The Freedom to Learn


by Jeff Mortimer


Education goes beyond the classroom, behind prison walls


“T


here was no place to hide in this class,” says Robin Lucy. “You had to do your work and people would notice if


you didn’t.” Tere was no place to hide because


Lucy, an associate professor of English, taught the Winter 2013 course she refers to inside the walls of Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, a prison in Pitsfield Township that houses all of the state of Michigan’s roughly 2,000 female prisoners. Entitled “Narratives of Imprisonment


and Liberation,” the class was comprised of 15 Eastern students and 15 inmates, following the model of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which has trained 374 college instructors in 37 states—as well as Canada, Australia, Denmark and the United Kingdom—in techniques for succeeding in a teaching environment unlike any other. Lucy’s class was the fourth taught by


Eastern instructors at Women’s Huron Valley. Eastern faculty have taught classes at the prison on a volunteer basis since 2006, but the Inside-Out courses, first of-


28 Eastern | SUMMER 2013


fered in Fall 2011, are regular parts of the curriculum for which outside students receive credit and instructors are paid. Perhaps “regular” isn’t entirely ac-


curate. According to Lori Pompa, Inside- Out’s founder and director, the unique environment is what makes the program such a transformative experience for its participants. “Te crux of the whole thing for me is


that what we do in that classroom is cre- ate an environment within which people feel really free,” says Pompa, who has taught criminal justice at Temple Uni- versity in Philadelphia since 1992. “Tat could happen anywhere, but it is that much more compelling when it happens in the context of a prison, the antithesis of everything else that’s happening in the prison. By dint of people being together, and the focus being off of the instruc- tor and onto the learning community, we build community in that room. Not that we ever had a caring community as a goal; we didn’t think all this through ahead of time, just created a class and started to see over time what was hap- pening.”


What happens, says Jessica Kilbourn,


“is life-changing, for both inside and outside students and for the instructor. Tere’s something that is reached that you didn’t know was there.” Kilbourn and Kathryn Ziegler, lecturers in women’s and gender studies, co-taught Eastern’s first Inside-Out class, “Introduction to Gen- der and Sexuality.” “Even in my own life, I don’t take my freedom for granted anymore,” Kilbourn


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