Prison Education Series
Part II: Ironies at Work
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Higher education, an endeavor filled with ironies, certainly provides too many examples to list here. When teaching an introductory writing course in the local maximum security prison last spring (pictured below), I confronted many of these ironies, one being that these were among the best students I’ve ever worked with. This reality, in addition to my embarrassment at dramatically underestimating them, led me to repeatedly ask, “Why are these individuals so good at being students? Shouldn’t these students, who we might assume are less educated or not focused on endeavors like learning, produce far worse outcomes than students in normal college settings?” As I’ve said, the answer was “no” and this is why many of the ironies of American education continue to bounce around in my brain.
Focus
In America, we habitually brag about how many other things we do while getting an education, particularly those that are not technically educational. Most of us have lived through, and/or heard multiple people say, “I worked X number of jobs when I was in college and paid my own way,” etc. This “bootstraps” mentality now manifests as an argument against student-debt relief: “I worked two jobs and paid off my loans, and nobody gave me any help!” We believe that, post high school, obtaining an education should be difficult beyond the curriculum itself; it should always be done alongside other work or made to “fit in.”
But here’s a fact that applies to everyone, myself included—the less time you spend “doing education” while receiving one, the less you learn from that experience. I worked part-time during my undergraduate years at establishments that closed at 4:00 AM. I would often get home by 5:00 AM and be dead on my feet during that day’s classes, as night/online classes weren’t a reality at that point in time. I would argue that the idea of higher education as a long game of focused work is, except for an elite group, dying in America. Read Cal Newport’s Deep Work and you’ll gain some perspective quickly.
How does this apply to my brief experience in prison education? The students were drastically more focused. They might work jobs within the prison (they grow their own produce and make their own bread), but there was nothing more that they desired than to be in class, to seize the chance for education and intellectual growth. Their class assignments were not just “something to get done” among the bevy of other tasks that make quantity and multi-tasking the gold-standard of American productivity. Other than family members or religion (several of the students were Muslim), our class, at that time, was the most important thing in their lives. They had a clear goal to not only get as much out of each class a possible, but to also think about the course and its material while we were not meeting. While in their cells, they would read, reread, then reread again the work assigned for our upcoming discussions, constantly turning the ideas over in their minds.
The students would say to me regularly, “Professor, you won’t believe what we have to listen to, all day and every day, when we aren’t in this room. The ignorance, poison, and hate. This takes us away from all that.”
Let’s add the following important details: they had no phones, no internet, and a regular schedule (this is worth a post on its own). Thus, terrible irony #1: their isolation, by default, created space for them to focus on their work.
Speed
Another obsession in American higher education is “time to degree.” Faster always means better, as this leads to cost savings and entrance into the labor market. It is hard to argue against the claim that, for many Americans, the speed of education has become more important than its quality. Thus, we have spent years “cutting college.” How so? The number of college credits students earn in high school continues to increase and many students now earn a full Associate’s degree upon graduation. Accelerated classes—7 or 8 weeks, sometimes even shorter in the summer—are becoming increasingly the norm, as is deemphasizing the “degree” for smaller micro-credentials like badges and certificates. This is, of course, not by definition a bad thing, as people’s needs and goals differ and, to be fair, American higher education has proven incredibly slow at reconceiving what schedules might look like beyond traditional semesters. That said, I stand by the following belief—there is a more traditional, well-funded, and less hectic educational environment preserved for the economically and “legacy” elite, done so with the understanding that higher education, including a transition into graduate school, takes time, deep work, and a near-singular focus in order to develop true expertise.
How does this apply to prison education? The institution, as you would expect, manages the population’s schedules down to the minute. My course was the only course the students took. This pace, which I would argue is too slow, resulted from understaffing that required this one-step approach (this was beyond the prison’s control). Still, for the students to have been able to take a second class, they would have had to prove themselves capable at succeeding in the first. Thus, irony #2: in colleges and universities we largely do this in reverse—we have no problem with students registering for 18 or more credits and carrying a 2.3 GPA. “Student success,” a common term in higher-ed parlance, is often positioned after problems occur rather than before. Subsequent efforts take the form of probation, alerts, interventions, advising appointments, and even algorithmic advice about what major is truly “right” for a particular student.
Many student-success initiatives are designed to prevent such troubles ahead of time—for example, first-year seminars, smaller classes, mentorship programs, and other “high-impact practices.” But the nature of life in America requires us to play catch-up more often than not. Our society does not construct itself to incorporate post-secondary education the way it does K-12. American institutions of higher education carry the full burden: adjusting to students’ work schedules, economic status, family situations, broadband access, mental/physical health accommodation, and so on. Thus, irony #3: with my students there was no such rush. Some students would be released soon and could transfer those credits should they decide to continue, and some sat in the room with release dates that were not coming anytime soon. They could take their time because they had a lot of time to spare. I do not say this to be flippant. I am merely pointing out conditions, often ironic, that worked to produce significant student success because of restriction and regimentation, rather than complete freedom and a praxis of “at your own pace.”
Mandatory Tutoring
One of my students did not know what a comma was. I don’t report this as a terrible thing or a can you believe this moment. Not by a mile. He proved to be one of the classes’ best writers and funniest storyteller. This is a man who spent over a year in solitary confinement and both wrote and spoke about that experience with painful elegance (there was no humor in that story). Somehow, he held on to his humanity and whenever he read work aloud to the class we were gripped by the narrative, often laughing hysterically about his old family stories, regardless of if there were commas, where they positioned, and whether they were used correctly.
Each student, once a week, had a mandatory tutoring appointment. This wasn’t optional “office hours” that might or might not be a ghost town, or a campus resource that students could take advantage of if they wanted. It was mandatory. More importantly, we deemphasized grammar and usage in class—which are often deliberately used to shame and embarrass people—and focused on storytelling. Stories unite, rules divide. Punctuation skills became a skill we developed peripherally (with short lectures in class to provide explanations and examples), but storytelling—something vital to all cultures, including prison culture—proved more effective at resolving issues of grammar and usage when placed as the primary rather than secondary goal. Thus, in tutoring, the students could work on grammar/punctuation in relation to work in which they were deeply invested. Thus, irony #4, which affected me more than the students: storytelling has always been the key, as is the audience understanding the narrative being told. That’s the fabric. Sew on the buttons later.
I’ll pause here before moving on to the next installment, but I want to be clear about something because, well, I’ve learned a thing or two about the interwebs. I am not saying that we should confine students and create prison-like conditions for them! But I am saying that this stark juxtaposition of educational environments revealed a lot to me about what’s not working in the outside world I would return to after each class. Sometimes, these stark juxtpositions are exactly what’s needed to jumpstart new ideas.
We need to think about these ideas as higher education fights tooth and nail for students and tuition revenue in this era of shrinking support for state institutions from their respective legislatures. How are we assuring quality in a social context that prioritizes speed and quantity? How do we support quality intellectual growth, and thus desperately needed expertise, in a system that demands either low-credit quantity to serve “time to degree” or lower quantity in terms of time spent doing actual learning: “Earn you credential in only 3 months!”
I walked into a maximum-security prison expecting to work with students with little to no skills, knowledge, or experience. I was fantastically wrong. Not only were the students high functioning, but over us loomed the great irony of their negative placement in society proving highly conducive to education that incorporated reading, writing, discussion, and verbal presentation as its primary tools.
In the next installment, I’ll try to get at the issue of “Why do prison education?” As you can imagine, not everyone supports such initiatives or feel such a privilege should be afforded to the incarcerated. Now that the incarcerated are one again eligible for Pell Grants and universities everywhere need students, expect this to become more of an issue.