Ability and Disability in the Prison Classroom

The purpose of this page is to help educators better recognize, understand, respond to, and support students with a range of physical and learning differences and abilities, in order to meet the unique challenges of teaching within already-restrictive learning environments.

Producing, distributing, teaching, and evaluating the content and curriculum of any course requires careful attention and adherence to occasionally-updated accessibility requirements outlined by the Americans with Disabilities Act Links to an external site. of 1990, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (especially sections 504 and 508). In any class, all students should of course be provided equivalent access to universally accessible materials. In other words, we should already approach instructional design prepared to essentially universalize, within reason and with direct support from college disability services, the different modes of communication through which we deliver instruction — ensuring video or audio includes accurate captioning of any dialogue, securing digital versions of written materials that can be exported for use in myriad reading modalities such as braille or text-to-speech, or making key lesson materials available beyond in-class lessons (e.g., distributing copies of lesson slides to assist students’ ongoing notetaking and studying).

Educational experiences within incarcerated environments boldly underscore the imperative of universal educational access. In particular, as educators practicing within these environments, we are acutely aware of the instructional limitations we navigate as often compared with otherwise-robust resources available on our main campuses. Incarcerated classes are simply, but often frustratingly, not built into the same digital and other campus networks as most other courses being offered to non-incarcerated students within the same college system.

Classes may or may not be equipped with a projector, or with computer access to your prepared lesson slides and other learning materials; and technical assistance may be next-to-nonexistent, especially in real-time (i.e., many facilities do not provide on-call technical assistance while classes are in session). Students who are incarcerated, certainly, are even more immediately and pressingly aware of the additional limitations placed around their pursuit of an education, which frequently include limitations to computer access, subsequent little or no access to Learning Management Systems (e.g., Canvas), and little or no access to a college library or other resources for conducting outside research and studying.

Note: Even as some of these factors continue to improve within CDCR (e.g., the distribution of tablets with tightly-restricted communication and search capabilities), the utilization of information-based technologies within these settings is, at least traditionally, fraught with frustrations for both students and instructors. That is, students and instructors who initially "piloted" new technology programs within CDCR, even those specifically implemented to support educational services, understandably found that regulations around the use of these new technologies often neutralizes their functionality and purpose (e.g., school laptops being collected by CDCR without warning).

Some aspects of one’s ability/ies may be perceptible/visible, or imperceptible/invisible; they shape our experiences, impact and inform our identities, and frame/filter how we perceive and interact with the identities and abilities of others. You may be familiar with your college’s disAbility support services, which support and provide accommodations for a spectrum of abilities, including neurodiverse-/cognitively atypical learning needs, as well as varying physical disabilities and limitations.

As all students should be provided means to formally request reasonable academic accommodations, without such specialized services in place students may feel alienated, disempowered, and disconnected from the overall learning environment, or from the college and higher education experience altogether. Conversely, our goal in facilitating both discipline-specific as well as general education courses and programs within carceral spaces is indeed to empower and co-participate in lifelong learning.

As an instructors in a carceral space, we should account carefully for a rich, diverse spectrum of learning strengths, along with cognitive differences and disabilities; and account carefully for a wide range of distinct physical, bodily orientations to any given course’s subject matter.

The Imperative of Accessibility

Learning experiences must be manageable, and so students should be given opportunity to work independently, and the opportunity to complete much of their work guided by their own unique strengths. A manageable learning experience should also be challenging, so that students may identify critical connections between concepts and circumstances, and so that conceptual understanding can translate into concrete utility — ability and preparedness to apply what is learned.

One of the most productive challenges we can facilitate for students is the opportunity to learn, holistically, from one another. Such a challenge is found in recognizing our own limitations for fully understanding (interpreting with total clarity) the outward appearances and behaviors of others.

Impaired mobility and/or impaired perception of the senses (i.e., physical disability) may not always be apparent in our interactions with students. Difficulty recognizing others' impairments and distinctions may be especially challenging whenever others' access to medical treatment is insufficient, limited, or withheld — either because of bureaucratically dense or obscure restrictions on basic access to almost all basic needs resources; or, as may sometimes appear to be the case, because of a callous dismissal of the needs of individuals who have been criminally convicted and incarcerated (i.e., medical services or other staff potentially overlooking the medical needs and requests of students and others who are incarcerated).

Further, students with diverse and atypical learning needs may not always make those needs known to instructors or other students; or they may not even the have means to obtain and evaluate a necessary, formal diagnosis. This can be especially true for those students who are neurodivergent, such as persons on the autism spectrum, those with severe or high-functioning attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and more developmental and other learning disabilities.

Social Masking

Social masking refers to the practice of crafting one's outward behavior in order to appear in a way others might be more likely to perceive as "typical," with the intention of concealing cognitively atypical attributes. Social masking is a distinct variation of impression management Links to an external site., a kind of socially motivated, everyday performance of self designed and deliberated in order to help one regulate how others will perceive and make sense of their behavior and character. Social masking is distinct in the kinds of impressions certain persons with developmental and other learning disabilities will craft and attempt to present; that is, social masking is uniquely about trying to conceal one's inability (or impaired ability) to communicate and socially function in ways that are otherwise typical for, and taken for granted by, the vast majority of learners

The video below provides a simple but effective overview of social masking as it pertains the experiences of persons who are neurodivergent. For people who are neurodivergent, processes for cognitive reasoning and for calculating social appearance may diverge distinctly from what many may consider to be “standard” ways of interpreting and responding to the happenings of life.

Participating in institutions designed for people with typical cognitive operations, and made primarily to tolerate typical-but-largely-learned outward behaviors and appearances that are more readily attentive to social sensitivities, requires social masking. Approaching accessibility as an imperative within the incarcerated classroom requires recognizing that any given class' or individual's particular needs for accessibility may only appear well outside the scope of that which we are currently trained and conditioned to recognize. That is, we are compelled as instructors, committed to the broad and disciplinary value of what we teach, to continually sharpen our own perception and recognition of others' distinct, and distinctly impactful lived experiences.

Instructional Approaches to Disciplinary Inclusion

Continually learning how to adapt your pedagogy, instructional design philosophy, etc., to such a diverse range of learning needs — overlapping with stark but predictable restrictions allowing us to meet those needs (i.e., CDCR bureaucracies) — becomes an opportunity to reimagine and reevaluate, through experience, the greater impact of what, and how, we teach in all contexts.

A Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach, in summary, recognizes and responds to the shared learning needs, and diverse learning strengths, of all persons. In principle, UDL essentially pursues the formation of curricula and teaching styles designed deliberately to incorporate and apply virtually all common academic accommodations to every single student. More importantly, universalizing instruction to account for diverse orientations to ability and disability compels us to build the teaching/learning experience explicitly around such accommodations:

Open time limits on exams/assessments. You may prepare, for example, out-of-class exams requiring students demonstrate their ability to apply an understanding of key concepts, rather than demonstrating an ability simply to identify correct answers. In other words, rather than matching terms with definitions, or filling in blank spaces with accurately-aligned information, students may be assessed as well on how they show their work building toward a correct answer (such as for a Mathematics assessment), or how effectively they demonstrate close reading and analysis. This may be one of the most consequential, and substantial, changes you choose to implement to your curriculum or teaching style within the incarcerated classroom, for students whose lives tend not only to be quite busy, but whose everyday mobility is already institutionally and significantly limited beyond their, or our, control.

Multimodal communication and comprehension. Certainly, individuals may demonstrate particular strengths as learners — for example, an “aural learner” may focus quite effectively on speech and patterns of sound, whereas a “visual learner” may pay especially close attention to text or patterns of imagery, and a “kinesthetic learner” may acquire understanding particularly well through physical movement and close attention to spatial relationships. These strengths may translate into how students present and express themselves as well. However, human beings are multimodal creatures; we have always acquired and applied our understanding of all things, conceptual and material, through myriad modes of communication. In other words, learning aurally benefits one’s visual learning, and learning visually benefits one’s kinesthetic learning, etc. Keep in mind that within an incarcerated college environment, a statistically above-average number of students will be less likely to have had the opportunity to complete a highschool education or equivalent, and for many, experiences with formal education may be several years, even decades in the past. Engaging students through myriad modes of communication, and equally providing students flexibility to express themselves across a range of communicative practices, helps ensure a more holistic, more human learning experience.

Subject-specific inclusion. Discuss, deliberately and explicitly, human ability and disability within the content of your course. Very often, students with disabilities, or other limitations and learning difficulties, may not convey those difficulties to you as their instructor. We may even unintentionally discourage students’ full participation when overlooking or exasperating the perception that individuals with disabilities are personally, solely responsible for keeping pace with instructional demands functionally designed for a presumed typical, but not a universal, learning experience. Truthfully, we diminish learning for all students when excluding the experiences of those who live and learn by navigating, overcoming, and even utilizing their distinctions in ability and disability to more comprehensively inform their understanding. Subject-specific inclusion goes beyond the use of curricular examples representing diverse experiences with ability and disability, and accepts as well the need for designing methods of instruction and evaluation to benefit the subjective experience of the individual student. Kinesiology or Dance classes, for instance, may evaluate student comprehension of bodily autonomy through both live demonstration — which may limit some students — along with an articulated (written, oral, etc) explanation of their demonstration.