The future of higher education in prison remains a pressing question more than twenty years after incarcerated students were denied access to Pell grants. We are still considering questions about who should be incarcerated and why. The forces were different in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s,
but we still have much to learn from those who labored in prison literacy classrooms in those times. This project, based on oral history interviews with six teachers who taught in writing workshops and higher education in prison programs in the 1970s and 80s, a time when prison arts, education and literacy programs were undergoing drastic shifts resulting from social, political and cultural forces, can help us understand the evolving nature of this practice. Additionally, the interviews can help us understand how these teachers’ experiences of teaching in prison at a time when carceral environments were often dangerous and challenging reflect and refract the prevailing narratives of
literacy at the time.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric