Abstract
An article in which two teaching assistants and six students of a university course taught inside a correctional facility, "Writing as Activism," collaboratively examine their experience as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom. Fostered and framed by their instructor’s critical and transformative pedagogical approaches in this course, the authors locate integrated learning and collaborative writing within carceral classrooms as sites for intentional and resistant futures to be enacted and embodied as a practice of post-carceral world-building. The students enter their individual narratives into this location of their experience of envisioning and enacting resistant futures together in this space as a student movement dedicated and equipped to bring a world beyond prison into being.
References
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). London: Bloomsbury
Academic.
Giroux, H. (2004). When hope is subversive. Tikkun, 19, 62-64.
Hall, B. J., Cates, R. M., & Reitenauer, V. L. (2019). Out of time: Accomplices in post-carceral
world-building. Humanities, 8(2). doi.org/10.3390/h8020064.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London:
Routledge.
hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. London: Routledge.
hooks, b. (2009). Teaching critical thinking: Practical wisdom. London: Routledge.
Inside-Out Problem Statement. (n.d). Retrieved from
http://www.insideoutcenter.org/about-problem-statement.html
Jacobs, D. (2005). What’s hope got to do with it? Toward a theory of hope and pedagogy. JAC
, 783-802.
Jensen, D. (2005). Walking on Water: Reading, writing, and revolution. White River Junction,
VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
Larson, D. (2017). Witness in the era of mass incarceration: Discovering the ethical prison.
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Series in Law, Culture, and the Humanities;
Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Mathieu, P. (2005). Tactics of hope: The public turn in English composition. Portsmouth:
Boynton/Cook Publishers.
Pompa, L. (2011). Breaking down the walls. In Stephen J. Hartnett (Ed.), Challenging the
Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives (pp. 253-272).
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Reitenauer, V. (2019). 'A practice of freedom': Self-grading for liberatory learning. Radical
Teacher, Vol. 113, p. 103-105.
Rich, A. (1977). Claiming an education. Retrieved from
http://www.yorku.ca/cvandaal/files/ClaimingAnEducation.pdf.
Schaefer Hinck, S. & Scheffels, E.L. (2015). Transforming argumentative dialogue
through prison service-learning projects. Argumentation & Advocacy, 51(3), 200–213.
Smith, C. (2017). Complex sentences: Searching for the purpose of education inside a
Massachusetts state prison. Harvard Educational Review, 87(1), 81-98.
Wells, I. (2014). “No hostages through these doors”: Thomas Bartlett Whitaker’s “Hell’s
kitchen” and the politics of PEN. Canadian Review of American Studies, 44(3), 471-499.