Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education

Turning Teaching Inside Out

A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education

Edited by

Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Sherr Roswell

TURNING TEACHING INSIDE OUT

Copyright © Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Sherr Roswell, 2013.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface: The Walls We Build and Break Apart: Inside-Out as Transformational Pedagogy

Dan Butin

Acknowledgments

Contributors’ Biographies

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The Walls We Build and Break Apart: Inside-Out as Transformational Pedagogy

Dan Butin

Inside-Out moves through the walls—it is an exchange, an engagement—between and among people who live on both sides of the prison wall. It is through this exchange, realized through the crucible of dialogue, that the walls around us and within us begin to crumble. So writes Lori Pompa, the founder of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in the final essay to this deeply powerful book. Those words, eloquently evoking the disturbing nature of profound teaching upon our thoughts and actions, bespeak the transformational model that Inside-Out has created. It is thus an honor and privilege to write this preface for a book that stands as a testament to Lori and the Inside-Out community’s work over two decades to enact an authentic means by which to transform prison education, and, in the process, the very nature of teaching and learning.

By teaching students in college (outside) together with individuals in prison (inside students) in academic courses run within prison facilities, Inside-Out is one of many innovative ways to foster experiential education and community-based models of teaching and learning. Fostering respect and reciprocity among the two groups and a deep understanding of the inner workings of the criminal justice system, Inside-Out can be seen as a powerful model of connecting theory to practice and helping campus students to see the relevance of academic coursework by linking it to the lived reality outside of our textbook covers and university gates.

But Inside-Out is so much more. What Lori has pioneered and Inside-Out has systemitized is a model of education few of us dare to dream of: an educational experience so structured that it almost literally teaches itself at the very same time as it destabilizes our traditional notions of teaching and learning. From the crashing noises of opening gates to the destabilizing experiences of the wagon wheel activity where inside and outside students first dialogue as equals to the closing moments when one group of students gets to exit while another stays behind, all of the participants within an Inside-Out course enact, embody, and are enveloped by the very issues they are seemingly only studying. The word and the world, as Freire (Freire and Macedo, 2013) was so fond of pointing out, become conjoined in praxis.

I have long argued that antifoundational service-learning offers an opportunity to undermine our deeply held habits of mind and repertoires of actions through deliberate and distinctive learning experiences. Such culturally saturated, socially consequential, politically volatile, and existentially defining moments rupture our sense of the normal and force us to confront the constructed nature of world. It is a self-consuming pedagogy that both teaches through its content at the very same time that it exposes, through its practice, the means and modes of such teaching.

When I developed these ideas over a decade ago (Butin, 2003, 2005), I had seen but a few examples here and there of such profound teaching. For it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to construct a framework for engaged teaching that actually performs its own principles and that does not suffer from the performative contradiction of undermining itself—by, for example, delivering a lecture about the power of experiential education.

But what I was really writing and thinking about was Inside-Out. I had read some of Lori’s work (Pompa, 2002) and spent time talking to her, heard about the trainings she had been doing with faculty from around the country, and seen some of the outcomes. What I came to see was that Inside-Out was the embodiment, the most powerful model I had ever encountered, of transformative education.

The chapters in this book—written by faculty and practitioners, inside and outside students—attest to such transformation. They speak, both literally and figuratively, to how the educational experience of the Inside-Out pedagogical model makes visible how walls constrain and how they break, how cages get built and are unlocked, how closed spaces conceal as well as liberate all of us. What Inside-Out has done is begun to loosen and, yes, crumble, the preconceptions of what it means to be bound by the walls we have built to keep some people out, some people in, and all of us within our boundaries.

I do not mean to over-valorize or overpromise. And neither does Inside-Out. There are more than two million individuals in prison in the United States, constituting the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, and comprising 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated population. This population is disproportionately nonwhite and poor. Almost one in three young black men are, at any given moment, either in prison or under parole (Roberts 2004). It is thus unrealistic to suggest that Inside-Out, even with the hundreds trained and thousands taught, could transform our criminal justice system.

And yet what Inside-Out offers is a transformation of thinking. Foucault (1977), in founding the Prison Information Group in 1971, argued that The ultimate goal of [the group’s] interventions was . . . to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty . . . We wish to attack an institution at the point where it culminates and reveals itself in a simple and basic ideology, in the notions of good and evil, innocence and guilt (227–228; see Butin, 2010, chapter 3, for an extended articulation of this argument).

What Foucault wanted, and what I believe Inside-Out accomplishes, was to make visible how an entire system, an entire culture, operated in a deeply disturbing and disturbed binary. Foucault was not attempting to whitewash evil or deny guilt. Rather, what he railed against was a system of physical and conceptual constraints to how we viewed the world, others, and thus ourselves (Butin, 2006).

Such transformations of vision and comprehension are unfortunately all too rare in a postsecondary educational system seemingly devoted to breaking down the walls of our ignorance. It is thus breathtaking that Inside-Out has created, within the very walls that bind so many of our citizens, a means to make them begin to crumble. This is engaged learning at its zenith, and an inspiration to all of us who strive for a better world.

References

Butin, Dan W. Of What Use Is it? Multiple Conceptualizations of Service Learning within Education. The Teachers College Record 105, no. 9 (2003): 1674–1692.

———. Service-Learning as Postmodern Pedagogy. In Service-Learning in Higher Education: Critical Issues and Directions, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 89–104.

———. Putting Foucault to Work in Educational Research. Journal of Philosophy of Education 40, no. 3 (2006): 371–380.

———. Service-Learning in Theory and Practice: The Future of Community Engagement in Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Foucault, Michel Revolutionary Action: ‘Until Now.’ In Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Dinald Bouchard, ed. Ithaca, NY: Corrnell University Press, 1977, 218–234.

Freire, Paulo and D. Macedo. Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. NewYork: Routledge, 2013.

Pompa, Lori. Service-Learning as Crucible: Reflections on Immersion, Context, Power, and Transformation. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 9, no. 1 (2002): 67–76.

Roberts, Dorothy. The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American Communities. Stanford Law Review 56, no. 5 (April 2004): 1271–1305.

Acknowledgments

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, like this volume, is by its very nature a collaborative endeavor. Countless people, in and out of prison, have been instrumental in its development. Prominent among these are the contributors to this volume, and we thank them and invite you to see first-hand the fruits of their insight and commitment. They include:

Paul Perry (chapter 4), a founding member of the Graterford Think Tank, whose suggestion in 1995 that one-time prison visits between students and incarcerated men or women should extend into semester-long experiences was the seed for the Inside-Out program,

Kay Harris, who was the chair of the Criminal Justice Department at Temple University in 1997 when Inside-Out was started and has chosen to remain involved, with deep commitment, in every aspect of the program since that time (chapter 5), and Melissa Crabbe, Inside-Out’s associate director, who has been instrumental since 2003 in shaping our trainings. She adds whole dimensions to the program, both regionally and (inter)nationally through her extraordinary creativity and vision (chapter 3).

We extend special appreciation to Kay Harris and Melissa Crabbe for early shared reflection on this book project and the work it should do in the world.

Temple University, its Criminal Justice Department, and its College of Liberal Arts have afforded the staff at the Inside-Out Center, and by extension, the whole Inside-Out community, the freedom and support to flourish. Today, in 2013, Temple is joined by more than 100 academic institutions supporting faculty and students as part of the Inside-Out network, many offering college credit to all students taking courses.

The Graterford Think Tank, established in 2002, serves as the heart of the international program and over the past decade has already inspired the development of eight other think tanks across North America. The committed participants in these ongoing working groups form an ethical and intellectual backbone to the entire network. Working collectively, think tank members offer trainings, public education workshops, research projects, and other support to people in prison and beyond. In so doing, they fashion a praxis—a way of being, doing, and learning together—that undergirds the analyses in this book. Every one of the hundreds of individuals who have attended an Instructor Training has benefited from the wisdom and counsel of trainers in the Graterford Think Tank, the Theory Group in Michigan, ACE in Oregon, or the Walls to Bridges Collective in Ontario.

The talented and dedicated Inside-Out Center staff, past and present, have provided strategic leadership for Inside-Out over the past decade. These include Melissa Crabbe (chapter 3), Erin Howley (chapter 12), Francesco Campanell, Jean Lenke, Cyndi Zuidema, Simone Davis, Tricia Way, and Christiana Girvasoni. A special thank you to Tyrone Werts (chapter 17), who helped to establish Inside-Out classes at Graterford, and who, once released after more than 36 years in prison, joined the Inside-Out Team. The organization’s work is also energized and deepened by the wisdom, support, and guidance of the Inside-Out Steering Committee, Research Committee, and Temple Advisory Board.

The Philadelphia Prison System took a chance on trying out this pilot educational program at its inception in 1997 and has continued to host courses ever since. Since 2002, the administrators and staff of Graterford Prison have hosted Inside-Out classes, trainings, public forums, and weekly meetings of the Inside-Out Think Tank. On behalf of each author in this collection, and the many participants throughout the network, we thank the many wardens, superintendents, Department of Corrections officials, correctional educators, case workers, and corrections officers at over 100 institutions across North America who are committed to education for all people and who have partnered with faculty and universities to bring university-based and incarcerated students together. The devil is in the details, and their efforts to secure space, dedicate staff, and arrange schedules are key to the success of Inside-Out.

Over 460 instructors throughout the United States, Canada, and beyond have, with great trust and generosity, completed an Inside-Out training. Each of these educators, both inside the academy and beyond, brings his or her particular wisdom, creativity, and courage to the work; together, they are creating and sustaining remarkable educational collaborations in their communities.

We thank the tens of thousands of family members of the entire faculty, staff, and inside and outside students who participate in this challenging work: their lives have been impacted—and we hope, enriched—by the program, too, and they have extended untold support to their loved ones. We think particularly of Leonard Pompa who left us too early at age 99½ and his support of Inside-Out. He would have loved seeing this book in print.

We also thank the many funders over the years, especially the Soros Foundation, who share the vision of Inside-Out and have helped to keep the work vibrant and expanding.

Many thousands of inside and outside students have taken part in Inside-Out classes across the United States and Canada. We thank and honor them above all, for bringing their trust, respect, industry, wisdom, and full engagement to the Inside-Out circle, and for taking the collective insights gathered there into the rest of their lives.We are grateful to the many generous people who have lived with this book as we have and have contributed to it immeasurably. These include Dan Butin, for inviting us to craft this book and for the many ways he fosters educational opportunities that bring people together and strengthen communities; Sarah Nathan, Associate Editor at Palgrave, and Deepa John at Newgen Knowledge Works for capably stewarding this project to completion; the talented cadre of colleagues, copy editors, and thought partners whose insights and expertise have sharpened the collection, including Chandler Davis, whose incisive copy editing made this book better and also helped to make it a family affair; Inside-Out teaching assistant extraordinaire Kathryn Dehler; Goucher Peace Studies Department Chair Ailish Hopper; Goucher Prison Education Partnership Director Amy Roza; GiannaDeMedio; Michael Roswell; Naomi Roswell; committed and responsive colleagues Randell Duguid, Lora Lempert, Jane Miller-Ashton, and Shoshana Pollack; the Walls to Bridges Collective for support and insight; the staff at the Inside-Out Center; Mike Voisin at Wilfrid Laurier University; the professional Van Meter faculty secretaries, especially Cathi Price and Jamie Winter, and the Goucher Faculty Affairs Committee for a summer research grant that helped this book see light; Peter Armstrong, Lee Steel, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hannah Taïeb, and Sofia Szamosi for gifts untold; and David Roswell, Bob Roswell, and Edith Sherr for their loving championship of the project. Our warmest thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their insight and their enduring commitment both to this book and to creating change through transformative education.

Lori Pompa, Founder and Director, The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Simone Weil Davis

Barbara Sherr Roswell

CHAPTER 1

Introduction—Radical Reciprocity: Civic Engagement from Inside Out

Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Sherr Roswell

A powerful classroom experience results in a radical and lasting positive change, a metamorphosis. Transformation. Educators seek to define that  process, to account for it, and especially to incite it, to open up possibilities for the kind of engaged learning and teaching that will prove transformational. This volume offers an extended reflection on the wider implications of one uniquely powerful pedagogical model. Founded in 1997, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program weds community-based learning and prison education, bringing college or university students and people in prison together as classmates for a semester of shared experiential learning. Fifteen thousand incarcerated (inside) and campus-based (outside) students have taken at least one Inside-Out class, and in many areas, inside students are now taking multiple Inside-Out courses for credit in subjects as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance art, social work, literature, and the law. While these academic classes are the core of our work, they have become an integral part of a larger mosaic of sustained engagement. We will see reflected in this volume the program’s emphasis on alumni activities on both sides of the wall, innovative region-wide collaborations, longstanding Inside-Out think tanks in prisons that engage in public education, trainings, and research projects, and an increasing number of initiatives that take the co-learning pedagogy to sites beyond the prison entirely. This book considers the broader lessons that Inside-Out provides for community-based learning praxis and for postsecondary teaching in general, on campus, in prisons, and in other community settings.

Prisons are compelling places. Largely invisible to those who call the Academy home, they evoke our deepest resentments and most intense fears. Saturated with ideology, they operate as a hidden node connecting the network of social issues that community-based learning most often addresses—from inadequate public education to racism to poverty. They incarcerate 2.3 million Americans; ten million US children have had a parent behind bars.¹ It is no surprise, then, that prison classrooms provide an especially intense instantiation of community-based teaching and learning, where the process of crossing boundaries, engaging with difference, and entering a space imagined as other is made literal. A course that brings university and incarcerated students together provides an intensely embodied context in which to examine the walls that divide us, the institutions that support those walls, the issues and people made invisible in mainstream American culture, and—paradoxically—the power of individuals and groups to make change.

Over the past two decades, as urban communities have been increasingly impacted by the effects of mass incarceration, universities have deepened their engagements with these same communities. Service learning and civic engagement efforts have become institutionalized on almost every campus in North America. Even as programs have matured and expanded, however, the field continues to founder on several intractable contradictions and conundrums. How can an instructor create a service learning course that offers deep engagement with others as unique individuals, yet prompts undergraduates to attend to structural inequities? How does that instructor advance beyond creating a superficial encounter with difference to foster what the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) terms interactional diversity,—engagements that elicit diverse perspectives as valued resources for consequential problem solving?² How can a university use its wealth of resources to create service projects that do not unwittingly reinscribe the deficiencies of the recipient, and the needs, rather than the assets, of a community? How, in fact, can a community-based project live up to its aspirations to be fully collaborative, engaging community members as full partners in design, inquiry, and leadership? How can universities institutionalize service learning, making programs sustainable and strategic, without sacrificing the nuanced flexibility, responsiveness to local conditions, and tactical finesse³ that community-based work demands? Why, if reflection is critical to learning and growth in service learning projects, is it only required of university participants, and not participants from the community? And how are faculty to facilitate openness and risk-taking if they are not themselves challenged to step out of their familiar positions of authority?

This collection argues that, by disrupting the fundamental assumptions fueling these tensions, Inside-Out provides a critical and timely contribution to community-engaged work in the university. By enacting a particularly thick, fully realized pedagogy of engagement, the voices of Inside-Out collected in these pages deliberately synthesize strategies from a variety of traditions to create radically reciprocal opportunities for learning. The chapters gathered here examine both the theory and the practice of Inside-Out, placing it within the larger context of community engagement in higher education, testing its claims to address some of the most vexing contradictions of most service learning initiatives, analyzing its components and their synergies, assessing its ambition to transform participants, sounding the depth of its core commitments, probing its reach, and considering the implications of a model conceived in dialogue, expanded through the collaborative efforts of all stakeholders, and now replicated in hundreds of classrooms across North America.

Inside-Out begins with the assumption that all human beings—whether they reside behind bars or on the outside—have innate worth, a story to tell, experiences to learn from, perspectives that provide insight, and leadership to contribute to the community. By bringing together campus and incarcerated students for a semester of shared course work in a prison classroom, Inside-Out creates an extended opportunity for these students to study, converse, and collaborate on academic projects as equals. Offering an alternative model of community-engaged learning unfettered by paternalistic notions of charity or service, the Inside-Out model is rooted in reciprocity, dialogue, and collaboration. By examining social issues through the prism of prison, inside and outside students come to a fresher and deeper understanding of the subject matter than might be possible in an ordinary classroom. And by collaboratively designing projects based on course readings and dialogue, students are challenged to think through change strategies and explore their personal and collective potential as change agents. The result is a constructive dialogue that inspires participants to generate new ideas and fresh solutions, catalyzing the kinds of changes that can make communities more inclusive, just, and socially sustainable.

Faculty working in fields that span the arts, humanities, social sciences, and social services have introduced Inside-Out as a novel and rewarding community-based learning opportunity to students at community colleges, research and state universities, and liberal arts colleges across North America. In the process, the program joins and advances the larger effort to return higher education programming to people in prison and jail, currently available to only six percent of those incarcerated.

As Mike Rose argues in Back To School, with 40 million adults in the United States possessing neither a high school diploma nor a General Educational Development (GED) Certificate and a minority of students enrolled in community colleges completing a certificate or degree,⁴ access is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for achieving a robust and democratic system of higher education. It is not enough to let people in the door; we have to create conditions for them to thrive once inside (105). By imagining students’ fullest possible development and activating not just the economic and narrowly academic, but the full range of intellectual, social, civic, moral and aesthetic motivations for education (133), Inside-Out offers a pathway to academic success not only for students who are incarcerated but potentially for students from other communities that have historically been underserved by higher education as well. Reimagining pathways, student and instructor practitioners of this model also interrogate and reconceive what is meant by academic success.

Fueling this approach are seven-day intensive Instructor Training Institutes, where interested faculty learn from a team of incarcerated and outside facilitators how to build classroom communities dedicated to dialogue, critical reflection, experiential learning, and responsible collective educational inquiry. The week of professional development prepares participants to facilitate Inside-Out courses in their own disciplines, to establish and sustain functioning agreements between prisons and universities, and to pursue credit-bearing options for inside participants. The trainings bring together educators of all sorts from across the continent and beyond: faculty from across the disciplines, veteran teachers with longstanding involvement in prison or community-based education, graduate students, and community members. Inside-Out’s approach to the teacher’s role, developed over 15 years and evolving, has great resonance with the work of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, restorative justice and peace-building circles, and a long history of informal educational practices in prison settings. Participating as students during the training in a variety of experiential activities and engaging in projects that approximate the group projects so central to most Inside-Out classes, new instructors learn by doing, share their own considerable expertise, and benefit, too, from guided meta-reflection.

Self-inquiry matters whenever we teach; when some of our students are living within the constraints of confinement, we are even more obligated to be clear on our own positions, motivations, and capacities. Why are we drawn to this work? What obstacles do we face, and where are our sources of strength and replenishment? How do group dynamics over the course of the training week reveal our own blind spots about power and privilege, and how can we interrogate and move beyond them?

Contemporary academic culture rarely brings professors face to face with their own lives as teachers, nor, specifically, are those who bring campus and community participants together often given such a thorough preparation in reflective and dialogic practice. At a time when students, community partners, and community-based learning offices are often left to navigate the partnership without the professor’s involvement, Inside-Out’s emphasis on teacher trainings helps to shift and integrate community engagement more fully into the academic experience. As one professor-trainee reflects:

Learning means to travel to the battleground. Learning means to realize the true challenge before me and to strategize, to struggle, to sit in the fire so that I see what I have been avoiding, to understand what I am most afraid of, and to meet the challenge of the forces in this world that attempt to undercut humanity.. . . Each person reflects me to myself in an entirely new and evolving way. Learning from others is to learn about myself. Learning will never be finished.⁵

Inside-Out’s work has been fundamentally shaped by the perspectives of its community partners: people in prison. In 2002, in an effort to sustain their partnership beyond the artificial limits of an academic semester, a group of inside and outside alumni of Inside-Out courses formed the Graterford Think Tank, which has met weekly at the maximum security state prison outside of Philadelphia ever since. With director-founder Lori Pompa and associate director Melissa Crabbe, the Graterford Think Tank has shaped Inside-Out’s pedagogy and ethical guidelines, and it continues to play a key role in the week-long instructor trainings. Other Think Tanks have formed in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Ontario, Oregon, Tennessee, and West Virginia, each with a distinct culture and mission, but each equally committed to the values and practices that animated their original Inside-Out experience.

In Inside-Out seminar classrooms and think tanks, sustained, shared inquiry lead two populations to build one classroom community, a negotiated we, neither easy nor seamless, but built from shared discovery, and put into practice, allowing for continued engagement beyond the semester’s conclusion.

The work of shared reflection helps to determine those engagements, because it increases participants’ capacity for critical inquiry. Even as Inside-Out courses defamiliarize and challenge assumptions about prison, they defamiliarize education and learning as well. This connection is created in one of the very first joint classes, as inside and outside students work together in small groups to consider such questions as:

When you think of prison, what image first comes to mind? Where do these images come from? What do most people assume about people in prison? What is prison for? When you think of college, what image first comes to mind? Where do these images come from? What do most people assume about people in college? What is college for? How are college and prison different? And, how are college and prison in some ways similar?

Reflecting and collaborating together, transcending the walls that divide us, as a program byline describes it, inside and outside students often report a powerful experience of transformed insight and motivation. Contributors to the present volume examine and attempt to theorize the relationship between a larger project of social change and the individual’s classroom experience of transformed understanding of self, other, and society. Turning Teaching Inside Out also takes up the central challenges of this work, both practical and philosophical—partnership challenges familiar to all who lead community-based learning initiatives, put through the crucible of the penal context. What are the institutional limits on the transformation Inside-Out evokes, the sometimes vexing pressures on mission that come from collaborating with and answering to multiple stakeholders?

This volume weaves together perspectives from across Inside-Out’s network, across its history, across genres and disciplines, across the continent. Peering if not leaping over watchtowers and ivory towers alike, these writers speak the story of a program in many voices.

Part I: Origin Tales: Seeding and Building a Program brings together three chapters that recount the genesis and replication of this program. They highlight two key growth moments that any community engagement educator can encounter: inception, that is, moving an idea from inspiration to manifestation; and replication, turning a strong local program into a national (and now international) model. Consideration of Inside-Out’s origin tale and raison d’etre comes from founder and director Lori Pompa and from Paul Perry, founding member of the Graterford Think Tank and the man who first had the idea that became Inside-Out. Pompa’s lead chapter provides a comprehensive introduction to Inside-Out’s history, philosophy, and pedagogic strategies. Perry’s Death of a Street Gang Warrior places Inside-Out’s emergence within his own remarkable story of cognitive metamorphosis, with an analysis and a poetry that leave formulaic tales of the rehabilitated man far behind. In an chapter with applications to a wide variety of programs that seek to scale up, associate director Melissa Crabbe, lead designer of Inside-Out’s instructor trainings and coordinator of Inside-Out Oregon, walks the reader through the development of a network of highly productive partner relationships in the Eugene-Portland corridor in Oregon. Crabbe’s chapter usefully offers ten takeaway lessons about program expansion, revealing some of the rich outcomes possible when informal and formal agreements and relationships are allowed to accrete and form a dense weave over time. Innovations and crosspollinations emerge and institutional players begin to recalibrate their role in the larger community in ways that catalyze systemic change.

Part II: Expanding Teaching and Learning presents a set of chapters that consider dialogic pedagogy in practice. Today we confront parallel and intersecting crises in both higher education and criminal justice, leaving campus-enrolled students with big questions about the social contract and at least 2.3 million incarcerated Americans written out of that contract. In What the World Needs Now, M. Kay Harris, Associate Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Temple University and one of the first instructors to join Pompa in teaching Inside-Out courses, explains how and why the pedagogy serves as a meaningful counter to a history of racial oppression, exploring the historical legacies and structurally embedded dehumanization that Inside-Out helps to disrupt. K. D. A. Daniel-Bey and Amelia Larson, alumni of Inside-Out courses with think tank experience, draw on their Inside-Out experiences to challenge status quo educational practices and to offer alternatives. Their chapters remind us that the move toward educational justice requires a cool look at not one but two of our most impactful social institutions. Charles Boyd and Mario Carines, both incarcerated coaches and think tank members who help to facilitate instructor trainings (in Pennsylvania and Michigan, respectively) consider their own roles as trainers and the impacts of this work on participating faculty. They each demonstrate that even veteran teachers are grateful for the chance to pause for a week of immersive professional development to both experience and learn more about fostering and facilitating community building and intergroup dialogue. In Teaching Itself: A Philosophical Exploration of Inside-Out Pedagogy, Gitte Wernaa Butin explores her adaptation of Inside-Out into a three-session seminar in a halfway house as part of an introductory philosophy course. Her chapter takes readers into her classroom and offers an extended analysis of one experiential learning unit on the resonances between witnessing, experiencing, and causing harm.

Part III: Productive Intersectionality: Navigating Race, Place, Gender, and Class, at the center of this volume, examines challenges that are perhaps especially high-stakes and complex in a prison setting, but that are critical to anyone considering campus/community collaboration. The authors in this section look squarely at both the deep frustrations that can arise over endemic oppressions and some of the strategies deployed in the Inside-Out community to try to break through the stickiest and most challenging kinds of hierarchy and bias. Community-based learning initiatives require their organizers to decide how they are going to confront the manifestations of power and privilege, both when recruiting and selecting participants, and in the classroom, fostering cultural competency and ongoing opportunities for critical reflection. The section opens with a Forum on the complex ways that power and privilege can play out when race, class, gender, sexualities, criminalization, and instructor/student hierarchies all intersect. Roundtable participants, including long-time instructors, staff and think tank members, offer specific strategies that can help diverse groups engage the productive discomfort that can lead to growth and insight. Being Human, by former program coordinator Erin Howley, and Breaking through ‘Isms,’ by artist, activist, and educator Ella Turenne, share a variety of art- and text-based workshop approaches, drawing on the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal to suggest facilitation techniques that can vitalize the growing edge of mutual discovery. Trusting the Process, written collaboratively by two alumnae members of Canada’s first think tank, takes frank inventory of the personal impacts of their graduate level Inside-Out sociology course, showing how an explicitly feminist framework can impact classroom practices and offer lasting learning.

Part IV: Transformation? Connection as Catalyst offers a set of chapters that try—from various vantage points, in different registers, and via various methods—to ask a set of ambitious questions: What kind of transformation can or should the post-secondary educator or community-based learning provider hope for? Individual, institutional, systemic? Why and how does the Inside-Out process work, to the extent that it does? Will impacts endure? What is the relationship between transformative education and social change? In what becomes a sort of duet, long-time Inside-Out instructor Steven Shankman and inside Tennessee alumni Tony Vick use different discursive strategies to suggest that it is in the encounter, in the deeply reciprocal and irrefutably human gaze of our sister or brother, that we find transformation. For both authors, that transformation is linked to a new understanding of the ethical relationship that gives us our selfhood in the first place. In Access for Whom? Tyrone Werts, a founding member of the Graterford Think Tank and, since his 2011 release after more than three decades in prison, a key member of the senior staff on the outside, presents Inside-Out as a strikingly productive opportunity for whole-self learning as well as a significant gateway for people who otherwise might not see themselves as college-bound. In The Reach and Limits of a Prison Education Program, Simone Weil Davis looks at the places where personal and sociopolitical transformation can be seen to intersect, and how the Inside-Out process invites exactly such an integration. The section concludes with chapters by Kristin Bumiller and Gillian Harkins that place Inside-Out within the landscapes of neoliberalism and higher education in prison. These chapters argue that Inside-Out provides an unusual opportunity for all participants—inside and outside—to see anew the sometimes homologous workings of two of our most profoundly formative social institutions. Such analysis, they each suggest, is key to advancing from educational access to educational justice.

The contributors to Part V: Yardsticks and Roadmaps: Evaluating Change ask how Inside-Out marks and measures the transformation it seeks. In Alchemy and Inquiry, Barbara Roswell and Simone Davis reflect on a variety of explanatory models that can account for its power and on the often thorny challenges of research and evaluation that have occupied members of the Inside-Out network who are connected through an extended research community. The chapter summarizes a wide-ranging roundtable discussion among members of the program’s Research Committee about the ethics, purposes, and methods appropriate to such research, about scope and scale, and about the paradigms and tools that can best analyze and assess the pedagogy’s aspirations for individual and collective transformation. This section of the book explores not only which questions need asking but also what research practices can enact the program’s principles by extending full partnership, in design, implementation, and analysis, to university and community participants. In answer to this question, Angela Bryant and Yasser Payne argue for the political and analytical benefits of Participatory Action Research (PAR)—and specifically for street PAR—as the