November 12, 2014 - 15:08
Creating a curriculum to enact in any environment is difficult, but in a space as restrictive and foreign as prison can sometimes be to students as privileged as we are, there are several extra factors to take into account. As the pilot group of students going to work on a literacy program at X Correctional Facility (XCF), we’ve already had the opportunity to direct and shape the “curriculum,” so to speak, of our class. But, in doing so, we face some interesting, and sometimes frustrating, dynamics. What are our goals for this class, and how do they map on to what the social worker has asked us to do? The concept of “literacy” can be vague, and being explicitly directed to tutor these women in it suggests that they are coming into the space because they are illiterate. While this is certainly not the case, given the limitations on the literacy of some of our participants, what can we reasonably ask or expect them to do? What sort of access are we to assume they have had before? Mostly, we have gone in with high, but flexible, expectations, so that we are (ideally) not limiting the potential of what they can do, while being sensitive to difficulties that may come up. We also recognize that the environment of a prison can be unpredictable, as evidenced by our difficulty for much of the semester in getting our participants to the classroom before the prison-wide headcount, and this complication, among others, cutting into our actual class time. The population of the class also fluctuates, from women being released, sent into lockup or to another prison, or just not being called up to the classroom on any given day. For the purposes of this four-week curriculum, though, I am wishfully assuming a few standards: that we have about an hour during each session to work with the women, and that we get roughly the same group of people each week. And, because each week presents a learning opportunity for both the incarcerated women and those of us coming from the Bi-Co, I use the pronoun “we” to describe the entire group of us: 6 Bi-Co students and 6-10 women from XCF.
The overarching goal of this curriculum is to produce a performance piece of personal narratives that will be enacted by each member of the class (Bi-Co and XCF). This will allow each member of the class the opportunity to practice the basic tenets of literacy, i.e. reading and writing, while also engaging with it in a collaborative, kinesthetic way that keeps the spirit of the endeavor: that we are writing about our real lives, for our real lives. This is not a rote exercise in writing for its own sake, but rather an exploration of how our identities interplay with our environment to create our stories and memories.
On the first day of this curriculum, we’ll start by free writing our responses to various prompts that ask for a personal narrative around a specific topic. Free writing allows for creative production without the self-censorship–ideally, it will allow us to gather several ideas and explore what they mean before diving into one specifically. Some of the prompts that we’ve already given the women to think about for their journal entries during the week are helpful examples for these kinds of questions:
- What’s the story of your name? What experiences have you had because you have the name you do? Would you change your name, if you could?
- What is your favorite meal? Why? Who cooked it? Who are you eating with? Where?
- What’s a mistake or assumption that people often make about you? How do you feel when this happens?
- What’s something that you’re really good at? What makes you good at it?
But, hoping to inspire the most creative responses we can, these prompts will be flexible, and members of the literacy group (both Bi-Co students and women from XCF) will be able to alter them, or substitute new prompts, as they are motivated to do so. Ideally, these narratives will come out to about one hand-written page, but there will be time in future weeks to expand and revise the narratives.
For homework over the week between the Thursdays when we have class, we will encourage the XCF women (and the Bi-Co students will participate as well) to continue thinking and writing about the prompts, and to spend time talking to other members of the literacy group about the project–both our own work in it, and the broader plan to ultimately create a performance.
The second day of this curriculum will focus on peer review of our writings, which, in any situation, can be a tricky proposition. We will begin by collaboratively creating a set of guidelines for peer review, e.g. focusing on constructive criticism, and asking thoughtful questions about the story and where it could use more detail. These will ideally be brought up organically by the participants, but one piece of this that we, as the Bi-Co student “leaders” of the class, will emphasize is this: the writer does not have to share any details that she is uncomfortable making public. This is critical in the carceral space, because there are so many restrictions and rules around privacy, and because, in order to maintain and encourage supportive and respectful engagement, participants should be made to feel safe to push their comfort zones when and if they consent to doing so.
Once guidelines have been established and agreed upon, we will partner up–ideally, one XCF participant with one Bi-Co student to encourage communication between the groups, but adapting if necessary to have groups of three or non-mixed partnerships of XCF women. Each participant will share her free written piece (or a part of it, if she prefers) with her partner, who will give thoughtful feedback. The aim of this exercise is not to change or disrupt anyone’s narrative, but rather to ensure that details of the stories are fleshed out, and that the stories are cohesive. At this point, the partners will also give one another feedback on which story seems most suitable for performance, if there are several to choose from.
While there will be no formal homework following this week’s session, participants should continue thinking about and reflecting on the activity, and continue to write in our journals to keep up the momentum of writing each day.
The third week will focus on preparing for the performance of the pieces, both through polishing the writing and practicing its presentation and physicality. For the first half of class, we will all take clean sheets of paper and finalize our narratives, taking into account the suggestions made by peers and any other last revisions. Ideally, each member will write this clearly and neatly, so that it’s easily accessible to read for practice and during the performance, if necessary.
Then, during the second half of class, working with the same partner from the last week, who already has familiarity with the story, we will each practice performing our monologue/vignette/poem narratives. This will help us all to get comfortable with saying the story aloud, and working out the performance style, emphasis, and tone that the piece will take. This will help in the translation of the writer’s voice from the page to the performance, and smooth out any parts that seem inconsistent or unclear.
In preparation for the performance day the following week, the homework after this session will be to practice the performance daily, and think through different aspects of what performing means. Each member should write in her journal about what excites her and what makes her nervous about performing, and reflect on the process of creating a personal narrative to share with others.
The fourth and final week of this curriculum will be centered on the performance. Similarly to the second week of the curriculum, we will create a series of guidelines for the performances, including staying quiet during others’ performances, and keeping any personal information within the walls of the classroom. Once the guidelines are set, each member will draw a number to determine her place in order, so that the selection is as randomized as possible. The rest of the class, XCF and Bi-Co, will sit at the tables, set up in a U-shape, while the performer stands or sits in the center of the tables for her performance. If necessary, participants may read from their papers, or, if they have memorized the story, act it out more fully. As I’ve noticed in some previous weeks when opportunities for sharing and more minor performances have come up, some women from XCF have been reluctant to leave their seats, but I hope that, in this instance, we will create an environment where everyone will feel secure enough to stand or sit in the center as a culmination and display of their hard work on the project.
The final step in the curriculum will be a reflection on the project, and the process of developing a performative personal narrative. Specifically, we’ll focus on questions such as:
- What was your favorite/least favorite part of the process?
- What scared you about performing, if anything?
- How did this help you explore the meaning of your story?
- What did you learn about other members from their performances?
- What did you learn about yourself from your own performance?
We’ll discuss our answers to these questions after the performances, and also encourage participants to continue writing about and discussing these ideas outside of our classroom. At the end of this fourth class, the Bi-Co students will collect all the stories (but assure the XCF women that they will be brought back), and evenly distribute them amongst ourselves to type, along with our own stories. The next week, we will bring them back into XCF, bound, to give to the women there as a commemoration of the project and of our performances.
Rationale:
In conceptualizing this curriculum, the main question on my mind was, what does literacy mean in an adult, carceral space? In this literacy group that we have been developing, I think we’ve struggled some with what we actually mean when we talk about improving literacy. We’ve been broadly tasked with helping the XCF women prepare for the GED, but not all the women in the group are actually planning to take the test. We’ve also bristled a bit at this limited language of literacy, that characterizes many of these women as reading at an elementary school level–a patronizing, degrading rhetoric that does not meet them where they are. In that vein, we have worked to create a space where literacy is broader and more inclusive than just the critical reading section of the GED. We’ve brought in slam poetry, Greek mythology, and The House on Mango Street, a collection of vignettes that inspired this curriculum, jumping off from a storytelling exercise that we did about our names. We brought in composition notebooks (no metal spiral rings are allowed in prison) and encouraged the women to write on a variety of prompts similar to those listed above. One of my own goals for this semester is to create an appreciation of, and dedication to, reading and writing for all members of the group–Bi-Co and XCF alike. Creating a single, cohesive curriculum that spanned multiple weeks helped me to crystallize this objective, but our current style, planning week by week, allows us to react and improve on our plans as we go. Knowing that, I recognize that in implementing this, we might need to rethink some of the specifics, based on the feedback that we get from the XCF women and logistical realities, but hopefully, the shape of the project will hold.
Markus wrote about the crucial impact of a student’s identity as a learner–and while the context of her work was quite different than ours at XCF, the principle remains critical: in order to succeed in education, all students, of any age, must take pride in their learning and understand how it relates to their own identity. In our space, I think this identity is directly tied to owning our literacy, because, no matter what a test may say, every member of our group possesses a critical literacy. The focus of this curriculum, then, was to bring that literacy to the forefront of each participant’s identity, to create an innovative plan that would encourage us to own and share our stories in this carceral space–an enactment of literacy that averts the traditional modes of access to education. I looked to Campano’s discussion of the culture of performance created by Angelica as a model for invoking the identities and experiences of each participant in collaborating to create a meaningful presentation of all these interspersed identities–student, prisoner, woman, reader, writer, learner.
As things go in prison, it can be difficult to hold on to anything too tightly, because the bureaucracy and unpredictability of the system can sometimes set even the best-laid plans off track. And while I don’t think that education within the prison environment necessarily ought to be characterized as radical (and, on the contrary, I believe it should be more widespread), I do recognize that just gaining access to the classroom, in the most basic sense of the word, can be complicated. But, through implementing this curriculum successfully, I believe not only that we would create an innovative method of access to literacy, outside of the GED prep books, but also that our identities, as Bi-Co and XCF women, through this storytelling venture, would diverge and come together in new ways. While there are many differences to be seen and appreciated between our stories, we may also, through these exercises, see more of our fundamental similarities as women coming together to learn and take ownership of new modes of literacy.
Works Cited
Campano, G. (2007). Immigrant Students and Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
Markus, H. (2008). Identity matters: Ethnicity, Race, and the American dream. In M. Minow, R. Shweder & H. Markus, Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference (1st ed.). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.