This essay explores the pedagogical lessons of student-inmate peer reviews conducted during a prison outreach project in a first-year composition class. Collaborative writing between inmates and students reveals the positive outcomes that can result from strong mutuality in community-based learning relationships. Through a qualitative analysis of student reflection papers and prisoner oral reflections, this essay
shows how an emphasis on the personal during this project did not preclude systemic considerations, but rather produced productive, political outcomes. This essay concludes with a response from my community partner—a prisoner in a medium security facility and participant in the peer reviews. We hope to demonstrate how a reciprocal, relationship-based orientation can facilitate not only productive communitybased learning outcomes for students and communities, but also a new type of scholarship—one more thoroughly enriched by community voices.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric