This “Best Practices” session will highlight a partnership between Portland State University and Columbia River Correctional Institution that, following the model of Temple University’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, brings together “inside”/incarcerated students with “outside”/University students to form an inclusive learning community. The presenter will share approaches to establishing, nurturing, and growing productive partnerships across institutional difference; offer insights about liberatory pedagogical strategies to catalyze “education as the practice of freedom” (Freire, 1970); and report on corollary outcomes to the partnership, including publications co-authored by faculty, inside and outside students, and staff.
Bringing non-incarcerated students and faculty inside correctional facilities to learn with and from their incarcerated colleagues provides a rich context for transformative learning for all and invokes a lived sense of possibility in imagining and co-constructing the world as we’d like it to be. Given the dislocation both inside and outside students tend to experience in this sort of boundary-crossing learning community, they must confront what Mezirow (2000) identified as “disorienting dilemmas” in their encounters with each other and with the material at the center of their inquiry. Fundamentally, “Writing as Activism” as a course, Inside-Out as a program, and progressive educational and other programming inside correctional institutions more generally, reflect this core feature of transformative learning theory: that experiencing disorienting dilemmas provide the foundation from which learners might expand our frames of reference, experiment with new frames of reference, shift our perspectives, enlarge our habits of mind, and engage intentionally as agents of change in our world.
