thinking towards the spring semester...

So, after shouting for months that we should talk about the essays in Radical Teacher, I finally found the time, betwixt semesters, to spend a morning reading through them. Sad, heartening, discouraging, inspirational….I want to include some of my reading notes here, and also some thoughts about next steps. And I want to invite y’all to think w/ me about what our “course” of action might be this spring. I’m ready to be more ambitious!

We have volunteered to offer a “preview” of the book group on Friday, Jan. 24th, so I’d like us to have a plan sketched out for the semester by then, and a mini-class to offer @ that point, too—one that definitely includes writing.

For starters, I’m wondering about organizing the group around a topic or two: Freedom? Isolation? Abolition? Agency? Change? Power? Code-Switching? Reformation? Discipline? Inequality? Challenging Women? Creating a Civil Community? Learning to Think Critically? Writing Our Stories?....and I really am thinking about taking writing seriously this time ‘round, actually building the class around that. So we could give a certificate to those who attend 10 of 14 classes, and write 10 pp—or something like that.

For me, by far the most powerful piece in the Radical Teacher collection was “An "Impossible Profession"? The Radical University in Prison,” by Atif Rafay, who directly challenges our orientation of seeking material that is “relevant” to the prisoners: he rejects

"the project of devising a radical theory of education specifically for prisoners…a separate set of educational outcomes inevitably perpetuates the marginalization of imprisoned students…"rejecting that project may be "the most important curricular decision a prison education program can make…. The best education for the best is the best education for all.” Efforts to tailor curricula to make it "relevant" surrender at the very outset the autonomy that frees universities to be dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, interested in their students as potential participants in that enterprise; this autonomy is what enables students to imagine themselves as more than creatures of circumstance. The margin of freedom thus afforded students is never anything but fragile, tenuous, and even to a great extent wishful-but it remains nevertheless precious, perhaps especially so in prison. The university must insist on teaching its own, immanent idea: the radical impulse should complicate the practice of teaching the incarcerated, but not betray it.….prison is a "cauldron of broken time”…making nearly impossible the sustained concentration necessary for serious academic work….A habitus hostile to learning is… prison's principal educational achievement….which can all but foreclose reflection and imagination.”

I got so interested in Rafay’s take on these questions that I did a little more reading, and uncovered a really remarkable piece that he published in The Walrus, On the Margins of Freedom, which challenges the “fairy tale” of “inner mobility”: “There is one relief: nothing is expected of you, you have no responsibilities, you are at ultimate and absolute liberty…[but] the self and the spirit, you come to realize, do not exist deep within, but extend far beyond you; they exist only through the connection with all of that with which you share an interest.”

Rafay is devastating in describing the effects of prison, and also cautious about the effects of higher education there; in the Radical Teacher essay, he quotes Ann L. Mullen, who “concludes in Degrees of Inequality that, far from being subversive, expanding higher education "palliates the problem of class conflict" by promoting the notion that opportunity prevails and denying the reality of acute, worsening inequality…."the college swindle" actually underwrites the sometimes heartfelt but invariably fatuous belief that more education is the panacea for social ills.”

But I also found a wonderful counternarrative to this position, in an essay published in an earlier issue by Doran Larson, “Abolition From Within: Enabling the Citizen Convict,” Radical Teacher (Fall 2011): 4-15,80--which describes his work in a writing workshop, and the book he’s publishing of his students’ writings—as well as in a piece by Anke Pinkert and three of her prison students, on “The Transformative Power of Holocaust Education in Prison: A Teacher and Student Account,” Radical Teacher (Spring 2013): 60-65,79-80:

“the students …took issue first and foremost with the label and characterization of ourselves as "victims." We agree that structural (racial and class-based) forms of exclusion contribute to mass incarceration and to our present circumstances. But we do not wish to be seen by others-particularly liberal educators or radical critics of the Prison Industrial Complex-or to see ourselves as victims of the system, without agency or the power to change it….we related the power and possibility that comes with agency rather than the helplessness often associated with victimhood.

In Pedagogy of Freedom Freire states, "I like being human because I know that . . . my destiny is not given but something that needs to be constructed and for which I must assume responsibility.” We assume responsibility for our crimes. We believe that we are the products of our decisions and actions, and we recognize ourselves as such. This represents the transformation of the prison system from within….education in prison is the vehicle through which we meditate, analyze, and transform ourselves and, ultimately, society from the inside-out.”

Both of those essays are about creating civic communities within the prison. They are inspirational.

So…what do you think? Could we put together a packet that begins with, say, Friere and bell hooks on “teaching to transgress,” and then read, oh, I don’t know, The Color Purple and Sula and…?