In Fall 2023, I gave a talk at the second annual Higher Ed in Prison conference organized by the Tennessee Board of Regents, as part of their work with the Tenneesee Higher Education in Prison Initiative. This was the first keynote I gave outside of the Pacific Northwest region and I thoroughly appreciate the experience.
I am learning that each time I am asked to stretch into something new or unfamiliar, my work gets stronger. I understand it better, how it connects in so many unexpected and unexplored directions. We are bound by our unresolved trauma, our untended grief, in so many ways. We are also bound by joy, love, creative endeavor, and care.
A spiritual teacher once said told me that the constant tension between the One and the Many is a Divine Dichotomy and that feels truer and truer everyday. I often wonder if balancing our connections between joy and anguish are also part of that Divine Dichotomy. Connecting in only one way or the other denies us the full experience of our humanity, but honoring them equally can seem an impossibility.
We spent the majority of our time in a short workshop, so I’ve included only my opening and closing remarks. As this was a conference about higher ed in prison, my talk was directed to corrections educators, and currently and formerly incarcerated scholars and teachers, but its message is applicable in all learning spaces.
I’m working on a recording but for now, here are my opening and closing remarks.
Our Guides
Today’s conversation brings us back into our bodies, as we consider how to build a trauma-responsive teaching practice. At its heart, trauma-responsive teaching is an invitation to become familiar with our own hurts, care for our wounded learner self, and bring the experience of self-tending into our teaching.
As I prepared for today, I asked myself the question posed to us by the luminous adrienne maree brown: “what is the next elegant step?” What is something we can do, right here, right now, in response to this system of inhumanity disguised as education? What can we do in the liminal and limited space and time we have with students trying to reclaim the right to education that is the birthright of all people? What pathway can we dream – with them – into a different future?
Ancestor bell hooks called us in to education as the practice of freedom. So have Michelle Alexander, Grace Lee Boggs, Patrisse Coulours, Angela Davis, Eddie Ellis, Paulo Friere, Shawn Ginwright, Miriam Kaba, Ibram X Kendi, Bettina Love, Cara Page, Sir Ken Robinson, Bryan Stevenson, and Erica Woodland.
In my own life, I hear that call from William, Michelle, Koty, Alicia, Trish, Stanley, Terrell, Christopher, Chris, Ronald, Dylan, Jarrod, Brandon, and countless others past and present. So many who have been most harmed by education still believe in its promise as a pathway to freedom, to liberation.
Transgressing the boundaries
But teaching to transgress demands substance beyond what is taught, and we can no longer indulge the mythology of intellect above all. Neglecting the emotional and physical facets of ourselves, has narrowed our efforts at growth and change to primarily the realm of thought. This self-inflicted boundary binds us in a fraction of our truth, a small portion of our full humanity.
Now, in this historic moment, we are called forcefully to transgress that self-inflicted boundary.
We are living in a time of thresholds, of transitions, of liminal spaces. We stand at the crossroads, where transgressions, border crossings, intrusions, interruptions, all carry the weight, the power, the potentiality that exists everywhere all at once. Teaching and learning are suffused with that potentiality, as they seek the fields on the far side of our imaginations, disrupting the limits we have placed on our human-ness.
In this time, the substance of our transgression must arise from thought, feeling, and action, united in balance, prepared to move in all possible ways. We cannot think our way forward, or intellect our way into some new space of teaching and learning. We do not recover our fullness with greater intellectualization, but with our own rehumanization.
This first transgression prepares us for the next, as we consider the inhumanity of imprisonment.
Being fully human in a dehumanizing institution trespasses against personal and cultural defenses, erected to deny and avoid the unavoidable grief and rage and pain of incarceration. Breaching this boundary is a transgressive act, to be done with great intent and purpose. Bringing our full selves into truncated spaces brings the entire experience of teaching and learning with us; an invitation to our students to share in those experiences.
In an institution whose sole purpose is to punish transgression, education intensifies the urgency to redefine that term with our own purpose. In a space created to dehumanize, our second transgression is to recognize, accept, and find joy in our students’ humanity, and our own.
We recover, reclaim, and restore the fullness of our humanity with a different conversation, a different experience, a different creative exploration.
Today, I invite us into that difference, to touch our unexplored edges; to reexamine the shape and feel of learning; to transgress our boundaried humanity - as learners - so we might bring that new shape into our learning spaces.
But what are those shapes, and how can they show up in prison classrooms?
The answer is both philosophical and practical.
First – we cannot share or give what we have not experienced. If we have not experienced learning differently – in a way that recognizes our full human-ness, hearts and bodies as well as minds – we cannot extend that experience for our students. We can try to ‘brain’ our way through a portfolio of pedagogies, methods, models, and frameworks, but without feeling learning in our physical and emotional bodies, we limit our imagination and our practice to what we already know.
Second - We replicate what we HAVE experienced. We recreate how we felt, what was done to us, what we have witnessed done to others, what we have felt but not named. We replicate our own dehumanization, and reinforce the dehumanization of others.
Our work now is to find – together – a new sensation of learning in and from our entire humanity, and consider how we might bring that into our classrooms.
Possibilities and futures
Access to education matters, in content exploration, learning how to learn, discovering our capacities as learners, and practicing how to relate to others – to see ourselves and them as equally human, equally worthy and deserving of love and care.
In prisons, dehumanization begins immediately for both staff and incarcerated people. Those who get to leave at the end of the day face the daunting task of rehumanizing themselves on the ride home. People who don’t get to leave face the task of reminding themselves and others of their humanity in the face of the endless dehumanization of incarceration.
What I have heard, time and time again, is that prison classrooms are a place where many people felt recognized in their human-ness, even if for a limited time, and in limited ways.
How and why this happens, who experiences it and who doesn’t, why some classrooms don’t offer humanity and others do is a long and complicated conversation, but I can offer a piece of insight for all of us who work in carceral spaces:
We have to remember ourselves as human first, before we can truly recognize anyone else’s humanity. Embracing ourselves then opens the space for us to treat others with the dignity they deserve a full and complete human beings.
While it is not our place to confer humanity, we can protect and care for ourselves and others by remembering our shared birthright – our shared worthiness.
We are all worthy. We are all born enough.
Education – schools – which should be places that affirm our worth, treat us with dignity, and strengthen us as learning beings instead undermine our sense of worthiness, trivialize our dignity, and sow the seeds of disbelief in our learning selves.
Mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex carry this work forward. They dehumanize everyone they touch, replenishing and nourishing nothing.
Maintaining our humanity, remembering the humanity of others, is not a given and takes more than the application of our intellect. It demands work, consideration, thoughtfulness, and – above all – the desire to WANT to maintain and embrace humanity.
It requires our imagination, our hearts, and that well of courage we may have neglected.
And here – again - education and learning can provide a way forward; they can be a path that takes us into a future where joy and wonder lead us into the fullest versions of ourselves; building a world that affirms life, care, generosity, and awe.
We hold the gifts and talents and creativity to imagine joyful teaching & learning – how they feel, sound, look, taste, and smell. How they make US feel – even in the harshest of environments.
We have to believe they will fundamentally shift our human experience toward a fuller expression of our loving & generous natures.
This imagining happens on the individual, collective, systemic, and cultural level simultaneously. Even the smallest, tiniest effort can have exponential impacts because that’s how joy works – it is highly contagious. All we need is a taste of what it CAN be in order to gives ourselves over to its birth.
And we aren’t imagining alone. There is an emerging consciousness, a collective, that is working together - toward joy in this life, on this planet, in this existence; joy in so many different iterations and forms.
We have to keep choosing joy, wonder, imagination, and care. We have to keep asking the questions that matter most when it feels hardest: How do we prioritize dignity, connection, and joy? How do we fight for liberation, not to protect privilege?
Maybe that’s what we can do right now – when things feel grimmest and so so dark – keep choosing joy, keep choosing to believe that we can and are better, keep practicing hope and joy as a discipline.
Every time we choose these directions, we affirm ourselves as beings who can be more than violent survivalists.
Dacher Keltner, author of Awe, writes about “collective effervescence,” one of the eight wonders of life, originally introduced by Emile Durkheim.
Durkheim describes the experience of collective effervescence as “feeling like we are buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, and oceanic “we”. Remembering, even imagining, this joyful physical sensation - that we can find it together - can help in even the bleakest of moments.
In all my years of education, as both a teacher and a learner, the teachers I remember best are those who so thoroughly enjoyed learning WITH us that it was impossible not to want to join them. If you can do nothing else for your students, you can be a joyful learner WITH them.
When you return to your work, whether inside or outside the prison walls, remember that isolation is an unnatural state, that joy lives in connection, and is what our souls desire.
Even when times are hard, we can find joy, and satisfaction in teaching, and we can share that joy with our students. Sharing the joy of learning together is the future that pulls me in its direction and I hope to meet you there, in those splendid fields.