Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023)
Advocates for Education in Prison-Based Writing Centers
Julie Wilson
Warren Wilson College
jwilson@warren-wilson.edu
Abstract
Prison-based writing centers are needed to support the academic achievement of college students who are incarcerated. This study describes the author’s work designing a writing studio to support credit-bearing courses in a women’s prison. I used a qualitative action research design combining scholarship, observations, surveys, and interviews with iterative practice. I approached the work with a generalist tutoring mindset based in my campus-based center’s work, but found that students needed access to course-based expertise in an isolating environment with scarce resources. Scholarship and interviews revealed pitfalls educators can bring to prison-based writing programs, including pressures to adapt to the prison’s “rehabilitative” mindset and unexamined low academic expectations. Also revealed was the expertise of incarcerated students in surviving this dehumanizing environment and recognizing their own academic needs. Recognizing this expertise, established programs successfully employ incarcerated students who also have academic credibility with their peers, as peer tutors. To improve our program, we initiated more communication with faculty to anticipate students’ needs for resources and to answer students’ questions more directly. Also, we created ways for students to have some degree of control over their sessions, through signing up for sessions in advance and moving between independent work and sessions in a computer lab. Whatever tutors a program uses, it needs to recognize their knowledge and use training to complement that knowledge. All writing centers can learn from the voices herein that we must create room in our spaces for students to advocate for their education.
Introudction
“Higher education in prison is not for the fainthearted,” writes Rebecca Ginsburg, director of the Education Justice Project at the University of Illinois. “There is much at stake…. College in prison is not inherently beneficial or righteous. To be honest, a poorly designed or implemented program can do more harm than good” (Ginsburg xiv). In 2016, I offered to expand our writing studio in support of a colleague’s initiative to offer courses in a nearby women’s prison. A writing center to support college courses in prison seemed, to use Ginsburg’s words, “inherently beneficial” in assisting incarcerated students to complete their writing assignments outside of class. But time would show that, just as writing centers on campus do not serve all students equitably without continuous reflection and action, our prison-based writing center needed careful attention and revision to successfully respond to the varied experiences of incarcerated students.
Each and every incarcerated student faces a difficult climb in achieving an education within a system that suppresses critical inquiry, access to resources, and equal humanity. But within the constancy of confinement, individuals have varied educational backgrounds and goals. The challenge writing centers in prisons face is in generating methods that address systemic barriers to learning, without flattening the incarcerated student into a generic victim of the system who needs our help to flourish. This is a challenge made visible to outsiders by the concrete features of the setting—the guarded and surveilled entrances and exits; the uniforms, lockdowns, and label of “offenders” that incarcerated students endure. But it’s a challenge that extends to our campus-based spaces as well: how to develop tutoring methods that serve disenfranchised populations without flattening students into problems we can solve.¹
How does a writing center successfully support the academic goals of incarcerated students? I sought to answer this question through a qualitative action research process. Action research is a research paradigm whereby educators develop research questions based in their teaching context, employ varied methodologies to answer those questions, and feed their findings back into their teaching (Pine). Action research is situated—whereby researchers recognize the unique context of their work and are cautious to claim generalizability of their findings—and collaborative: “by, with, of, and for people, rather than on people” (Pine 31).
In essence, the research has accompanied our prison-based writing center’s design and redesign. The faculty director had initiated a partnership with a state-run minimum security women’s prison in a semi-rural setting close to our campus, offering two credit-bearing courses each semester from different departments. The program is based on the National Inside-Out model, that brings non-incarcerated students into prison to study alongside incarcerated students; additionally, we were committed to all students receiving college credit for the experience and obtained grant funding to make that possible. My piece of the partnership was to develop writing center support for the incarcerated students to match what is available on campus.
To give a brief overview of the methodology with details to be filled in later, in fall 2017, I based the initial design on our campus writing center. After some missteps, in spring 2018, I collected anonymous surveys from 14 students and interviewed 39 stakeholders in our program (students, teachers, prison staff, tutors, director). I also sent out a survey about academic support on several professional listservs and interviewed 29 educators who responded to the survey. After transcribing and coding interviews and surveys, in Fall 2019 I channeled findings into a collaborative redesign, which worked until March 2020 when we had to leave the prison due to COVID, and which starting in January 2022 we are reviving. My study was approved by my college’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), and I followed research guidelines of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to which my institution’s college-in-prison program is connected. These guidelines helped me to carry out my research ethically through the practice of transparency regarding my research topic and goals, informed consent with the ability of participants to withdraw their consent, the use of pseudonyms to protect participants’ privacy, and where possible collaboration in the interpretation of findings: I shared a draft of my findings with participants and asked for their feedback.
This article represents a slice of my findings from these three years of work. To situate readers, I begin with framing commentary about the U.S. carceral system, college-in-prison programs, and writing centers. Next, I merge interview data with published scholarship to describe pitfalls that writing educators can face in prisons, and to describe programs that successfully resist these pitfalls in part by involving incarcerated students as tutors. Where possible, I prioritize accounts by system impacted scholars, who combine academic and lived experience. Then, I describe our program’s first three years, again with an emphasis on student perspectives. I end with brief thoughts about what the writing center field as a whole can learn from what may seem at first glance a sidebar to our work.
Why writing centers need to do this work
Our country has the highest incarceration rate in the world, 2.2 million people or 0.86% of the population in 2016 (Gramlich). When people leave prison, they face lifelong “collateral consequences” past the length of their sentence, with diminished post-incarceration access to life necessities including employment, education, housing, public benefits, and voting rights (Alexander; Vesely-Flad). The US carceral system disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic people, especially Black men (Gramlich), as well as people from low wealth backgrounds (Forman) and LGBTQ people (A. Jones). While the overall incarceration rate has declined over the last decade, the incarceration of women is on the rise (Sentencing Project). Most incarcerated women have a history of victimization and trauma, as well as related mental health and substance use disorders (Sawyer). If one believes that the carceral system is flawed but necessary, that it segregates dangerous and immoral people from good and law-abiding ones, it may be possible to swallow these uncomfortable facts. However, if one instead examines how prisons disproportionately house Black, brown, poor, and LGBTQ people; if one reflects on gender-based victimization and trauma; then one must reject the fundamental premise that prison separates good and evil and instead see that the prison is a mirror of systemic racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism in society, and that for many people the traumatic prison environment fills in for our society’s lack of a basic social safety net. The collateral consequences associated with incarceration mean that preexisting inequalities are often exacerbated post-release.
Colleges and universities must not ignore the nearly one percent of our adult population who are behind bars, their need to pursue education and work upon reentry (for those who do leave prison in their lifetimes), nor the massive system whose complexities system impacted² individuals can help others understand. Ginsburg writes, “By providing opportunity for accreditation, leadership development, and the accumulation of cultural capital… for incarcerated scholars; and by creating pathways that can lead to enrollment in college upon release, college-in-prison programs can play a role in… comprehensive efforts to change the American system of incarceration” (5). College classrooms are rare spaces in prison where “inmates” become “students” and can sharpen critical thinking, communication, and collaboration skills toward the kind of societal leadership that Ginsburg describes. James Davis, who graduated from Wesleyan University while in prison states, “I cannot overemphasize how problematic it is for the socioeconomically disadvantaged to be unable to articulate their reality” (10). Of his college experience, Davis writes,
It is special to be within this harsh prison environment and be able to experience, even momentarily, some semblance of normalcy. There is also a positive culture within that community that is entirely different from the culture in general population. In the classroom space ideas are shared and debated, intellectual growth is fostered, and friendships can transcend prison and the normal prison routine of separation.
Davis’s words speak to how prized intellectual spaces can be in a punitive setting where distrust, surveillance, and segregation are the norm. College-in-prison programs can’t redeem mass incarceration, but their presence is a step forward: a space for people inside to articulate their own reality, form relationships with others on the basis of shared intellectual pursuits, and gain credentials to, in the words of Michelle Jones, who produced groundbreaking historical scholarship while in prison, “interpret the lived experience of incarceration and synthesize its individual impact and societal consequences to academia and the world” (108).
Writing centers play a small but vital role in ensuring college-in-prison programs offer an education equivalent to their out-of-prison counterparts. In 2018, an estimated 270 colleges and universities offered credit-bearing courses in prisons (Castro et al.). With Congress restoring Pell Grant access to incarcerated students in December 2020, this number will grow. Erin Castro and Mary Gould argue that college-in-prison programs should be evaluated, not on whether they reduce recidivism rates as is common, but on standard collegiate learning outcomes such as communication and critical thinking. Yet, writing tools and supports are highly limited in carceral settings (Castro and Gould; Jones).
Writing centers need to put themselves forward as collaborators to emerging or established college-in-prison programs and seek resources and training to sustain this work. Writing centers have had mixed success in responding effectively to the needs of students with identities underrepresented in higher education. In Out in the Center, Denny et al. identify that writing centers are both marginalized on college campuses and also often marginalizing of students across race, multilingualism, gender, sexuality, faith, class, and disability. We are presented with a dual call to action: to create more pluralistic spaces through open conversation and critique, and to seek and embrace leadership opportunities that move writing center work beyond our spaces. Both of these orientations are essential for writing centers partnering with college-in-prison programs. We must deeply appreciate intersectionality in identities, to look beyond incarceration as “the identifier that appears as most legible on… bodies” (Denny et al.) to incarcerated students as whole, complex human beings, with multiple facets to their identities that can come into play in the writing center. Simultaneously, we need to stretch beyond what I would call a kind of passivity inherent in writing center methods—wait for students to come to us, wait for students to show us their assignments, wait for students to state their goal—and instead become proactive collaborators with prison-based faculty, preparing specific, relevant assistance that in a resource-poor and isolated setting will equip incarcerated students to excel as writers.
key themes from literature and interviews
“Staying in Our Own Lane” as Academics
On the most foundational level, writing center practitioners need to be clear in our minds, against sometimes great pressures, that we serve the college, not the prison. That our aims are academic, not rehabilitative (Ginsburg). That we serve, not “inmates” or “offenders,” but students (Inside-Out 10-11). This clarity of purpose and a person-centered mindset must guide all of our communications.
Similarly, we need to enter prisons as educators, not saviors or charity workers (Ginsburg). Castro and Gould recognize that many people assume education serves fundamentally different purposes in prison; college-in-prison programs are inevitably measured by a unique statistic: their impact on recidivism. But for educators to judge a program’s success solely by its impact on recidivism is to buy into the purported rehabilitative function of the carceral system (Castro and Gould; Ginsburg). Such thinking skews the purposes of a college education, turns students into broken, flawed human beings that classrooms can fix. It doesn’t help, Ginsburg notes, that most college educators are white, and in many prisons, students are people of color.
The literally centuries long legacy of domination makes it difficult for middle-class whites to avoid approaching African-Americans, in particular, without a gloss of paternalism and what has come to be called a ‘white savior’ complex. A rehabilitation framework slides easily into the narrative that people of color are almost by definition in need of help, and that white people can and should provide it. (Ginsburg 6-7)
Educators can resist rehabilitation and savior narratives in part by differentiating their purposes from the prison’s. Ginsburg writes, “It is easy and tempting to adopt the rhetoric of criminal justice reform and crime prevention…. I encourage instructors and program administrators to stay in our own lane” (6).
A boundary around academic life can be tricky to maintain in the arena of writing instruction. If college-in-prison programs are to be excellent, students must write for many purposes and audiences and with increasing levels of complexity, just as they would on campus (Berry). However, there is a strong tradition of autobiographical writing in prisons. In literacy programs, personal narratives do often empower writers, producing what Tobi Jacobi calls “small ruptures” in a system that would render them voiceless. But emphasizing personal writing in college courses could obscure the multiplicity of academic writing, and perhaps play into a rehabilitative mindset if educators, intentionally or not, ask students to describe their life trajectories including some kind of transformation in prison. In an interview, Logan Middleton, coordinator of writing workshops with the University of Illinois’ Education Justice Project, explained:
In terms of the types of writing [college] students are being asked to do, and given the range of where students want to go after–some want to pursue college on the outside, some don't–I guess a concern that I have about success and what that might look like going forward, is, will students think that writing looks a certain way, or embodies certain characteristics that aren't necessarily valorized or prioritized on the outside? I get very concerned about prison narratives, and students being encouraged to write into more redemptive arcs that plant some not great stereotypes about incarcerated folks.
On a related note, in an interview Ann Green who teaches in Saint Joseph University’s college-in-prison program said if she were to bring tutors into a prison, she would screen against judgmental or self-aggrandizing attitudes. “I would want to avoid a student who was interested in fixing either the prison system or the prisoners, mostly the prisoners, a person who would attribute incarceration to illiteracy in a really simplistic way.” Green’s observation is a critical insight for writing centers looking to recruit and train tutors whose goals align with an academic focus.
The ‘Wow! Factor’ and Upholding High Expectations
In addition to avoiding the rehabilitative “lane,” educators need to steer away from the pitfall of low expectations, frequently revealed in prison settings when educators express surprise at the intellectual gifts they encounter. Andra Slater calls this common reaction the “Wow! Factor.” Slater describes seeing this while a student inside, for example when a visitor from the university said, “Don’t take offense to this, but you guys are really intelligent.” Slater writes, “While I imagine this guest had good intentions, his ignorance regarding our academic capability as incarcerated people was revealed in his statement.” Slater continues:
Even the most enlightened among [non-incarcerated people] may uncritically bring with them perceptions and stereotypes about who inhabits these spaces. They may believe that incarcerated people, even if implicated in a discriminatory system of mass incarceration, are not smart, let alone, intellectual. Notions of race, ethnicity, and class likely tie into why educators underestimate the intellect of incarcerated minority students. (25)
It’s not just educators who need to unlearn expectations. Many incarcerated students enter college courses doubting they can achieve. Among traumas that incarcerated students have experienced are educational traumas: in educator Em Daniels’ words, “emotional and spiritual wounds inflicted during the process of learning, as students are shamed for HOW they learn” (39). Daniels writes, “The spectrum of educational trauma, which includes standardized testing, bullying, and chemical restraints…is a major factor in students’ entry into the prison pipeline” (Gray as cited in Daniels 55). BIPOC students and disabled students are particularly targeted by school disciplinary policies that lead students from public schools into the carceral system (Daniels).
Students need opportunities to rebuild confidence in educational settings, which educators can do by pairing high expectations with trusting in students’ abilities and providing high levels of connection and support. In reflecting on what our students need, our program director Rima Vesely-Flad calls confidence “the engine that moves you forward....Work that involves thinking, reflecting, and strategizing demands starting with a level of confidence that you can actually do it, that you trust yourself, that other people trust you.” Salt Lake City Community College English professor Jessie Szalay explained that her writing classes begin with “confidence building” in the power of one’s own critical thinking.
One of my goals is... helping students feel that sense that they have … a right to share their opinions, that they have a right to write them down, to analyze how other writers work, and share not just what they think of it, but how they see it working, to evaluate it and analyze it critically, that their opinions matter. Because students in any population will struggle, but this especially if they haven’t had great experiences in school before…. If that confidence building isn’t done early on and continuously, they are more likely to just shut down.
Once she realized her students needed more support, Szalay advocated to her department chair for funding to hold office hours in the prison. This type of effort fosters “connection” between educators and students, which Em Daniels states is essential to mitigating educational trauma and building positive classroom experiences.
From a three-year national study of college programs in prisons, two of eight recommendations for improving student outcomes involve writing and academic support: improvement of student readiness for college-level coursework, especially around reading and writing skills, and enhancement of peer support networks (Meyer et al.). Starting a writing center in a prison to accompany a college-in-prison program is a necessary step toward students achieving at the same level as their non-incarcerated peers. Without a writing center, faculty may feel reluctant to enforce high standards because they see students without adequate resources or academic preparation to achieve. Students may face an even more isolating college experience, with minimal access to teachers, classmates, and resources outside class.
“Building with Someone” and Experienced Students as Mentors
While writing centers have essential expertise, we must build programs that empower experienced students and alumni of college-in-prison programs to use their layered expertise to guide new students. As an established program, the Bard Prison Initiative has a powerful mentor network between its bachelor’s and associate’s degree programs (College Behind Bars). In looking at how such programs begin, I am drawn to the writing center in University of North Park’s master’s program at Stateville Correctional Center, where graduate students who are incarcerated train to become writing advisors. Writing Center director Melissa Pavlik and three writing advisors have documented this work in recent publications. They describe the valuable expertise of inside students in translating writing center pedagogy for their environment. Writing advisor Rayon Sampson likens scaffolding to a preexisting concept in the prison of “building with someone…. I am not sure where this term is derived from, but it is commonly used when cellmates bond or engage in conversations to get to know each other better.”
Also from North Park, writing advisors Benny Rios and Scott Moore address the necessity of extracurricular group discussions and the structural limitations on such gatherings. Moore writes,
Not only is there a very strict sense of the actual time you have to learn from the teacher, but class can also be cut short at any moment if a lockdown occurs. Then there is the issue of students spread throughout different housing units, so once class is over you have limited contact with most peers until the following week….That is why there is such a premium put on the hour you have with classmates in the chow hall before you are escorted to the school building each week.
During chow, it is not uncommon to be part of a group consisting of seven or eight peers brainstorming ideas or discussing the best approach to a writing assignment. Everyone’s point of view is respected, and the informal setting provides a laid-back environment.
Recognizing the value of collaborative discussions among peers, Rios argues that students need more than just class and mealtimes. His understanding of communication networks inside the prison leads him to an idea for the center’s expansion.
In prison… we deal with… an authority that has absolute control over what goes on and puts security as its highest priority…. There is no way to decentralize the authority of the prison administration; as a result, we are confronted with barriers that include: 1) limited mobility for students; 2) no internet access; 3) limited access to the education building; 4) little communication with peers, tutors, and teachers; 5) no opportunities to work formally in small groups or hold conference aside from our weekly classes and study halls; 6) the possibility of lockdowns; and 7) stress caused by the prison environment….
One way to address limited mobility is to try to get permission from administration to allow students who reside in the same cell house opportunity for small group sessions on the first floor of the cell house or in the bullpen for an hour a day…. Another thing we could do is utilize letter writing to offer reader response and peer critiques to fellow peers within the same cell house with the help of inmate porters, workers who do custodial work in the cell house. (Rios 27-28)
Across several interviews, I heard suggestions for building a successful tutoring program with incarcerated peer tutors. First, tutors need to have academic credibility with their peers. One professor, who chose to remain anonymous, chooses teaching assistants (TAs) who have done well in her course, even sharing their papers with new students. She said, “I really think a lot of the benefit has been just assuring them that they are capable and they are prepared…. That goes a long way.” She also uses “outside TAs,” graduate students from her institution. “The grad TAs are very well-liked,” she says, “but there is something particularly helpful about having incarcerated students as TAs. They just get it. They are peers in a sense that is quite different.”
Second, tutors should be compensated. At Notre Dame, Matthew Capdevielle has been able to compensate writing center tutors with service-learning and academic credit, which supports degree completion and time off their sentence. A couple of interviewees said their TAs were employed through the prison and received prison wages.
Third, writing centers need to consider how employing inside tutors can affect interpersonal dynamics inside. One interviewee described the prohibition of anything appearing to be a personal relationship between a professor and a student; they navigated this by giving several names to prison staff and letting them choose a TA. Capdevielle spoke of not conferring a “superior status” on some students. “We want [being a peer tutor] to be something that [students] aspire to, but not something that kind of separates them from others in a way that might be lorded over others or just create an obstacle to their functioning well as a community.”
Our story
Our program takes place in a minimum-security state women’s prison. In Eastern Appalachia, the facility sits beside a small, forested mountain range and is ringed by tall, barbed-wire topped fences. The facility comprises a cluster of one-story buildings—dorms, chapel, cafeteria, gym, educational building, gatehouse—with grassy spaces and walkways in between, and several garden beds.
The nearby college campus of Warren Wilson, whose writing studio I have run for fourteen years, is a small private liberal arts college distinctive for our “Triad” curriculum of academics, work, and community engagement. Our program founder, Rima Vesely-Flad, worked here as a professor of Religious Studies after teaching at New York’s Sing-Sing Prison. She wanted to start a college-in-prison program here, and chose the model of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, where classes are mixed with non-incarcerated and incarcerated students. Vesely-Flad’s research has focused on the racist theological and philosophical texts that underpin wrong assumptions of criminality inside and virtuosity outside prison walls. With the prison where we operate being 80% white and 20% people of color, we recognize that here, race less visibly contributes to incarceration than do social class and gender; at the prison’s annual training for educators, we learn that almost all residents have experienced gender-based violence in their lifetimes.
Inside-Out allows both sets of students to face misconceptions of the “other” in the shared venture of being students. For the program to be equitable, Vesely-Flad committed to granting college credit for inside students, not positioning outside students as learning from inside students, but with. With college contributions and grant funds, we currently offer 8 academic credits (2-3 courses) each semester, with faculty from Creative Writing, Education, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Social Work, and Theater.
“Middlemen” and the Writing Studio’s First Iteration
In fall 2017, after two years of piloting non-credit-bearing reading/writing groups (while also meeting regularly with prison and college staff, and fundraising), we offered our first credit-bearing courses: Introduction to Creative Writing and Introduction to Social Work. For the several “inside” students who continued from our non-credit-bearing groups into the regular college courses, the shift in academic rigor was a bit of a shock. In the reading groups, written work had been exploratory rather than formalized, responded to rather than evaluated. We’d even published and celebrated a volume of students’ expressive work. The Social Work course introduced long formal assignments with lengthy guidelines and rubrics. In the Creative Writing course, some students found the caliber of work that had been celebrated in our informal groups was graded down. Inside students were stressed by not feeling like they had the knowledge or the resources to succeed at these new standards.
A writing center was what inside students in our program needed, but it took us a while to figure out what that would like—primarily because we quickly learned the model of generalist peer tutoring with undergraduates available back on our campus was not a great fit. Generalist peer tutoring proved inadequate in a setting where students had limited college background, and especially where other resources were scarce to non-existence. Inside students needed access to the expert knowledge of their faculty members; they needed additional references to support their studies; they needed computers. In a move that taught me as much about student resourcefulness as about writing centers’ blind spots, the inside students worked with me to orient our writing center time toward fulfilling their needs.
I did initially try peer writing assistance, recruiting several inside students who had some past exposure to college, a junior Social Work major from our campus, and a retired teacher who volunteered from the community. I showed up for our first training with photocopies of the first two chapters of the Longman Guide to Peer Tutoring and handouts on brainstorming and outlining: classic generalist texts I’d prepared for us to discuss. Our hours were announced over the loudspeaker, repeated twice as all announcements are. I pulled the six-foot tables into a rectangle so we could face one another in the small room whose one window faced the mountains. The pale walls were hung with flip chart paper from earlier meetings, with magic marker lists that on that day might have included a list of emotional reactions to stressful situations, side-by-side with calming or problem-solving strategies. Gradually, the others joined me.
“How do we write a paper in APA?”³ The peer tutors in the Social Work class did not want to discuss peer tutoring. They set down their notebooks, textbooks, and thick, detailed syllabuses. Their first writing assignment, the students informed me, in tones not without urgency and stress, was due in two weeks, and it required APA formatting.
I was not prepared for this opening gambit. On campus, students would rarely come in for a three-page paper due in two weeks. On campus, I don’t bother remembering APA; I look it up on Purdue OWL. I hadn’t spoken with the professors about their writing assignments for the courses because that’s not something I do on campus.
“I talked to my old GED teacher,” one student told me. “We looked through their reference books, but no luck.”
Another student pulled out some papers. “I asked the psychologist; she found this in one of her books.” Sure enough, APA guidelines.
“I can take this down to the GED classroom,” a third student said, “and make copies.”
My mind was racing: APA formatting can wait if you can look it up when you need it. Prioritize higher order concerns? The whole concept had never seemed so subjective.
In those early days at the prison, my mouth always felt dry, a sign I was nervous, a student told me. “I’ll bring more resources on APA next time,” I said.
In my embarrassment, I couldn’t absorb another lesson: the students had pulled together and solved their own problem. Knowing the environment and the resources available, scant though they were, was the key.
“I like that whenever you are in these classes, you feel like you’re in college,” Candace told me in an interview the following semester.⁴ She had been in that first group of peer tutors. “They are extra-special classes they have here in prison,” she said wryly. “They are mainly for rehabilitating you. These are classes you are getting credit for to get your degree. The material is college material.”
Candace and other students taught me, it was not only the shift from our reading/writing groups that surprised students, it was the shift from prior coursework in prison (e.g., horticulture, hospitality, personal finance, reentry programming). Our students had taken advantage of every program they could access, but many had not experienced Ginsburg’s academic lane.
Other students seldom came to our center hours, but the peer tutors and I evolved in the way we used our time. They wanted information and resources; I became the conduit. I found APA handouts, background articles on topics they were studying, I relayed their questions and their concerns to the faculty members. They passed on what they learned to other students.
“When we met together,” Candace remembered, “we could shoot off ideas to you and you shoot off ideas and collectively we decide what we need and what would be helpful [with whatever problem] we were having and whatever research we needed, and help us reach our potential… Even though the people didn’t come, we could go off into the community: ‘This is what we learned.’ Whenever someone brought a problem we hadn’t thought of then we could bring it down to you.”
“In a way that’s how our center functions on campus,” I said. “Students come with questions and, if we can’t answer them, we often point them to the librarians, or their professor. Like emissaries, or liaisons.”
“More like middlemen,” Candace said.
Halfway through that first semester, Vesely-Flad sat down with students to hear their feedback on the program. Some had real concerns about college writing, but they wanted someone whose authority they could trust. Several also seemed to find distasteful the idea that peers from their classes had been elevated to another kind of status in the classroom through the peer assistance program. One student mentioned that one of the peer tutors was always coming up offering to help her, even after she’d declined the help.
We realized, even though we had retooled the center, if it was serving just a few students, our writing center was inequitable. For the peer tutors and perhaps for the students in their social networks, we were a conduit for resources. For students outside their networks, we didn’t offer what they needed, or felt condescending.
In interviews in a subsequent semester, several students traced their skepticism of peer writing tutors to the fact that, for many college students in this prison, their prior educational background consisted of getting their GED in prison. Some felt that the GED was not a strong preparation for collegiate writing. Marcia, who had completed her GED in prison and was now taking one of our college classes, shared her sense of the gap. “In GED, when we did writing, the teacher… made sure the sentences were complete, the grammar. These [college] grades are based on the ideas of the class.” Another student was adamant about tutors needing significant college background. She stated, “I’m not going to go to someone who got their GED in prison. Now if you have a degree or are actively seeking one, that’s who I [would go to].”
I disbanded the peer support. Vesely-Flad and I began offering regular office hours ourselves, and we asked faculty to make themselves available through weekly office hours in the prison. Students came, some to us, some to their faculty. Their anxieties subsided. Going into our second semester, I recruited five community volunteers with college degrees and teaching or related experience. Perhaps because they had not been trained in writing center theory, they were not bound by traditional ideas about what we did and didn’t do. They wanted copies of all the textbooks so they could read along. They wanted to have the instructors’ assignment sheets well in advance. They wanted to sit in on classes. Like the students, they saw writing success as intimately bound up with the particular class, not something that could be addressed in a general way.
“Acclimation Time” and the Writing Studio’s Redesign
Two years later, in Fall 2019, our writing studio looked quite different. We had moved from the small classroom into a computer lab down the hall. This lab had twelve desktops around the periphery, and a desk with a computer linked to a printer. The room was about twice as big as the classroom, open in the middle with a window looking toward the road. It felt more spacious. People could be working independently, or side-by-side with a friend, or in a session with a tutor. Whereas in the classroom, staff had opened the room for us and called students down, when we arrived in the lab students were already there working, some waiting for sessions, others not. It was an academic workspace into which we entered.
In response to students’ requests for increased access to technology and study space, we had collaborated with the Education Program Director to keep the computer lab open every weekday for our students. This was a huge boost to our program, especially after dorm computer labs were closed due to infractions. Some students spent hours a day in the lab. Some arranged to meet friends from classes. While there was no internet, the students were resourceful in discovering the PCs’ tools, and generous in showing each other. They learned to use the APA citation tool within Microsoft Word. They found folders of images to enliven their PowerPoints. Each semester, with the superintendent’s permission, we loaned students USB drives and issued allowed paper allotments.
Also at students’ request, we switched from drop-in hours to faculty passing around sign-up sheets in class. Students could pick their time and tutor. Three volunteers had continued to tutor with me, and we had used grant money to underwrite several hours of academic advising, in response to students’ desires to connect coursework with academic and career pathways. The advising also included access to classroom accommodations for students with documented disabilities.
Most students used the Studio during their first semester in the program or with a new professor, and less so subsequently. In interviews, some expressed an initial need for reassurance that eventually faded. One student said, “At first I thought I can’t do this.” Another, “I was scared to death to take anything because I’d been out of school for so long.” For some of these students, we were an essential resource. One described coming because her professor said she had great ideas, but she wasn’t confident about structuring her paper. “It goes back to the college setting and what they expect of you.... I don’t understand how you can’t go straight to the point and not just go one paragraph. She has helped me extend my idea and have a whole paper related to that idea.”
In interviewing students, I learned more about why some didn’t use the center. Many were studying with classmates. “Here we have a good peer support program. We don’t call it that,” Lavender explained, with an air both amused and self-confident. “In our class, we support each other. Even if you don’t get along with each other, you support each other’s academics.” Yvette shared, “Three of us used to get together Sunday afternoons. We would read over one another’s reflections and critique those. The first paper, we didn’t know what he was looking for. We looked at each other’s.” These observations were consistent with those of North Park writing advisors Scott Moore, Benny Rios, and Rayon Sampson, referenced earlier, who described how students benefitted from meeting together informally and brainstormed ways to address structural barriers to peer gatherings.
Other students didn’t use the center because the classes were not so challenging as to necessitate that kind of support. One student noted, “For some reason, I thought the class would be harder.” Another said that most of the writing assignments for her class were “reflections…. Sometimes I think people are more into thoughts and feelings than facts and skills.” Another student noted that our classes varied in the kind of challenge they provided, with some being more reading-based and others more “hands-on.”
We reshaped our writing studio based on interviews and observations. Having initially assumed that people in prison have lots of free time, I’d learned that our students had heavily scheduled days. Many held jobs in the prison and belonged to other programs; their movements were also heavily controlled, for example by “the count” which happened at scheduled and unscheduled times throughout each day. Marcia explained that scheduling was her biggest challenge: “I work third shift, and school is in the evening. Having an everyday life schedule with being in school has been a lot of exercise for me. At times, it’s been,” she sighed dramatically, “it’s been a lot to be in a school program and hold down a job as well. It hasn’t been easy or hard. It’s exercise for the real world. It has been challenging, but, you know, what you have to do. You’re like,” Marcia smiled as she sighed demonstrably again, ‘When am I going to ever have a break?’
Heavy scheduling coexisted with sudden changes from above. An unscheduled swath of time could be taken away, like that, in a lockdown. The computer lab could be shut down as punishment. You could get sent to “big Raleigh” in the middle of the night for a medical appointment. When I joked with students about how early they started on their papers, what “good” students they were compared to on-campus students, one told me it wasn’t that. “It’s because anything can be taken from us at any time,” she said.
We tried to adjust our program to give students a little control in their interactions with us. In a system that takes away control, I learned how much this mattered. Like students on campus, these students wanted to choose the tutor whose style best suited their goals. Early on, I had erred toward heavily encouraging students to use the center, resulting in some students feeling patronized. We learned we needed to show up, consistently, and maintain a more neutral affect about sessions. Not to be excited if lots of people showed up, or disappointed if no one did. Sometimes, I took a book and read while students worked at computers independently. Availability became a huge piece of our program.
Rob Phillips, the Education Program Director, suggested that students needed to ask for assistance in their own time, and that this relates to their experiences with trauma.
Residents are tentative about new people. It takes a while to build up trust. Everyone wears a face here, to me, to you—truth is somewhere in the middle. To [tutoring] volunteers, they’ll show a face. There’s an acclimation time before they can get down to work. It takes time to get yourself into a role. It’s trauma-related, related to substance abuse. There’s a mishmash of problems here, and enmeshed in that is a person looking to turn themselves around. You have to work from a place that is trauma-informed. You need to say, ‘I’m here to assist, let me know if I can help.’
For Phillips, “trauma-informed” entailed being consistent in one’s availability as an educator, letting someone know you are there when they are ready, not insisting they need your help. He calls allowing this time for trust to build “acclimation time.” I had needed a type of acclimation time as well. I had learned to discuss assignments with faculty at each semester’s outset, to gather needed resources and prep the tutors. We could assure students: this thing we’re suggesting you do, it matches your professor’s purpose in this assignment. Students trusted us more when they saw consistency between our suggestions and their professor’s. In addition, I gained confidence in my own abilities in this new environment. My mouth wasn’t as dry. It was easier to take jokes, to make jokes.
A few of our incarcerated students held jobs as teaching assistants in the prison’s GED program. I was very curious about how they experienced the tutoring dynamic. Rosalin illuminated for me the dynamic of being present and available, without forcing assistance on students.
Some people may be hesitant because it’s an inmate. A lot of people are hesitant to ask for help. [If inside students worked as TAs in the college classes], it would be better to have a TA actually be in the class so they get to know the person, so they know them and sit down to talk to them. It doesn’t have to be every class. It could be every other class…. They’ll be more likely to come down to get that help…. Some people are more shy. You don’t know what kind of background they are coming from.
Whenever I first came in the GED room, people were more reluctant to reach out to ask for help. The longer I’m here, the more willing they are to ask me for help. Sometimes they need someone to talk to about what’s going on. Then we can start homework. Some people have something going on in their personal life. One girl came in here. It was the anniversary of her father’s death. [We talked about it] and then she was ready to move past it... . Some … people want to get something off their chest: my grandmother is sick; I’m scared about the GED. Then they’re ready to work….
Some teachers get aggravated with me. ‘They should be doing their work.’ But that’s me. I want them to feel they can talk to me.
Here, Rosalin shows that she can calmly accept a student bringing emotional distress into an educational space. I believe Em Daniels, whose work on trauma-responsive practice I referenced earlier, would appreciate how Rosalin prioritizes emotional self-awareness. A peer tutor’s acceptance of trauma can be an important offering in a student’s learning process and their ability to occupy an educational space.
Advocacy for education
At the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020, our in-person programs were shut down, and without internet access at the prison, virtual classes were impossible. We finished that semester’s programming through exchanging physical packets, and that summer we used the same approach to run book groups with our continuing students. Then for three semesters we were not able to have a presence in the facility; during that time, thank God, most of our students seem to have been released. We resumed in-person classes in January 2022, and the writing studio is rebuilding, and even at the time of completing this article moving into a third iteration of our services.
This study has taught me that a writing center’s success doesn’t depend on if you have inside peer tutors, outside peer tutors, volunteers, faculty tutors. It depends on complementing the existing expertise of the tutors you have, with expertise they lack. For those new to an academic discipline, they need training in its writing standards. For those new to tutoring, training in writing center pedagogy. For those who aren’t themselves system impacted, who are prone to the blind spots that outsiders bring, they need access to the expertise of those who are system impacted, and to educate themselves from multiple perspectives about the carceral context.
Let’s return to a challenge stated at the outset: how centers can address systemic barriers to learning in a population without reducing that population to its most obvious features, without stifling individual variation or imposing passivity. This study has taught me that the answer is we need to make room for student advocacy. Our program would have failed had we not recognized in students their capacity to know their own needs. In their study of working-class students, Denny, Nordlof, and Salem reveal the hypocrisy in writing centers that purport to be student-centered yet dismiss or deprioritize certain student requests. “If a student comes to the writing center saying they want us to proofread their paper,” they write, “we are thoroughly versed in the methods of not hearing that request. We think to ourselves, ‘that’s not really what you want,’ or ‘It’s better if I don’t give you that’ (73). I can’t read this without remembering the first day in our prison-based writing studio, when I wanted to teach the writing process and got asked about APA. From there, our prison-based students’ greatest needs in regard to writing were access to computers and access to their professors. How many students on our campuses might have similar needs that they are trying to address instead of coming into our spaces?
Writing centers are supposed to be student-centered but sometimes it takes getting outside of our everyday reality to imagine new possibilities for what student-centered looks like. Many voices in this paper, some from our program, others from scholarship, represent advocacy for education from inside prisons. At a time when many in the free world are questioning education’s value, we ought to respond to those demanding knowledge.
acknowledgments
The author could not have completed this work without the contributions of many people. Warren Wilson College provided a sabbatical for this research. John Steele listened to, read, and gave patient, discerning feedback on many unwritten and written drafts, even one New Year’s Eve. Rima Vesely-Flad open-heartedly invited me to join her project, becoming a generous mentor, colleague, and friend. The editors and anonymous peer reviewers from Praxis helped me finally realize what I wanted to say and gave skilled feedback that helped me say it. Tiffany Rousculp critically nurtured an earlier draft of this work, drawing from her experience developing the community writing center movement. Thank you to those at other colleges who generously shared experiences in interviews. The faculty and students of Warren Wilson Inside-Out taught me much more than I have been able to include here—thank you.
notes
The language of W.E.B. DuBois’ always salient question about being Black in America is consciously echoed here: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
“System Impacted includes those who have been incarcerated, those with arrests/convictions but no incarceration and those who have been directly impacted by a loved one being incarcerated” (Cerda-Jara et al., 2019).
Quotations approximate what was said.
I use pseudonyms for all students, choosing first name pseudonyms in keeping with program culture.
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