Teaching Literature And Writing In Prisons

New thinking about the role of education in confined environmentsAs the work of Malcolm X, Angela Y. Davis, and others has made clear, education in prison has enabled people to rethink systems of oppression. Courses in reading and writing help incarcerated students feel a sense of community, examine the past and present, and imagine a better future. Yet incarcerated students often lack the resources, materials, information, and opportunity to pursue their coursework, and training is not always available for those who teach incarcerated students. This volume will aid both new and experienced instructors by providing strategies for developing courses, for creating supportive learning environments, and for presenting and publishing incarcerated students' scholarly and creative work. It also suggests approaches to self-care designed to help instructors sustain their work. Essays incorporate the perspectives of both incarcerated and non-incarcerated teachers and students, centering critical prison studies scholarship and abolitionist perspectives.This volume contains discussion of Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live from Death Row, Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.

In a time of increasing mass incarceration, US prisons and jails are becoming a major source of literary production. Prisoners write for themselves, fellow prisoners, family members, and teachers. However, too few write for college credit. In the dearth of well-organized higher education in US prisons, noncredit programs established by colleges and universities have served as a leading means of informal learning in these settings. Thousands of teachers have entered prisons, many teaching writing or relying on writing practices when teaching other subjects. Yet these teachers have few pedagogical resources. This groundbreaking collection of essays provides such a resource and establishes a framework upon which to develop prison writing programs. Prison Pedagogies does not champion any one prescriptive approach to writing education but instead recognizes a wide range of possibilities. Essay subjects include working-class consciousness and prison education; community and literature writing at different security levels in prisons; organized writing classes in jails and juvenile halls; cultural resistance through writing education; prison newspapers and writing archives as pedagogical resources; dialogical approaches to teaching prison writing classes; and more. The contributors within this volume share a belief that writing represents a form of intellectual and expressive self-development in prison, one whose pursuit has transformative potential.

As the work of Malcolm X, Angela Y. Davis, and others has made clear, education in prison has enabled people to rethink systems of oppression. Courses in reading and writing help incarcerated students feel a sense of community, examine the past and present, and imagine a better future. Yet incarcerated students often lack the resources, materials, information, and opportunity to pursue their coursework, and training is not always available for those who teach incarcerated students. This volume will aid both new and experienced instructors by providing strategies for developing courses, for creating supportive learning environments, and for presenting and publishing incarcerated students' scholarly and creative work. It also suggests approaches to self-care designed to help instructors sustain their work. Essays incorporate the perspectives of both incarcerated and nonincarcerated teachers and students, centering critical prison studies scholarship and abolitionist perspectives. This volume contains discussion of Mumia Abu-Jamal's Live from Death Row, Marita Bonner's The Purple Flower, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Othello.

Incarcerated bodies, liberated minds: a narrative of literacy education behind bars. Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college- level classes at a high- security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman’s classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. The students’ work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation’s prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the “school to prison pipeline,” she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.

Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world.

This collection includes a kaleidoscope of voices and perspectives from prisoners, former prisoners, scholars, and activists to examine the extraordinarily invisible and closed system of incarceration that characterizes the massive U.S. prison industry. The book explores in multiple ways, the role of writing in carceral settings, including material realities, ethics, and social justice. It is a book about the power of writing as well as its limits. It is a book that celebrates and critiques, challenges, and reveals. It is a book that, like the writing of incarcerated women, repays careful reading.

Prison Writing and the Literary World tackles international prison writing and writing about imprisonment in relation to questions of literary representation and formal aesthetics, the “value” or “values” of literature, textual censorship and circulation, institutional networks and literary-critical methodologies. It offers scholarly essays exploring prison writing in relation to wartime internment, political imprisonment, resistance and independence creation, regimes of terror, and personal narratives of development and awakening that grapple with race, class and gender. Cutting across geospatial divides while drawing on nation- and region-specific expertise, it asks readers to connect the questions, examples and challenges arising from prison writing and writing about imprisonment within the UK and the USA, but also across continental Europe, Stalinist Russia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. It also includes critical reflection pieces from authors, editors, educators and theatre practitioners with experience of the fraught, testing and potentially inspiring links between prison and the literary world.

As the United States' prison population has exploded over the past 30 years, a rich, provocative and ever-increasing body of literature has emerged, written either by prisoners or by those who have come in close contact with them. Unlike earlier prison writings, contemporary literature moves in directions that are neither uniformly ideological nor uniformly political. It has become increasingly personal, and the obsessive subject is the way identity is shaped, compromised, altered, or obliterated by incarceration. The 14 essays in this work examine the last 30 years of prison literature from a wide variety of perspectives. The first four essays examine race and ethnicity, the social categories most evident in U.S. prisons. The three essays in the next section explore gender, a prominent subject of prison literature highlighted by the absolute separation of male and female inmates. Section three provides three essays focused on the part ideology plays in prison writings. The four essays in section four consider how aesthetics and language are used, seeking to define the qualities of the literature and to determine some of the reasons it exists.