison system. Smith’s use of material that many would assume would not be of interest to or beyond the intellectual reach of incarcerated students made an interesting and important statement about the capabilities of inmate writes as well as addressing how teachers in many settings might problematize the nature of autobiographical writing for their students. Kimberly Drake, Scripps College, “Mixing It Up: Women at Crossroads Write a Stinger Cookbook”Kimberly Drake, the second speaker, also explored the impact of the prison environment on inmate writers’ identities in a workshop she taught for a women’s re-entry program in California. In this program, the women dealt with problems of autobiography and identity by creating a cookbook consisting of unique prison recipes. Drake, like Simeroth, noted the loss of identity that occurs upon entering the prison system. Drake began the cookbook project in an attempt to address problems of autobiographical writing in prison: the difficulty of discovery and disclosure of painful personal material as well as students’ suspicions of the teachers’ motives. The cookbook, which features recipes created by the use of a “stinger” (a prisoner-made cooking device), provides recipes as well as explanations of how to create and use a stinger. The cookbook format allowed the women to explore the connections of food to their own lives and to create their own identities, provided support for self-expression, and allowed the inmates to conceptualize themselves as writers. This different approach to a writing workshop, Drake speculated, gave these women a feeling of ownership and authority because, while the recipes and stories were personally significant, the writers were less invested and more distanced from their texts than they might be in more traditional autobiographical writing. Drake’s cookbook project explored interesting and unique possibilities for addressing the difficulties of disclosure and trust both prison teachers and teachers “on the outside” may encounter when asking students to engage in writing autobiography. Barbara Roswell, Goucher College, “Prison Teachers Reflect: Tensions and Transformations”Barbara Roswell, who teaches in a college program inside a Maryland prison, first asked session attendees to rearrange chairs in a circle, which we did, balancing our programs and our early morning coffee. Second, we were given copies of an excerpt of “Rain” by Kathleen Norris and an excerpt from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. Roswell then asked attendees to do something I had never been asked to do in a CCCC session; she asked attendees to write. We were asked to write about either our experiences as prison teachers or teachers who are interested in teaching in prison by responding to the first few words of the Norris excerpt and the beginning of the Dillard excerpt. After providing instructions, Roswell left attendees alone to write. After about three minutes, Roswell asked for volunteers to read what they wrote. Reflections included those from experienced prison teachers as well as those interested in the possibilities of prison teaching. Participants shared powerful stories that explored their motives for prison teaching, their changing sense of identities as prison teachers, and the complex nature of the carceral environment. Roswell’s session foregrounded the importance and pleasures of writing and sharing our stories, as one participant noted, “I had not done freewriting in a long time.” In addition to allowing attendees to share stories of the “tensions and transformations” of prison teaching, this session provided a reminder of the importance of story in creating our identities as teachers regardless of the site of our teaching. The fact that there was a fairly large group in attendance at this 8am session attests to the interest members of our profession have in prison writing and pedagogy. Speakers and audience members for the next session filed into the room as we moved the chairs back in rows and continued conversations sparked by the writing we had done and the stories we had just heard. |