One thing that really struck me about the Jones and D’Errico article was the director of a prison-based higher education program who is quoted as saying “They don’t tell us how to teach, and we don’t tell them how to lock people up.” The more I think about it, the more I think that higher education in prison should assume this role.  Jones and D’Errico grapple with the question of whether or not resources should be used to teach incarcerated individuals, but I think a much more important question is: if education programs exist in prisons, what kind of programs should they be?  I have a really hard time applying ideas of reform and rehabilitation from 200 years ago to our exponentially larger criminal justice system today.  I think that, at least in the US, using education as a way to carry out Freire’s idea of dialogical education could be very powerful.  We have a huge problem of racialized and gendered incarceration, of over-incarceration, of a privatized industry being given incentives to put even more people in that system.  Shouldn’t education in prison be used to counteract that?  To allow for dialogical conscious-raising, and to teach about the realities of the situation?  Maybe prison-based teachers shouldn’t literally be telling prison wardens how to do their job, but shouldn’t they start a dialogue about whether the “business of locking people up” needs to change?  Rather than going with Frank Hall’s proposal of putting prisons in the middle of college campuses, I think there needs to be a focus on figuring out wh

I found the questions that Jones and d'Errico asked to be very important but most often neglected when the public and media talk about schooling in prisons. First, they ask about the goal and purpose of education in prisons. This question really asks those who attempt to do schooling in prison to question their purpose, are they there because they see the prisoners as deficient and in need of reform? Or are they there because they believe that the curriculum will provide an opportunity for learning and growth? Then, the question about who educates and what type of education will take place went even deeper. This question really had me thinking back to the purpose of education. Should these classes provide them with the skills necessary to apply and find jobs after their release? Should they focus on exploring the liberal arts and the humanities? Most importantly however, was the way in which we think about and attempt to answer this question. If we have the idea of a prisoner in mind when thinking about which kind of education should be provided, then we automatically fall back into labeling prisoners and setting up a system that already names them as inferior. How then can we strip ourselves of misconceptions about who incarcerated people are, and see them as human beings who need to experience growth just like the rest of us? What is it about incarceration that completely changes our views of the kind of education "they deserve"? And in thinking about this, why aren't their voices present in creating curriculum and programs?

Week One: obervations

Faint outlines of soaring birds through the foliage above

The off-and-on sound of chirping cicadas

A cool breeze whips up an already cool morning

Sheets of light grey clouds move the rain of yesterday away, revealing a pale blue sky

The squirrel at the base of the tree behind me does not seem happy to have a guest

The grass, trees, bushes are green with only the faintest hint here and there of a light yellow creeping into the leaves

I see Anne walking to the gym, a few voices break my musings as they make the trip to breakfast

People may see me but they seem to pay my presence little mind- I am much more awake of them- I feel miscible

Suddenly a hawk is almost crashing through the tree branches, halting only momentarily on a branch before leaping back off, back into the sky

The sound of a truck, the peripheral view of the Pepsi logo catches my attention to the right

Overall though, the sounds of humanity are muffled here at this “early” hour

Here is the sun, reaching me through the clouds and leaves

The hawk flies back the other way as birds croak the alarm from tree to tree

I am a passive observer but I feel less intrusive than when I was walking

Groundskeepers are here, picking up the downed branches from the rain and wind of last night

The effects of nature are being tidied up, the manicured paths returning from beneath the ruble

The siren of an emergency vehicle is growing fainter

At the end of class today, (re-directed somewhat by Zoe!) I asked each of you to write--in the mode that Andrew Goatley describes as an "environmentally friendly alternative to goal-directed grammar" --a description of "what was happening," just then, in the room. Here is what we wrote, and then read to one another (it gives me shivers!):

Talking takes place.
Contemplation and thinking are happening around.
The desks are in a circle.
Shining through the windows.
Silent thinking.
Thinking continues.
Air is moving and responding.
Writing and thinking are happening.
Thought happens. Written words voiced in speech.
Thinking in peace.
Pensively gaze, frown, then scribble.
Pens are rustling.
Mental contortion.
Beings pulsating in peacefulness.
A conversation is going on.

I now want to bring this (lovely, really lovely!) production of ours back into conversation with wanhong's provocative post about the difficulty of describing motion without matter. She reports that--although the discussion in her high school physics class was guided by the motto that "motion is eternal while stability is relative"--every time they studied motion, they diagrammed it using dots or squares to represent the object in motion.

Stepping off from that insight…how might we diagram this poem?
Are there objects (in motion) in it?
(Are they us, or our thoughts?)

(and what we will leave out!)

One thing that really stuck out for me in the Silva article was the mention of the scale of intelligence on which prisoners were placed to determine whether their IQs merited effort on the part of the prison system to educate them. These labels, ranging from "above average" to "imbecile", are not only offensive in the ability-minded conscience of today, but also in the idea that there is no hope for nearly half of all prisoners to ever learn something useful. These standardized tests, as we have discussed in class, are in no way a feasible method for extracting useful data about intelligence, and, so far as I know, there is no evidence that they would have been executed under fair conditions to prisoners. It seems that these scores and hurtful labels are an excuse for us to allow prisoners to fall between the cracks without education in incarceration facilities--if they were never bright enough to be educated anyway, we don't have to worry when our rudimentary attempts to educate them are unsuccessful, or don't land released prisoners a job (likely related to unwillingness to hire former prisoners no matter their level of "rehabilitation").

After reading the Jones & d'Errico and Silva articles, I've been feeling really conflicted lately about the question of who deserves to be educated. My initial response before reading any of these articles would've been an enthusiastic "EVERYBODY" but I thought Silva's mentioning of William Weld's suggestion of Boston University offering the free education program to the poor, law-abiding citizens rather than the inmates was mind-boggling, and yet kind of a good one. I can't seem to make up my mind! Do we have to pit the two groups up against each other? Are the two groups at the same level on the playing field? If I had to pick which group could receive the education, I don't think I'd have to think twice about giving it to the poor, law-abiding citizens. But that doesn't mean I agree with Weld's "lock them up and throw away the key" attitude. The fact that these two groups had something in common to struggle for was surprising, but I don't think it should have been.

I always knew there was some sort of educational access hierarchy that existed, but I could only think of that situation using groups of people categorized by socioeconomic status - I never once considered inmates as a group that needed to be considered in this discussion about rights to an education until now.