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Articles Conference Reviews |
J.2 Literacy, Incarceration, and the Making of TeachersJ.2 Inside Out: Literacy, Incarceration, and the Making of Teachers As a veteran teacher in prison education programs, I make it a point to attend all CCCC sessions that address issues of prison pedagogy and literacy. In this session, three emerging scholars who taught in the Education Justice Project, a university/prison higher education collaboration housed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explored complex issues of literacy, identity, space, and performance that were raised by the participants’ experiences of teaching and participating in this program. The Education Justice Project, created about five years ago, offers upper-division University courses to about one hundred incarcerated men. The program, created by the University and its faculty, offers one model of a successful college/prison collaboration. Patrick Berry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Literacy Narratives and Prison Relations” In his presentation, Patrick Berry intertwined an exploration of how literacy is configured in prison with his authoethnographic account of teaching an upper-division business writing class called “Writing for a Change” and reflections on his own experiences as the son of an incarcerated father. Berry’s well-designed graphics and black-and-white photographs complemented his presentation and were a welcome respite from text-only PowerPoint presentations. Berry shared copies of a publication, also called Writing for a Change, produced by the incarcerated writers in that class. Berry’s account of how teaching writing in prison impacted the “making of a teacher” raised powerful questions about how our own life narratives contribute to and shape who we are as teachers. Using theories drawn from Peter Mortensen and Linda Flower, Berry presented literacy narratives as a way to both reflect on and shape the world. Perhaps the most compelling part of Berry’s work was his juxtaposition of the writing of his incarcerated students with his own narrative of his relationship with a father who was incarcerated during much of Berry’s life. These personal accounts—of how one incarcerated writer shed tears as he read a piece about his relationship with his son; Berry’s account of how he came to both write about and document with photographs his relationship with his father—were the most powerful part of a thoughtful and well-researched session. Berry showed the audience a photograph of his father and related the role his father took in the design of that photograph. That photo as well as a drawing one of Berry’s inmate students made of Berry and other students in the class brought a welcome immediacy and personal feeling to this presentation. The methodology Berry employed that juxtaposed his own story with his qualitative research foregrounded the importance of shared stories and of “reinterpreting our own stories with and against the experiences of others,” especially when the “others” may seem as alienated from us as inmates are. These stories, as Berry pointed out, blur distinctions between the disparate spaces of the university and prison to create a “third space” where sharing of such disparate narratives is possible. Berry ended his session with a story that showcased the need for compassion; this story showed “the work of narrative to heal, honor and teach,” a powerful place to begin thinking about the literacy work that can be done in prisons. Dan Colson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “From the Cellblock to the Quad: Geographies of Prejudice” Like Berry, Colson, also a writing teacher with the Education Justice Project, thoughtfully explored the idea of space, but focused instead on the distinct geographic and metaphorical spaces of the university and a medium-security prison as well as his expectations of teaching in those very different spaces—expectations that were disrupted during discussions of such fictional accounts of crime as Native Son with his incarcerated students. Colson’s account presented the “condensed space” of the prison classroom as a lens with which to examine any classroom in which students encounter difficulty with discussions of race, class, and gender and in which the prevailing ideology makes such discussions difficult. Colson began his presentation by narrating his experiences walking to his on-campus class and to his prison class and contrasting the “open space” of the university to the “anxiously closed” space of the prison. Colson noted, however, that both spaces, although superficially different, are “structured institutions” that support culturally sanctioned discourses. As might be expected, Colson was prepared for what he called “mainstream political discourse” and “reaffirmations of the status quo” from his on-campus students, but was hoping for an antidote to that discourse from his prison students, who were, for the most part, from poor urban backgrounds and marginalized and excluded from political discourse. Colson’s expectations for his prison students raised interesting questions about the motivations of those of us who teach in prison; Colson hoped that his incarcerated students would be “proto radicals” and offer a sharp antidote to his mainstream, on-campus students and their expected polite discourse. What he found, however, were both progressive and regressive attitudes from the male inmates in his class, who, to his surprise, expressed racist/sexist/homophobic attitudes and stances. These students, Colson noted, “embraced some widespread biases” that he would not have expected; however, they were reproducing prejudices that they themselves were subject to. On the other hand, the inmates were willing to “narrate themselves” and, in contrast to the on-campus students, were willing to foreground and discuss their biases. For example, in their discussion of Native Son, they tried to understand the character of Bigger Thomas through the lens of their own experiences and reached a “space of vulnerability” as they narrated the socio-economic aspects of their own lives. Colson noted, however, that his inmate students also reacted with “hypermasculine” attitudes. Colson closed his session by exploring what this experience might mean not only to those of us who teach in carceral spaces but also to those of us who teach only on campus. He noted that this experience made him especially aware that as teachers, there are student responses that we like and privilege and those that we don’t like and don’t privilege. How do we encourage student participation in discussions of difficult issues? What if they hold positions we are uncomfortable with? Colson’s session helped audience members realize that the “contested space” of the prison classroom may help us to understand the tensions and complexities of our on-campus classes. Cory Holding, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Configuring Conviction, Performing in Prison” Cory Holding used the lens of performance art to explore the impact of teaching an upper-division class on performance and rhetoric in the Education Justice Project. Like her colleagues Berry and Colson, Holding’s expectations about teaching in prison were altered by her actual experiences. While most accounts of arts-in-prison programs focus on the “transformative” or “redemptive” nature of the experience for the inmate participants, Holding focused instead on what she learned about herself as a result of this experience; the result of which was a participatory performance called “Moving the World” in which inmates, corrections officers, and outside spectators were all asked to participate. Holding confessed to her audience that her experience of teaching this class was disruptive from the start. Her carefully planned and composed four-page lesson plan was completely derailed after her second class meeting when student responses and an altercation with a guard demonstrated to Holding that she needed to be a more flexible teacher in the prison environment. She also quickly learned that her students insisted she participate in the performance exercises she had them work on; they demanded, for example, that she participate in various improvisational exercises. One incarcerated student further demanded her participation by asking her, “What do you get out of teaching?” Despite Holding’s initial discomfort with the participation demanded by this performance and a comment from a guard about the “disruption” the performance caused, “Moving the World” was a successful program that was supported by the correctional facility’s Director of Programs. At the end of her presentation, Holding reflected on the “teachable moments” that this program afforded her and what she learned about herself; Holding’s session once again constructed the prison classroom as a space where learning takes place for all participants. I left Session J.2 enthusiastic about the work of these scholars who all brought new perspectives to the experience of teaching incarcerated students and the fact that attention was brought to the prison classroom as a place where our ideas of identity, space and performance can be tested, challenged and enriched. All of these sessions also raised possibilities for new directions in research into the transformative nature of the prison classroom. I hoped that the success of the teachers in the Education Justice Project would inspire other members of our profession to seek out opportunities to teach in prisons or create similar college/prison partnerships with their own institutions. |