Education

In trying to connect our prison classes and voice, I keep returning to the ongoing discussions our Friday group has about the structure of our class. One conflict we’ve had is how to open up the space we create, and be able to have “something for everyone”. We want to be accommodating, but it’s impossible to create a space accessible to all learners. Having a silent space or encouragement to write, moving on conversation when it’s off-topic, interrupting discussion for activities versus letting the discussion flow naturally. Additionally, there’s the consistent issue of having one or two strong voices among the inmates that can dominate the conversation. How do we intervene in that scenario?

I saw this image on twitter and it stuck with me. 

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander discusses the most recent iteration of the fundamentally racist system that exists in the United States: mass incarceration. Just like their ancestors, many black Americans cannot vote and are denied rights, only this time it is justified by their criminality. Their fathers were kept under control through fear and the guise of state’s rights. Their father’s fathers were controlled and dehumanized by slavery. 

Fighting systematic oppressions, People with high aspirations often express deep doubts and contradictory feelings about any acts that seem to work under the same system they want to fight against, and will be discouraged if there come no salient, quickly showing achievements of institutional changes. However, without gaining enough strength within the system at the first place, without temporarily enduring the unfairness to survive, without being somehow more successful or productive by the current social definition, how can people collectively get any opportunities to cause any changes forcefully in a long-term process, without being silenced, oppressed and excluded again and again, in the criminal justice context, prisoners being trapped in the cycle of incarceration?

since jody had us read the chapter of her and anne’s wip, i’ve been thinking a lot about it. on the reflections that i have on our work in the prison, and the reflections that i don’t have because i don’t want to think about certain things.

the question, ‘why are we here?’ is asked, but remained/s unanswered.

i want to learn from these incarcerated individuals, but how? how do we do that when we’re the ones structuring the classroom? i want them to have the space to learn as well – and arguably that is the focus, to use our access to provide a space for learning and a space for connecting to ‘the outside’.

Some different threads, laid out. Some connections in my head carry over to the page. Some might not:

for our thurs. 11/12 lesson plan @RCF, madison and i talked a bit about the ways that the previous week’s barometer exercise got people a bit more involved. we struggled to come up with exercises around the idea of personal narratives...  i liked how we tried to toss around ideas as a whole group in class — everyone had great ideas, and nell helped a lot with the creation of the ways i thought about the lesson plan and the concepts i think that madison, rosa, and i were going for. i hope we continue to make this a bit more of a group process as we move forward.

two major things that i also got out of it for future planning:

i want to reflect for a bit on how the thursday prison class went, especially now that i have more words to do so after our discussions last night.

first i think it's important to say that i think that the class overall went very well. i appreciate those who suggested we bring in the barometer exercise because i do think it gave space for participation for more folks who typically do not speak up during the evenings.

Sometimes, I forget that the people inside are people outside of our classroom. It is eerily easy for me to operate as if our classroom exists in a vaccuum. We enter the prison, head straight to the room, and we don't see the inmates until they're just outside our door. Class goes on every week, just as we planned, and we say goodbye. The people inside go back to... to where? to what? to whom? While back to the van we go, ready to decompress and listen to the latest handful of #1s on the radio. As group we spend so much collective energy planning the class amidst discussions of the prison industrial complex, and thus attempting to address the experiences that the people inside are coming to class with.