Browsing by Subject "prison"
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Item 20 Years Later: Angela. Davis and the Call for Prison Abolition(2023-04-05) Kwiatkowski, AmaraItem Advocates for Education in Prison-Based Writing Centers from Praxis: A Writing Center Journal Vol. 20 No. 2(Praxis, 2023) Wilson, JuliePrison-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.