Teaching Literature and Writing in Prisons
- Editors: Sheila Smith McKoy, Patrick Elliot Alexander
- Pages: 336
- Published: 2023
- ISBN: 9781603295918 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603295901 (Hardcover)
“This is the first anthology about teaching in prison that is openly written from an abolitionist perspective. A valuable addition to the discourse.”
—Victoria Law, author of “Prisons Make Us Safer” and Twenty Other Myths about Mass Incarceration
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.
Introduction (1)
Part One: Purposes
Riotous Study: Black Studies, Academic Unfreedom, and Surveilled Pedagogy in Prison Education (21)
Power Mapping the Capitol: Notes on Abolitionist Pedagogy and Captive Study (32)
The Sacred Writing Circle: Pedagogical Challenges of Creative Writing and Teaching among Incarcerated Women (48)
Of Toothbrushes, Bread, and Beanstalks: Freedom and Kinship Inside (62)
Relational Methodologies and Decolonial Outcomes for the Prison Writing Classroom (74)
The Brain Is Wider than the Sky (87)
Meteorite (95)
Shakespeare with Survivors: Learning from Incarcerated Women in the Me Too Era (107)
Playwriting across the Walls as Abolitionist Practice (118)
Cracks in the Glass Ceiling (131)
Rethinking the Hero Narrative of Critical Pedagogy: Teaching Creative Writing with and for Women at the County Jail (142)
Spanish Co-instruction in Prison: A Dialogue on Language, Identity, and Pedagogy (154)
Poetic Difference: How Emplaced Writing Influences Lives in Prison (167)
Unsettling Literacy: Querying the Rhetorics of Transformation (180)
Part Two: Practices
Liberators in Theory, Collaborators in Deed: Navigating the Constraints of the Prison Classroom (195)
Collaborating to Reimagine Knowledge Sharing in the Prison Classroom (206)
Disrupting the Time of Incarceration: Close Reading in a Justice-Oriented Prison Classroom (218)
Reading and Writing between the Devil and the Deep Blue: The Appalachian Prison Book Project (231)
Narrating Captivity, Imagining Justice: Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Prison (245)
From a Public Defender Office to a Prison Classroom: Why I Teach Writing in Prison (258)
Writing Our Lives into the World (267)
Erasure or Exploitation? Considering Questions in Prison Publications (278)
Self-Care as Ethical Practice for Teachers and Volunteers Working with Writers behind Bars (289)
Notes on Contributors (303)
Index (313)
