Early Childhood Education and Prison Education: cultural overlap?

Jody Lewen came to speak to students about Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison in California. She described her own path from HM to graduate school to a PhD in rhetoric and finally landing as the executive director of this project. She started as a volunteer during graduate school and as she described it, "if you follow the things that feel right it all comes together."

As I listened to Jody talk about how hard it is to humanize the prisoner in conversations about what is needed and why programs such as this are important, about the culture of prisons that they need to talk about during teacher training, and about the challenge of helping prospective teachers confront their own personal biases and stereotypes about prisoners, I was hearing so many parallels to my conversations with graduate students about teaching young children. A common thread was the idea of holding ourselves accountable for the ideas, impressions, and assumptions we bring to a group of people who have been made invisible by society or who have been hidden from us behind a deep stereotype.

Jody talked about the gang culture of prisons, but also about the ways in which this Associates Degree program has been shifting culture. She discussed the impact the program is having not only on the prisoners who are receiving an education, but also on those who are in contact with or living among those prisoners. With one in ten prisoners in the program it has great potential to bring about true cultural change.

This conversation brought to mind Carla Shalaby's idea that schools are simply places where we teach children to go to school and that discipline parallels the punitive nature of prison discipline. Perhaps this is true about education as well. Do we need to train teachers in both cases about culture and bias first to develop an educational program that counteracts the forces that impact the human condition of being incarcerated or being young in our society? Do we need to convince funders of the value of educating these two groups of people as a humane and imperative act rather than a preparation for participation in society in roles defined for them by society?