Lessons from Teaching in Prison: Part II, the Students
So you’ve signed up to teach an Adult Continuing Education (ACE) class at your institution. You show up to your first class with all of your materials and your full class curriculum going through your head. As you walk into your assigned classroom, what do you see?
For a first time instructor at any institution, much less in a prison environment, it can be an anxiety-inducing experience to meet your students for the first time. When you add the pressures inherent to interacting with others in prison, there is even more uncertainty and stress. Who are the men sitting in front of you, and what do they expect from you? What will the next 6 to 12 sessions be like and how will you need to adjust your content and teaching style to engage the bored-looking young man sitting in the back of the class? How about the skeptical older gentleman giving you the eye from the middle of the room? And is the bright-eyed student sitting attentively front-and-center right in front of you encouraging, or maybe a bit concerning?
Based on my experience teaching a number of ACE courses at a low-security institution, you will see all of these faces every time you start a new course term, but just remember: they all signed up for YOUR course. They all chose to spend a couple hours a week with you, and are looking to you to teach them something new, or give them some insights on a topic that they are curious or interested in. Some may have signed up just to have something to do, get some credits to help their prison records, or just to spend some time in the air conditioning (if your education building has A/C), but make sure to give all of your students the benefit of the doubt, and you will find amazing students where you may have least expected it.
A bit of background on me that I left out of my first blog – my experiences in teaching have stretched from being a teaching assistant in graduate school (teaching aspiring physical therapists, physicians, and fellow PhDs), to my years in the Biotech and Pharmaceutical industry presenting information to patients, nurses, and physicians (as well as hundreds of sales reps over the years). I’ve had to learn to tailor my content and approach to various audiences, thinking about their backgrounds and learning objectives, making sure to connect the content as much as possible to their daily experiences. This is definitely a skill that comes into play when teaching ACE classes in prison. You can’t take anything for granted when it comes to who may be sitting in your class, as you will have students who may not have completed high school sitting next to students who have advanced degrees. You may have students who have never had steady employment interacting with students who had 20-year careers. You’ll also have to juggle inner-city backgrounds with others who have only ever known a sedate, middle-class suburban existence and make your content relevant and interesting to everyone in the room.
It makes for an interesting environment for class discussion, and that is where some of the most valuable time can be spent in each class, so make sure to plan for questions and stay open to productive discussions where appropriate. Please note “where appropriate” – there can be a tendency in some classes, depending on the individuals in the class, for discussion to wander away from the curriculum that you have planned, and it is vital that you keep control of the room and the topics. This is one area that every instructor can benefit from more practice, and prison ACE classes will provide plenty of opportunity for practice. This is also the area where any ACE instructor will need to make sure they are properly prepared to address difficult portions of the class and/or ready to admit when something may be out of their area of expertise. Remember that skeptical-looking gentleman? Class discussion is where he will poke at your content and test your expertise, so don’t get caught making anything up, and plan for times where you’ll need to steer things back on course.
Class discussion is also the time when you (and the rest of the class) will get the most out of your time together. All of those different backgrounds and levels of experience make for a discussion environment that you may not get anywhere else. Viewpoints will be shared that would never come up otherwise, and everyone can get fresh, new insights on your topic. Just keep in mind to keep a firm hand on the subject matter (always avoid religion and politics) and also keep in mind the interests of everyone in the room – it’s never good to engage half of the room and lose the other half. As long as your class sees you as the fellow inmate who is taking time to share your experience and knowledge with them while working to engage and understand their viewpoints, you’ll gain their respect and get the best from each of your students.
To close, I’d like share a personal experience from one of the first classes I taught in prison. It was one of my Creative Writing classes, and I had the usual mix of students who were 1) just wanting to get some tips on general writing (perhaps to help with their legal work or letter writing), 2) aspiring novelists and journalists who had already written up complete chapters or even whole books prior to the class, or 3) guys just wanting to get some course credits. Throughout the course, I had a good mix of interaction with everyone in the class and almost everyone had opened up and read something they had written for the class to critique. Yes, the guys in group 2 had the most questions and the most developed writing samples for the group, and yes, the guys in group 1 had more general questions and didn’t benefit as much from the parts of my course that dealt with character development and writing interesting dialogue, but the most memorable comment I received was near the end of the term from one of the guys in group 3.
I usually start the course with an intro session that includes the “why did you sign up for this course” question, and and like to end the course with a quick “what did you get out of this course” session. I had appreciated this one student’s honesty in admitting that he had signed up for the course just to get credits, and throughout the course, he had sat at the back of the room and didn’t participate as much as the other students, but he had attended every class, and had payed attention the entire time. When I asked him what he had gotten out of the class, his reply made all of the effort I had put into the class worth it: “Yeah, I signed up for this course just to get more ACE credits, but now I’m thinking about writing a little kids book for my daughter that I have never seen (since he had been locked up just prior to her birth), and I want to thank you for giving me the tools to do something I never thought I would do.”
If that doesn’t make you want to keep teaching, I don’t know what else would.
OK, I’ve covered some of my thoughts on why teaching is good for the teacher, and how teaching in prison can be a rewarding experience in terms of the student interactions, so I’ll end with the final part of how teaching in prison is good for the inmate community. Thanks to all for reading!
