| Abstract: | This article discusses pedagogical strategies for college humanities courses in prison. It outlines a pattern of failure and a pattern of success in the typical college prison class. Inmate-students, conditioned into a role of extreme dependence on the prison, will often be put off by college-level work that fails to account for or alter this dependent role. A pattern of failure ignores the difference between on-campus and incarcerated audiences, while the successful pattern proposed blends  hard learning with exposure to university-related cultural activities, designed to both teach and re-enculturate the student.Dr. Cioffi is currently Assistant Professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University, Department of Languages and Literature, Portales, NM 88130. He was previously the Coordinator of the Prison Education Development Project at Indiana University. An earlier version of this paper appeared in his handbookFreeing Shackled Minds: A Handbook for the Prison College Classroom, which was part of a final report to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the agency that funded the project for its last year and a half. |
