Teaching Inside: I am Pretty Sure I am Failing Some of My Students

Yesterday I taught my final Writing Seminar for the time being. With a proposal about “Andragogy Inside” having been accepted by ASHE, I need to actually focus on finishing the piece I will present with my colleague Kaiya at the annual meeting in Houston in November. But because life is so interesting, the exchange I had with a student yesterday afternoon, and the piece another student wrote last week, is linked not only to my own introspection regarding my personal instructional methodology, but also to the work Kaiya and I will produce.
I think, as educators, we spend a necessarily inordinate amount of time questioning why we teach what we teach and how we teach it. We worry about whether our assessments accurately measure content mastery; we worry whether our students are feeling appropriately affirmed AND challenged simultaneously; we worry that we could, with our methods, be doing more harm than good. We worry; we change lesson plans; we shift curriculum; we overhaul everything; we want the best for our students and are likely to see their challenges as reflections of our methods.
This is a large part of why I wanted to write something about teaching inside. To a large extent, Castro & Brawn (2017) stole a lot of Kaiya’s and my thunder LOL but the article addresses SO MANY of the struggles and dynamics and tensions of teaching inside, critiquing many of the instructional methodologies that currently permeate the field.
By the way, when I say “stole our thunder”, I mean that she (Castro’s first name is Erin as well!) and Brawn wrote and published an amazing article before Kaiya and I were able to write and publish ours. It really is an amazing article, so I will link to it again here, just in case you stubbornly scrolled past.
But I digress.
In this desire to think publicly and aloud about some pillars of professionalism for the field of teaching inside, I asked some of my students to think about the things that are important for teachers inside to understand that, from their perspective, are categorically different than skills, knowledge, or competencies required of teachers teaching in more traditional, outside environments. Immediately, one student said, “Well, it’s important to not treat us like idiots. A lot of time we get watered down classes that are a waste of time. Here, even though the class isn’t for credit, I feel like this is what a real college class will be like and I feel like I’ll be prepared to start real school when I get out.”

So, that was encouraging to hear; Second Chance began with the hope of providing justice-involved folks with the tools to be and feel successful in a higher education institution classroom. But I needed more and asked my students to think as critically as possible about what they, essentially, wished all prison educators knew.
One student wrote a 3 paged paper outlining some really great points, a few of which will definitely be included (and properly attributed, of course). The one that stood out to me the most was the issue/concept of grading and what it can mean for someone who, in many instances, has not had positive relationships with school and learning in the past. I took it personally — but not in a defensive way, if that makes any sense. I thought about my own grading policies inside, the feedback I provided guys, and the ways in which my own attempts to set the bar high for them may, in fact, be setting the bar higher than they feel they are capable of achieving. I brought this up to the student (who is already asking about fall workshops, by the way LOL) and he wanted to assure me that he wasn’t writing about me, but about the larger conversation about what is communicated through grades. I told him that I knew he wasn’t personally attacking and reiterated that the point is one, even if not a personal attack, that I felt I needed to think more deeply about.
I am 100% confident that guys have stopped taking workshops I teach because I am a hard grader; I am confident that those same guys have likely been triggered by the critical feedback I provide and, within the context of the correctional facility, would rather stop coming to the workshop than face what may feel, to them, like, failure. I am confident that I have, in trying so hard to stress how much I believe in them and their capacity, done damage that, at this point, I can’t undo because those students have not addressed me personally. And I can’t blame them for it, really. Again, the prison setting is not one that encourages vulnerability; no matter how hard one might try to establish the prison classroom as a safe space, it will always be against this larger backdrop of tension, uniformity, and oppressive and regimented control.

As a result of this feedback, I have assigned fewer things and have graded far less, looking for more collaborative forms of assessment to figure out if the guys are learning the concepts and skills that are intended. This brings me to another student who, yesterday, came up to me after the Philosophy workshop. He is new to our programming and joined the Psychology class (which meets on Friday nights) a little late in the summer session. We’re moving at a faster clip than we did in the spring and he is feeling a little lost, but not because he isn’t grasping the concepts presented.
He is feeling lost because he has not been told “what he is supposed to be learning” in this sort of objective, quantitative way. He explained that if there were tests or quizzes, he could effectively measure whether he was doing well or not doing well and that, right now, all he had were questions BUT he didn’t know “which” questions were the ones he was supposed to be asking. I explained to him that his sole job was to be present and attentive to the lesson at hand and ask questions for clarification whenever he felt he needed them. His response: “I know, but I just want to know whether I am doing well or not. A quiz or something would help!”
I could only exhale and smile. I smiled because this student was asking for the very feedback — cut, dry, “objective” — that I am now feverishly trying to get way from. I think, perhaps, this need of his is rooted — much like his fellow classmates who either endure the constant triggers or drop out — in how we conceptualize what “good” instructional methods and “typical” assessments (should) look like. So much of that is unquestioned in the K-12 space and, to a large extent, it remains largely unquestioned in the higher education space. Sure, we talk about innovation in the classroom, measuring things like collaboration, teamwork, and critical thinking, but this conversation usually ends up back in the same place we started: static assessments, comfortable instructional methods, and students who either continue to feel disempowered or who cling to what they recognize as a way to measure their own success and academic growth.
This work is already hard; teaching, as a field, has its own challenges, barriers, and obstacles. Teaching inside adds those extra, equally important but sometimes more challenging, aspects of negotiating what can be decades of ingrained academic self-doubt among students who, as a result of their incarceration, have been socialized out of an understanding of the importance and need for vulnerability in admitting insecurities in order to move forward. I certainly cannot force this kind of vulnerability, and focusing on it can, in instances, prove problematic for students once they leave the classroom; we teachers come in for like 90 minutes (or a few hours for those who do full morning and/or afternoon ABE courses) and then we’re gone. We aren’t with our students in their housing units and we don’t (always) know how they are treated once class is over.
I guess all we/I can do is constantly interrogate my own methods, my own curricular decisions, and my own reactions to student work. Thankfully, I’ve got some students who are comfortable speaking up on their own behalf and maybe it’s in their voices that I’ll ultimately hear the voices of those who’ve left without a word.

