Prison Classroom Research Articles

Teaching the Global History of Science in a Prison Classroom

Teaching the Global History of Science in a Prison Classroom

Equity in the Prison Classroom: A learning curve for higher education

This position paper highlights the ways in which inequities are present within the prison higher education classroom and between the prison- and campus-based classrooms. The exploration of the teaching challenges inherent in this environment, as well as practices to mitigate the impact of the inequities, is useful for college and university faculty and administrators designing prison-based programs. The reflections here are based on experience within both state and federal women’s prisons in the state of Minnesota.

Moral sight and ethical praxis in the prison classroom

The deployment of moral sight (a sensitivity towards the humanity of all people) and ethical praxis (taking account of important matters for learners) enhanced learners’ sense of dignity in a prison classroom comprising university students and men serving long prison sentences. This in turn enhanced the trustworthiness of the space, helped learners benefit from interaction and prevented moral blindness among prison educators. Three domains of ethical praxis for enhancing moral sight among educators are discussed: person-centred praxis; situational praxis; and pedagogical praxis. The article grounds the discussion using empirical data from participant reflections to uncover what mattered to them in creating a trustworthy learning space. Recognising the human dignity of learners, and engaging in practices that enhance this dignity and protect associated rights, was important for both groups of students. Deploying ethical praxis enabled participants to feel ‘seen’ in the classroom, in turn enhancing their sense of belonging and comfort in the space. For the prison-based students, having their contributions heard, recognised and valued was a rare experience in the context of serving a life sentence. For university students, the space provided a new and refreshing pedagogical experience, away from the institutionalised logics and constraints of the contemporary university. Relatedly, teacher-facilitators involved reported this to be their most enjoyable higher education teaching experience. There are wider implications for how higher education institutions ‘see’ the people they work with. The article argues for prioritising the human activity of learning over the institutionalisation of education processes, to create more trustworthy learning spaces.

Bringing the Archive Inside: Primary Sources in the Prison Classroom

Bringing the Archive Inside: Primary Sources in the Prison Classroom

Abstraction, belonging and comfort in the prison classroom

Prison education, at the institutional and policy level, is too often about the use value of qualifications, rather than the exchange value inherent in the experience of learning. This article explores how abstract discussion can be used to resolve this problem by facilitating the production and exchange of pedagogical capital in a prison classroom. The development of pedagogical capital, a form of symbolic capital related to learning, enhanced the sense of belonging and comfort experienced by students. The classroom comprised learners from university and prison, participating in informal discussion emanating from abstract questions. Based on interviews with, and feedback and reflections from, students participating in an eight-week course located in a higher security Category B training prison in the midlands of England (‘HMP Lifer’), we discuss how pedagogical capital was produced and maintained. Firstly, it supported teachers to create a trustworthy learning space to discuss abstracted concepts and challenge each other – at an appropriate construal distance – without the discussion becoming too emotionally charged or exposing potential vulnerabilities. Secondly, it enabled students to use their own historical knowledge and experiences (narratives), creating a more equitable contributory space and reducing the risk of judgement. Thirdly, these elements combined to facilitate an iterative process of dialogical investment and exchange. The findings strongly suggest that the pedagogical approach was crucially important in creating a safe, trustworthy, equitable learning space in which students felt sufficiently at ease to exchange their thoughts and ideas as part of group discussion. We conclude that this pedagogical approach has wider implications for enhancing student resources, and fostering a sense of belonging in other, non-penal contexts, including higher education institutions.

Prison Education Characteristics and Classroom Management by Prison Teachers

Abstract The purpose of this research will be to present the classroom management issues faced by prison teachers and introduce strategies applied by prison teachers managing them within the formal education system in correctional service. Cell classrooms, inmate students, and prison teachers’ characteristics and the importance of prison education are to be analyzed within Kosovo Correctional Service. To reach these goals three questions will be raised: 1. What are the classroom management issues in prison schools? 2. Are the prison teachers professionally prepared to teach to inmate students? and 3. Do prison schools differ from schools in the common world? This study will be introduced through qualitative data and a literature review as instruments of the study dedicated to prison classroom management and characteristics, teachers and inmates’ responsibilities and benefits within the informal education system within Kosovo Correctional Service. The research findings revealed that similar classroom management issues are present in prison schooling compared to classrooms in the free world; prison teachers are not additionally prepared to teach in prison classrooms to inmate students. Prisoners, who plan to rehabilitate and reintegrate themselves through formal prison education, want their circumstances and prison characteristics to be taken into consideration by all factors involved in their schooling within prison walls.

Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom: Options and Opportunities

Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom: Options and Opportunities

Dismantling violence: Refocusing the Camera to BLM in South Asianist Humanities

ABSTRACT This essay is a first-person account of the material reality of being a South Asian scholar-activist, a university faculty who has been teaching at a Texas men’s prison for thirteen years now. It speaks to how the BLM has been always already a large part of this scholar’s pedagogical impulses and curricular design; for her graduate seminars in humanities, she centers black subjectivities in the texts, theories, and trajectories that are chosen. When the M4BL put out their philosophical vision, she brought, shared, and taught it in the prison classroom. Key themes of prison studies inform her classroom texts from abolition democracy to Afropessimism; her work critically reflects on these connections in classrooms that often have both black and brown students alongside white students, some of whom are declared white supremacists. Through a memoiristic-exercise of dwelling on the lived material reality of being a teacher who travels between the free and the carceral worlds, the knowledge transmitted as tools to dissemble walls, the essay attest to extant bridges of personal-political-ideological in which a brown immigrant woman can draw from a deep well of black epistemologies to speak about humanity in the last stops of the U.S. academy, its prisons.

“Building that World”: Movements of Vision in the Carceral Classroom

An article in which two teaching assistants and six students of a university course taught inside a correctional facility, "Writing as Activism," collaboratively examine their experience as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom. Fostered and framed by their instructor’s critical and transformative pedagogical approaches in this course, the authors locate integrated learning and collaborative writing within carceral classrooms as sites for intentional and resistant futures to be enacted and embodied as a practice of post-carceral world-building. The students enter their individual narratives into this location of their experience of envisioning and enacting resistant futures together in this space as a student movement dedicated and equipped to bring a world beyond prison into being.

The Value of Teaching Critical Race Theory in Prison Spaces: Centering Students’ Voices in Pedagogy

This paper seeks to address the value of a humanities-based education, specifically focusing on a critical race theory course taught within a prison classroom. The perspectives shared are from three incarcerated students as well as their course instructor regarding the continued debate over whether vocational or academic courses are more beneficial in prison spaces. The case for vocational training has always been supported. Yet, the value of academic courses for incarcerated students, particularly within the humanities, is still questioned. Thus, this paper nuances and explains the value of a humanities-based course within a carceral setting. The voices and experiences of the three incarcerated co-authors are centered in providing the rationale for what courses like critical race theory can offer them besides just a basic focus on rehabilitation or recidivism. From their experiences with course material and discussions, a case is made that the intellectual and personal agency gained from humanity-based courses are both meaningful and relevant for incarcerated students.

Out of Time: Accomplices in Post-Carceral World-Building

An article in which a faculty member, a university staff member and former student, and a currently incarcerated student and teaching assistant collaboratively examine their experiences as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom, and as co-authors of the article itself. Fostered by the faculty member’s pedagogical approach and design of the course, the authors pose that critical practices of writing and learning are dynamic sites of imagination and collaboration, and in turn, avenues by which informed and intentional futures can be enacted. Locating their practice and experience of partnership within a prison, the authors enter their co-created and individual narratives into a discussion of the liberatory potentiality of written and collaborative “world-building” to identify, resist, and replace mechanisms of harm and oppression, effectively bringing a post-carceral world into being.

Literacy Behind Bars: Successful Reading and Writing Strategies for Use with Incarcerated Youths and Adults

Literacy Behind Bars:Successful Reading and Writing Strategies for Use with Incarcerated Youths and Adults Stephanie Hilliard Literacy Behind Bars: Successful Reading and Writing Strategies for Use with Incarcerated Youths and Adults Mary E. Styslinger, Karen Gabigan, and Kendra Albright, eds. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017. 105 pp. Literacy Behind Bars introduces its core focus in the subtitle: the goal of this text is to provide "strategies" aimed at improving the reading and writing skills of incarcerated persons of all ages. However, while this goal seems wholly explained by the book's title, it does very little to fully encapsulate the full breadth and depth of the book's content. Edited by a trio of authors who each have various experiences teaching in the penal system, Literacy Behind Bars features a wonderful diversity of information that reaches far beyond the goal set by its title. The book is tall and thin, almost feeling more like a composition notebook than a scholarly work. Simply perusing the size and shape of the text, one might come away with the impression that the text will be unable to fully deliver on its premise, as the content spans a mere 85 pages. Within moments of cracking the book open however, this impression feels unfounded. The foreword, written by William G. Brozo, serves as a broad introduction to the text itself, while the preface of the text offers much-needed context that lays the groundwork for the kind of spaces in which the following chapters were conceived. As a teacher who has worked in a prison classroom, I was heartened to see this framing, as Literacy Behind Bars sets itself apart from its modest title quickly, providing context and information that can inform any audience about the landscape of prison teaching, regardless of their previous experience or knowledge. Both the foreword and the preface include broad-stroke information that informs readers about the scope and scale of the American prison system, and by extension, its classrooms. One does not have to have previous experience with prison teaching to come away from the foreword feeling prepared to understand the context in which this text is focused. [End Page 111] Each chapter recounts a particular teaching or study experience, all of which are centered in an educational space within the American penal system. The students in question for this text range from juveniles to adults, and the reasons for their incarceration are just as diverse. Although the foreword and preface provide a sound overview of the prison system and teaching "behind the fence," consequent chapters further describe the uniqueness of teaching in the penal system, not just at a macro level, but at a micro one as well. The chapters do not appear to be organized in any particular way, but all include accounts of teaching in minimum-to-maximum security facilities, describe varying levels of technology access (some classrooms had strict rules about access to and possession of pencils, while other facilities allowed students supervised use of the Internet), and explore various contexts in which incarcerated learning occurs, including traditional classroom spaces, book clubs, and libraries. Although this wealth of experience is not framed as an explicit primer into what teaching within the prison system can entail, the text does, in fact, provide a solid overview of the various ways in which prison teaching is encountered. A reader with no previous knowledge of this work can come away from the book with a strong understanding of the physical spaces in which prison education occurs. Turning from the physical space of learning to the learners themselves, despite the occasional references to why these students are incarcerated, these notes are always included in a respectful way, which speaks to one of the unspoken goals of the text; it is clear from the rhetoric of the various contributors that these authors care very deeply for their students, are keenly aware of how outsiders view them, and have a vested interest in combatting the stereotypes attributed to incarcerated learners. This view is evidenced in several places. In "The Places We Can Go: Book Clubs for Social Justice," authors Jennifer L. Doyle, Elizabeth M. Bemiss, and Mary E. Styslinger recount the experience...

Why Teach in Prison: Co-Constructing the Prison Classroom

Why Teach in Prison: Co-Constructing the Prison Classroom

Recruiting, Retaining and Engaging Men in Social Interventions: Lessons for Implementation Focusing on a Prison-based Parenting Intervention for Young Incarcerated Fathers

ABSTRACTRecruiting, retaining and engaging men in social interventions can be challenging. The focus of this paper is the successful implementation of a parenting programme for incarcerated fathers, delivered in a Young Offender Institution (YOI) in Scotland. Reasons for high levels of recruitment, retention and engagement are explored, with barriers identified. A qualitative design was employed using ethnographic approaches including participant observation of the programme, informal interactions, and formal interviews with programme participants, the facilitators and others involved in managing the programme. Framework analysis was conducted on the integrated data set. The prison as the setting for programme delivery was both an opportunity and a challenge. It enabled easy access to participants and required low levels of effort on their part to attend. The creation of a nurturing and safe environment within the prison classroom facilitated engagement: relationships between the facilitators and participants, and between the participants themselves were key to understanding high levels of retention and engagement. The most fundamental challenge to high engagement levels arose from clashes in embedded institutional ways of working, between the host institution and the organisation experienced in delivering such intervention work. This threatened to compromise trust between the participants and the facilitators. Whilst adding specifically to the very sparse literature on reaching incarcerated young fathers and engaging them in parenting work, the findings have transferability to other under-researched areas: the implementation of social interventions generally in the prison setting, and engaging marginalised fathers in parenting/family work in community settings. The paper highlights ways of overcoming some of the challenges faced.

Teaching about fatherless snakes in a prison classroom

Teaching about fatherless snakes in a prison classroom

The Container: Designing a Creative Atelier at Sing Sing Correctional Facility

ABSTRACTA composer and project leader tracks the connections between the needs of incarcerated students and a successful music-making studio program design. Central to the work, and applicable to any art form or educational setting, is the informed predicting of students' potentials and the communities transformation of the meeting place—in this case, a prison classroom—into a container for teaching and learning.

Toward the Soul of a Transformational Praxis

This essay addresses education's paradoxical binding to disciplinary and hierarchical formulas and to social change and personal transformation, an irony uniquely extreme within the prison classroom. It juxtaposes two pedagogical models — one conventionally liberal, the other significantly more radical — to question the purpose and potential of prison education. In the process, the essay measures close reading, a textual practice that is also the hallmark of literary study, against the highest possible liberationist goals of the prison abolition movement.

Critical Points of Resistance: Preparing Adult Educators to Educate Inside the U.S. Prison System

This is a proposal answering the call for the Special Theme Issue on Adult Learning and Mass Incarceration. The purpose of this proposed research article is to present a case study that demonstrates the application of innovative critical pedagogical teaching methods used in a University classroom setting with adult educators who were preparing to teach inside the U.S. prison and jail system. While there is a body of literature that discusses the nature of adult education in the prison classroom, there has been a lack of data-based research that specifically highlights the critically overlooked issue of how do we develop adult educators for the task of teaching on the “inside”? This article will be an example of engaging alternatives and reformulating the conceptualization of how to approach preparing adult educators to teach behind bars by discovering and creating new possibilities for the role of adult education in prison.

Creating Activating Events for Transformative Learning in a Prison Classroom

In this article, we interpreted, in light of Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, interviews with 13 educators regarding their work with marginalized adult learners in prisons in the northeastern United States. Transformative learning may have been aided by the educators’ response to unplanned activating events, humor, and respect, and being a role model, and counselor. Teachers presented activating events that they perceived as supporting resistant learners in altering their meaning schemes and revising their frames of reference. Administrators of educational programs for marginalized adult learners can help prison educators develop these pedagogical practices. Practitioners and researchers may wish to explore humor in restricted learning environments as well as the challenge mandatory prison classrooms present for the field of formal adult learning and transformative learning theory.

The Transformative Power of Sankofa: Teaching African History Inside San Quentin State Prison

This chapter describes the author's experience teaching ethnic studies inside a unique California prison, and calls for college‐in‐prison educators to engage culturally appropriate curricula to realize the full transformative potential of the prison classroom.