outside students had to be at the top of their game to do well in the class be- cause the inside students set the bar for them and they rose to the occasion. And everyone in the class learned how edu- cation is deeply integrated with how you live your life.” Lucy points to Toni Morrison’s novel
“Mercy,” one of the texts in her course, as a good example.
“T
here’s a scene in the novel where women traveling from England to Virginia, all European women but
from all different classes, have this tea party in the hold of the ship,” she says, “and a number of inside students say that’s what it’s like in prison: you have to develop relationships and friendships that you never would imagine you would have to create for yourself. Tat opened up the book for the other students in class. I’ve taught Mercy to undergrad and graduate students and it’s not an easy book, but they found their way into it.” “What I tell my students is this is go-
ing to be a transformative experience for you,” says Lora Lempert, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan- Dearborn, which also offers classes at Women’s Huron Valley, and Inside-Out’s state coordinator. “I can’t tell you the di- rection of the transformation but I guar- antee you’ll be transformed. Partly it’s the creation of community because we’re in this bounded space. Students from the outside usually take classes and never talk to anyone else in the class. Here, they’re required to interact, so they bond.” Lempert and Lucy met one evening
when they were both ushering at an Ann Arbor Summer Festival concert. It was truly an “aha” moment. Aſter they dis- covered their shared interest and experi- ences in teaching the incarcerated, the two joined forces to make Inside-Out a reality at their respective institutions.
30 Eastern | SUMMER 2013
“Lora has been the driving force be-
hind everything that’s happened with teaching in women’s prisons in the state,” Lucy says. “It hasn’t been easy at times to convince people of why these are signifi- cant programs, why incarcerated people deserve the opportunity of education. But once people get on board, they really get on board, and Eastern’s been very supportive.” Te impetus for what became Inside-
Out came from inmates themselves. Pompa had been teaching sessions of her classes inside correctional facilities for several years when a prisoner at one of them suggested she do it for an entire semester, and include students from the inside. Two years later, in 1997, she did just that, expanding the program in 2002 to Graterford, a state prison west of Philadelphia where, unknown to her, the man who gave her the idea had been transferred. “Tis man has been involved with
this program all the way through and still is,” she says. But it was the first inside student group at Graterford that inspired her to take it to the next level. “Our very first class there was so on
fire about the issues that we decided to stay together,” Pompa says. “Tat group has been meeting voluntarily once a week ever since, and it was that group that said this is too good to keep it just at Temple University; you should make it a national program. So we did.” Te original focus, not surprisingly,
was on criminal justice courses, but the menu now includes instruction in a wide variety of disciplines. So far, Eastern’s Inside-Out courses have been limited to the Women’s and Gender Studies and English departments, although the program has, equally not surprisingly, atracted its share of students intrigued by the criminal justice field. “We get a set of criminology students, we oſten get students who have friends
or family who are incarcerated some- where, and we occasionally get students who were incarcerated themselves,” says Elizabeth Currans, assistant professor of women’s and gender studies, who will teach Eastern’s next Inside-Out course this fall. “I think there are also people who are just curious.” She says she was motivated to join the
program because “I think that we really forget and write off the people who are incarcerated in this country. Even if all these people should be in prison—and I’m not a judge, I don’t know—they’re still people. We need to provide them some opportunities so that when they re-enter our society, they’re likely to contribute in ways that will help them as well as us.” For Lucy, the Inside-Out experience
was a refresher course in the rewards of her profession. “It reminds me why we teach,” she
says, “because the inside students are careful readers, they speak their mind in a good way, and they want to know how to use their education to see an- other life and make sense of their own. Sometimes you forget how much is going on in your students’ heads, how much they’re struggling working with the material. For whatever reason, these kinds of classroom setings bring that to the fore; people are consciously and actively talking about what they’re learning, and that’s a real giſt to me as a teacher.” Tere was a giſt for the outside stu-
dents, too. “I told them our subject of study was not the inside students them- selves, but as citizens we needed to develop knowledge about prisons, the justice system, our society as a whole,” she says. “What came out of that is that many of our students really thought about what it means to be free. Are we sometimes in prison in our regular worlds?”3
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