
Teaching About Prison in Prison, Part Three
Thoughts on a semester teaching in the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program. In the first installment of this essay I covered the background of and preparation for the course. In the second installment, I covered my experiences up until the midpoint of the semester. In this final installment, I discuss the end of the course and reflect on the experience as a whole.
Learning (vs.) Place
In many ways, the second half of my interdisciplinary “Prison Scholarship” course continued along the trajectory I had witnessed early in the semester: students arrived prepared on a weekly basis, participated in provocative and engaged discussion, and (on the whole) demonstrated their ability to consistently wed healthy skepticism, intellectual curiosity, and personal life experiences to course materials. Their work ethic was not only admirable, it far exceeded the level of commitment I typically encounter from the majority of undergraduates on campus. (This was a fact that sometimes made it frustratingly difficult to encounter lackadaisical students in some of my other courses that semester). The students created final projects and presentations that, given their limited educational resources, met or exceeded what I would expect of students in a traditional learning environment. They were able to do both individual and collaborative group work that allowed them to connect course concepts to new scenarios and topics of interest, they were able to present original research projects to the class as a whole, and they performed quite well on a final exam that covered topics and terms across more than a dozen disciplines.
I had expected that teaching a course in a state prison would be a learning experience for myself as much as (or more than) it might be for the students enrolled in the course, but I don’t think I ever truly anticipated the degree to which the men I was charged with instructing would offer insight into how antithetical prison life is to how most faculty conceptualize the learning experience. The challenges I covered in the previous entry (no access to computers, outdated research materials in the prison library, etc.) continued to pose problems that forced creative workarounds (e.g. bringing in individualized printed articles for them to utilize), but there were other constraints that the students clued me in on that were well beyond my control.

For one, many of them complained about the lack of time afforded them to access those few spaces that existed in the prison for doing research, studying, or collaborating on projects. Requests for visits to the prison library, for example, typically had to be filled out well in advance of when the students would want to go access materials. Time in the library was then very limited, and could be granted in such a way whereas each of their visits may be separated by weeks. Additionally, students informed me that most of them had no way to get together to study with one another for the midterm or the final, no spaces available in which to practice their presentations, and no places to write without distraction; their living environments afforded neither the physical space nor the necessary solitude to prepare effectively for completing college coursework. Several of the students in the class were subject to other unique constraints (a violent roommate, time in solitary, etc.) that jeopardized their ability to perform well in the course. Beyond those more present concerns, about a third of the students in the course remained uncertain from week to week about their own place in the Second Second Chance Pell Pilot Program; these students were sitting in the classroom because they had been admitted through the department of corrections but — due to paperwork concerns — had not yet been formally enrolled at my university. (As of this writing, about two months after the last day of class, at least one quarter of the students have still not been officially enrolled in the course and have thus not received the promised college credit for the grades they earned.)
As indicated above, the students in the course overcame these challenges and succeeded in spite of them. In truth, those obstacles surprised me more than they surprised the students who, given their time in the correctional system, collectively seemed to expect constant roadblocks throughout the course. Indeed, my students often told me that they did not expect that either those administering the program from the outside (at the federal and state level, especially) nor the prison staff charged with seeing to their conditions inside wanted them to succeed in the course. It was if they had resigned themselves to not expecting fair treatment, to not receiving what had been promised to them at the start of the class, and to not being given a fair chance. That they persevered through this speaks to the value that they placed on the educational experience itself and what it might mean for their future.
Fears, Findings, and the Future
Though this series of posts has thus far been at least partially inflected by own feelings about the experience of teaching in a prison, I think it makes sense to close by revealing a bit more about what teaching the course has meant to me personally, how it has shaped my own thinking about both teaching and about prison, and where I would like to go from here. My hope is that audiences reading this post, especially if they are considering an opportunity that would afford them a chance to teach in a prison, might take away from my own personal reflections some sense of what teaching in prison might offer to them. Obviously, teaching in prison is in many ways the same as teaching anywhere else: it is something that should be done with the benefit to students as the first and foremost consideration. However, as is the case with teaching in any other context, each teaching experience can potentially shape the life of the teacher, too. This conclusion is about how this experience has shaped me.
To be completely honest, when I began the course I was grappling with a number of fears. I was afraid that I might witness or be the target of violence in my classroom. (This was a fear that several friends, family members, and colleagues expressed to me as well). I was afraid that the students would fail to see the value in the course material. I was afraid that they would lack the skills needed to succeed in the class. I was afraid that I would be unable to connect to a population with whom I seemingly shared very little life experience. Likewise, I was afraid that the prison staff would ostracize me as much as possible due to my interest in helping those they were charged with incarcerating. I was afraid that the class might end abruptly due to federal or state budgetary needs or shifting policy. I knew that I wanted to do the work, but I also knew that stepping on to prison grounds was an experience a world away from stepping on to a campus.
As I have hopefully indicated across these posts, I quickly discovered that the vast majority of these fears were either irrational or overblown. I was surprised at the level of enthusiastic support offered by the people I interacted with at the prison; even if (as some of my students indicated) there were those on staff who perhaps wished for the program to fail, they didn’t directly impede on me in my time there. My fears of connecting to the students was also misplaced: those same skills that for many years have helped me connect to students from diverse backgrounds were just as useful in the context of a prison classroom; the fact that I was close in age to some of my students at the correctional facility also meant that I had some ways of connecting with them that are harder to do with traditional students that might be twenty years my junior. Academically, the students were well selected: what some of them lacked in certain preexisting skill sets they made up for with a willingness to learn and with an enthusiasm for their opportunity. My fears of encountering a resistant group of students who lacked incentive and/or ability was wholly misplaced.

As we worked through course content and the class developed its own unique character, it became increasingly clear to me that while conceptualizing the class I had, in part, bought in to a certain stereotyped image of what life in prison must be like and, by association, what teaching in prison might entail. As a critical scholar, I teach students regularly how to discern hegemonic rhetorics about various groups as they appear in media, in conversation, across discourse, etc. As a teacher, I try to check as many of my own assumptions about new students as I can prior to entering a classroom for the first time. In theory, I believe I typically do these things well; in practice, I was not able to apply this skill set as well as I would have hoped to prior to the start of teaching in prison. Fortunately for me, my students had come to expect a measure of this when encountering someone from the outside and thus they helped me understand from very early on where they were coming from and what this class meant to them. Fortunately for my students, I was able to adjust quickly and fall back on my years of training in the classroom. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the most important thing I learned to do early on in the class was to engage with the students at the prison as closely as possible to how I would engage students in a campus environment. This is something that I already knew how to do (in theory) but took a little while to actually accomplish (in practice).
It is often the case that, over the course of a semester, you begin to know a little bit about your students’ personal lives through interactions that transcend course content — and that was certainly the case in the class I taught at the prison. Though I made it a point to never look up the names of my students on Google (as their arrest records almost certainly would have been listed) and to never ask them why they were incarcerated, a number of the students revealed components of their past legal difficulties during class discussion. I heard of run-ins with law enforcement, personal struggles with drugs and alcohol, difficult family situations, violence and abuse in and outside of prison, etc. As a whole, the students seemed to bond with one another and as a class through sharing some of these experiences. For my part, I found that fostering a respectful discursive space where they could be honest in their critiques of both themselves and of the systems that they encountered en route to my classroom proved valuable in earning their trust. This is probably the second most important thing I learned to do early on: find ways to encourage the students to feel, if even for a short while, that they are in a place where they can grant and be granted equal, mutual, unconditional respect. Without that foundation in place, it can be difficult to have a positive class experience in a traditional classroom; in the context of prison, I believe it would be impossible.
Finding oneself teaching in a dynamic classroom full of engaged students is an ideal situation for most any teacher. Finding oneself teaching in a dynamic classroom full of engaged students after fearing the exact opposite is eye-opening, humbling, and rewarding. On the last day of class, I told the students that my stock answer to the oft asked question of “How is the prison class going?” had become “It has been the best teaching experience of my life.” Now, after the course has wrapped up and I have had some time to reflect, that answer continues to ring true for me. As such, the end of the course was very bittersweet: while I was energized by the success of my students, I was disheartened at that the pilot program’s built-in uncertainty meant I may not return to that context in the near future. Given the experience I’ve had, I would very much like to keep working in prisons and for prisoners as part of my professional career. I am currently seeking contexts to do that work going forward. (If you are interested in doing the same, you might start by checking out organizations like the Vera Institute.)
At the end of the course, a number of students asked if I would write them a letter about my experiences with them so that they might be able to share it with a future parole board (a request with which I happily complied). It is my hope that these three posts might serve a similar function as those letters: to encourage those who can make a meaningful difference in the lives of our incarcerated students do so, to encourage them to recognize the challenges those students might face and how to potentially overcome them, and to encourage them to support programs that directly address some of the most grievous effects of our system of mass incarceration.
If you have read any (or all) of these posts and would like to chat on this subject further, please do not hesitate to contact me.
