Inside-Out Pedagogy and Dialogue
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done.”
Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative
“Prison walls are not just to keep people like me inside, they are meant to keep the public out”
Tyrone Werts, The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program
Each year, SUSI scholars participated in workshops sponsored by The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. It is a program designed to break down the walls that divide us. The program trains higher education instructors to teach classes that bring together traditional college students and incarcerated students to learn together in semester-long courses held in prisons and jails. The organization has trained almost 1100 educators who teach in more than 160 correctional facilities around the world. Inside-Out courses currently operate in most U.S. states and several countries including Canada, Denmark, Australia, Mexico, and the U.K. To get a sense of what the program looks like in practice, you can watch the Temple University video below featuring Lori Pompa, a professor who founded the program in 1997.
Site Visits
In 2018, the workshop was held at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Eastern State functioned as a prison from 1829 to 1971, but now is a museum. In the early nineteenth century, Eastern State was viewed as a progressive model of incarceration because it placed an emphasis on reform rather than punishment. However, one of the hallmarks of the system was its emphasis on solitary confinement, which is now viewed by many as a form of cruel and unusual punishment. The museum also had an exhibit on mass incarceration. Learn more about religion and incarceration HERE.
In 2019, scholars traveled to the State Correctional Institution - Phoenix just outside Philadelphia and were hosted by the men of the Graterford Think Tank (GTT), who have been meeting every week since 2004. After a dinner with Inside-Out founder Lori Pompa, the scholars made their way to the prison and processed through several gates to the prison chapel room, where they were greeted by Mu, Felix, Paul, Bobby, Saadiq, Vernon Stan, Rell, Charles, and Sam. These men were all serving life-without-parole sentences, but they have been actively involved in training Inside-Out college professors for 15 years. GTT members led a series of exercises including the wagon wheel icebreaker and a case study scenario discussion focusing on how people from different social positions perceived the same event, in this case, a prison riot.
Inside-Out Instructor Training Institutes
Inside-Out runs international training institutes around the world each year. They have trained educators throughout the U.S. and also in Australia, Mexico, United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Canada. It is a six-day training on curriculum development, setting parameters in carceral spaces, developing prison-university partnerships, fostering intercultural group communication, and learning interactive pedagogical approaches. Three days of the training take place inside of a prison. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, trainings have been postponed until 2021. To apply for upcoming trainings click HERE and send an email to dkrueger@temple.edu.
Readings/Resources
Pompa, Lori. “Drawing Forth, Finding Voice, Making Change: Inside-Out Learning as Transformative Pedagogy” in Turning Teaching Inside-Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Learning. Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Roswell, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Werts, Tyrone. “Access for Whom? Inside-Out’s Opening Doors” in Turning Teaching Inside-Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Learning. Simone Weil Davis and Barbara Roswell, eds. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Further Reading
Khuri, M. Lydia (2004). Working with emotion in educational intergroup dialogue. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 28, 595-612.
Intergroup dialogue elicits emotional responses they must be acknowledged
Guidelines for working with emotion in intergroup settings
1. Trust: Before participants are willing to open up and allow themselves to confront their worldviews, they must have a sense that the facilitators and other participants are trustworthy i.e. will not be demeaning, retaliatory, indifferent, but will be accepting, understanding and authentic.
2. Facilitator attitude and empathy: The facilitator must have an attitude of genuine understanding, respectful curiosity, and a willingness to suspend judgement. Definition of empathy: "a relational stance in which one reconstructs imaginatively another person's experience without evaluation and without regard to whether the experience is joyful or sad."
3. Facilitator's self-regulation: "Facilitators have to be emotionally present and engaged and, at the same time, be contained. Facilitators need to work through their own emotional issues outside the facilitation work.
4. Developmental, phase-specific tasks:
a. focus on building trust
b. highlight similarities and differences by inviting participants to share personal experiences informed by particular backgrounds
c. explore areas and topics around which the groups are in conflict
d. ask students to consider the implications of learning for social justice
"Formative Years" - in Horton and Friere's We Make the Road by Walking (1990)
This essay brings into conversation Paolo Friere (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and Myles Horton (founder of the Highlander Folk School - training school for civil rights activists) to discuss their views on education.
Friere: Books are useful to the extent that they help us understand the world more clearly - linking reading books and reading the world. Useful books also help us to see the theory in action.
Friere: "there is no creativity without ruptura, without a break from the old." In what ways do Inside-Out courses instigate this rupture?
