November 13, 2014 - 01:52
For the past several weeks I have participated in a book club created by two professors and a handful students for the women of ABC prison. The women represent a wide variety of ages and ethnicities and most return to the book club sessions weekly. There is some turnover in participants as new people join while former members leave ABC, but the group overall has remained largely cohesive. Each session is about two hours, albeit with a significant amount of time lost to calling down to each cell block to ask for all the participants.
Although I call my ideas for sessions a “lesson plan” the book club itself is not necessarily grounded in the didactic. Rather the goal is to engender critical thought about the text through the use of facilitated discussions, individual writing activities, and the incorporation of secondary text and articles to provide a lens through which to critique a work. Furthermore, discussions of text material can be expanded to include the larger world and its systems as a whole. There is no real hierarchy created as far as teacher/student relations and efforts are made to minimize the disparate power held by outsiders versus insiders. The voices of the women participants take precedence: this book group was designed with them in mind and therefore their voices, thoughts, and feelings carry the most weight.
My goal in designing this curriculum of sorts is to use various literary works to open the space up to larger questions of justice and the status quo. I do not plan to actively incorporate themes of incarceration in either reading selections or discussion topics and instead hope to help facilitate the direction of conversations in that direction while still operating so as to make the voice of the women paramount. I plan to use several weeks of group readings, guided discussions, and writing activities to engage with these topics, and then have the curriculum culminate in letting the women design their own curricula. In that lest step I hope to subvert the traditional power structures by creating a space where the women can exercise agency and autonomy without the usual threat of reprisal on the part of the prison system.
In selecting which novel and short stories to read I tried to identify literary works with which the women could identify: losing power and agency to another person and the feeling of being controlled; being moved to a new, foreign, and at times hostile environment; alienation; the brutality of a society devoid of choices or options; finding even little ways to fight back against oppressive systems; making a home, a family, and a community even when doing so seems impossible; finding hope and strength in even the darkest of places. Each week the women will read a short story or section of a novel and when we meet as a group time will be spent reading passages, discussing the text, and writing responses based on themes to do with the reading. All meetings will begin with introductions and a go-around to open up the space. This lesson plan spans six weeks, or six sessions total, each of which lasts two hours.
Lesson Plan
Week One: The first week will start with Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper. We will spend the first hour reading the story together, since it is relatively short, and opening up discussions about the text. I chose Gillman’s work because I believe that the main character and narrator, an unnamed women with postpartum depression confined to her bedroom by her husband/doctor, because I think the themes of isolation, power dynamics, and underlying feminist discourse will really strike a chord with the women–although not at first. The narrator, a rather a well-off white woman, would arguably seem at first glance very different from the women in the room, and syntactically the story does show its age. However, I hope through discussion to draw connections between the women’s experiences in dealing with power relations and patriarchy, both inside and outside the prison, through in-depth discussion. I also plan to talk a bit about the context of Gillman’s writing and the work she did as a feminist. From the discussion I plan to segue into a writing activity. I would ask the women to spend ten to fifteen minutes writing about a time when they felt trapped, either physically or mentally, by someone or something else. The last part of the meeting will be spent sharing and discussing people’s responses. Before the women leave, they will receive a copy of The Poisonwood Bible, the novel which the next few weeks will be spent discussing.
Weeks Two-Five: The next three weeks will be spent reading The Poisonwood Bible, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver. The novel chronicles the Prices, a family of six, who move from Georgia to Kilanga, a village in Belgian Congo, at the behest patriarch, Nathan. As a minister, Nathan hopes to convert and baptize the natives in an attempt to “save” them, forcing the rest of his family to move and somehow adapt to such a radically difference environment.
For the first week with this novel the women will read to the end of Book One, which details the family’s arrival and first attempts to adapt to Kilanga. We will start by checking in about how the book is going, what the women like/do not like, how far everyone has read, and give an overview of the book’s beginning: who the characters are, where they are, what they are doing, etc. Then we will re-read together two parts of the section that details the moments of the family’s arrival, part from Adah’s point of view and part from Rachel’s. Adah offers a more objective description of the village, recounting its appearance, the people, and what she observes. Rachel, by contrast, reacts with horror to the village and the people, focusing on things like the body odor she smells and the rather decrepit church. By contrasting these two passages, I want to start a discussion about perception and how different people can understand the same reality in very different ways. I also want to discuss how much someone can trust a narrator and the role of bias in description. For a writing activity, I want the women to write about a time when they were thrust into a new and maybe very uncomfortable or strange situation. I want them to describe that situation either as an Adah–greater objectivity and what perceptions and intimations they can glean–or as a Rachel–intensely critical and judgmental, focusing on everything wrong with a new environment. The women will then share and discuss their writings.
The second week will focus on the first half of Book Two, which describes the Prices trying to adapt to their new home. In this section I want to highlight Nathan’s cultural insensitivity and failed attempts to convert the natives by maintaining an attitude of dominance. Nathan allows no space for questioning or compromise and even refuses to let his own wife have any voice in what happens in their family. I want to connect this section of the novel to The Yellow Wallpaper and discussions of power dynamics and patriarchy and the damage that such dynamics can cause. As a writing activity the women will write a letter to one of the characters in the book, advising them of what to do.
The third week with this novel will focus on the second half of Book Two, stopping at “Exodus.” In this section the women finally stand up to Nathan: Orleanna, the mother, resolves to be a coward no more and openly defies her husband for the first time and Leah, once the most ardent supporter of Nathan’s religious ideals, eschews her father’s narrow ideas of what is right and moral and of religion. Original power dynamics are overturned left and right as Nathan loses his position as arbiter of power for the Prices, the women of the family build connections with the people of Kilanga instead of continuing Nathan’s practice of asserting western dominance, and even village traditions are challenged as Leah becomes the first women ever allowed to participate in a hunting ritual. I want the discussion of this section to begin with examining what happens when power structures are dismantled–is challenging the status quo a good thing? a bad thing? Are power structures important? How do these power structures play out in everyday life? The session will finish with a writing activity in which the women write about a time they tried to stand up for themselves and challenge someone or something’s power.
The final week with The Poisonwood Bible will cover the the novel’s ending, the Price women’s flight from Kilanga and their lives since. All find different ways to adapt to and make a home in the world, split up by circumstance and further divided by differing ideologies. The part I want to focus on most, however, is the final chapter narrated by the long-deceased Ruth May. Ruth May describes what is basically the butterfly effect, how small choices and occurrences can dramatically alter the course of history and shape where one’s life ends. She also forgives her mother for the circumstances that led to her death at just five years old. The majority of time will be spent in discussion about the book’s ending: what the women think, what they want to take away from this novel, what is important. Finally, in the last twenty minutes, I will outline the plan for the next meeting. In the last session of my curriculum plan I want the women to assume the role of teachers and facilitators, leading the discussions and deciding what to write about. I will then pass out two short stories, of which they will pick one to discuss.
Week Six: In this last meeting the women will be in charge of running the discussion and organizing activities. The previous week I will have distributed copies of two short stories, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, which details a town that holds an annual Hunger Games-like lottery where the chosen person is stoned to death by the townspeople, and The Egg by Andy Weir, which discusses the meaning of life and life after death. Before the session the women are to have read both short stories as decided as individuals which they want to talk discuss. In the first hour the women will be divided into two groups based on which story they chose and they have that hour to create a short lesson plan: discussion topic(s), a writing activity, or a short passage to read, for example. This will be done with the support of the book club outside organizers. After that hour the groups will teach each other. The second hour will be split evenly with each group having about twenty minutes to lead a discussion and an activity. The goal here is to put power back into the women’s hands and let them take control of the room. Both The Yellow Wallpaper and The Poisonwood Bible deal with power dynamics, the loss of power, and the (re)discovering of personal agency, themes I see as very relevant to a carceral setting where there exists such a wide gap between those with power and those without. Furthermore, this book club is meant to open up a space outside of those prison power dynamics but if we as outsiders always determine the course of the discussion and plan the lessons I find our actions rather hypocritical.
Rationale
Why Book Club? A prison is most likely one of the last places one would typically think of as the site of a book club, however, a place like ABC prison seems to me like the perfect place to organize such a group. Carceral settings offer limited educational opportunities to inmates: most offer General Educational Development (GED) classes for those looking to achieve a certificate of high school equivalency and possibly pursue higher education as well as some form of pre-GED educational level for those still improving literacy and math skills, but few if any programs exist for those who have already surpassed the GED level or whose focus is not on earning some sort of certificate. The book club, then, provides an outlet for educational discourse. The book club can also function as a sort of “second classroom.” Coined by Gerald Campano, the second classroom “runs parallel to, and I sometimes in the shadow of, the official first classroom. It is an alternative, pedagogical space. It develops organically by following students’ leads, interests, desires, forms of cultural expression and especially stories. It is part of regular instructional hours, but it also occurs before school, after school, during recess, during lunch and occasionally on weekends” (Campano 2006). For Campano, the second classroom exists outside of the normal structure of the primary classroom, the locus of basic instruction, and offers students greater autonomy and more room for discussion. Much of the same can be said for the book club. Though it may not exactly be a “classroom” the setting of the larger prison serves as that locus of instruction, the source of ultimate structure in the margins of which the book club exists. For those three hours gone is the rigidity of prison as the space opens up to include the voices and thoughts and feelings of all present.
Radical Reading However, the book club’s goals are not purely pedagogical. As touched on above, carceral settings function to isolate and restrict and create power dynamics that place the women of ABC at the bottom of the pyramid. Book club creates a space to challenge those realities. Much of the rhetoric around prisons and the prison system focus on what is wrong: the “bad things” inmates must have done to end up there, problems of crime and unsafe streets, the evils of the prison industrial complex and the era of mass incarceration, the stigma of the identity of “convict” or “ex-convict” on the outside. Former inmate of the New York prison system, Kathy Boudin recalls “I found the primary tendency of the system was to define me as a prisoner,” a designation that inhibited her own efforts to build critical literacy and AIDS education on the inside (quoted in Scott 2013). Moreover, applying the blanket identity of “inmate” or “prisoner” erases the identities and experiences of each individual and reduces a person to an object-like state where they become defined by their prison sentence. Book club, then, offers a (safe) space to challenge that erasure by the hegemonic prison industrial complex. “The radical potential of the prison classroom is realized in the unfolding of new pathways and discourses of change,” writes Scott, but “a radical transformation of the system will not come in the form of an answer from the outside” (2013). To begin the process of bringing about change one must foreground the identities and experiences of those on the inside. Seemingly simple discussions about a chapter of a novel can provide the spark for deep conversation about the nature of society and raise specific questions of how and why the prison industrial complex exists and function, but those conversations are a direct product of the women and come from a place of lived experience rather than isolated outside agitation.
Works Cited
Campano, Gerald. Immigrant Students and Literacy: Reading, Writing, and Remembering. New York: Teachers College, 2007. Print.
Scott, Robert. "From Merely Having Intense Experiences While Teaching in PrisonRadical Teaching." Proquest (2014). Web. 26 Nov. 2014.
Literature Used for Lessons
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Champaign, Ill.: Project Gutenberg, 2008. Print.
Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." New Yorker 26 June 1948. Print.
Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Print.
Weir, Andy. "The Egg." Creative Writings of Andy Weir. 1 Jan. 2012. Web. 12 Nov. 2014. <http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html>.