Reflections and Resources for Building the Course

This page asks the reader to consider change or adaptability as a means to disrupt harmful or exclusionary practices; it asks us to critically reflect on our previously held beliefs and biases, and also offers access and information for further readings and OER resources.

Critical Reflection

Reflect on why you have chosen to teach incarcerated students. Do you see all people as having potential for growth and redemption? Do you see incarcerated people as worthy of dignity and able to transform themselves and add value to society? What challenges do you anticipate? What will success look like for you? For your students? Consider discussing your ”why” with students on the first day of class; it can help you to build rapport and connection.

Reflect on the teaching and facilitation methods and approaches you currently utilize, have utilized in the past, and are thinking about utilizing in the future. How did you come to believe in your current approach and what works and what doesn’t? Why did you discontinue your past methods or approaches and what did you replace those with? What is appealing in trying new methods and approaches, and what is holding you back in the implementation process? Are co-learning, horizontal/egalitarian learning valuable to you as an instructor? How can you help develop and further these approaches to knowledge production within the college classroom inside of a prison?

When developing your classes, to the extent you are permitted to choose/design your curriculum it is a good idea to look at the normative framework with a new lens. A few questions to ask yourself while developing a course are:

What sort of representations are available?
Will your studies connect to the material?
How can I make the material more palatable and accessible so that it will be sensical to most people who read this it?
Who wrote the materials?
What sort of images are in the books/readings?
Are there data charts that are hard to read?

Building further on your reflection on your past, present, and future instructional and facilitation methods, consider your own biases and how they influence you as you engage as a teacher or counselor with justice-involved students. If you didn’t take the Implicit Association Test from Harvard University while you worked through the Power and Identity Module, consider doing so now. This is a fun, free test to figure out what type of implicit biases might inform your perceptions. Pick any identity category on the left to see what unconscious preferences are present.

Next, read "Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias" by Daniel Kelly and Erica Roedder.

After reading the Kelly and Roedder piece on Racial Cognition, you might have been surprised by the data. Awareness of our own biases, and the perceptions we have or are subjected to, bring about a consciousness to our embodied social locations in the world. We all have many identities, and which one we take up at what time is dependent on the context we are in. To isolate one identity only when we are perceiving is to generalize or assume that we know something about that category. So, knowing what biases we might have and how perception works alongside value judgements made in a classroom, we can rethink our approach to current and future classes with the goal of shifting our practices and create new ways of empowering our students.

Additional Resources

Open Educational Resources Initiative Links to an external site.. Academic Senate for California Community Colleges.

Funded by education trailer bill AB 1809 (2017-2018), the mission of the OERI Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) is to reduce the cost of educational resources for students by expanding the availability and adoption of high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER). The OERI facilitates and coordinates the curation and development of OER texts, ancillaries, and support systems. In addition, the OERI supports local OER implementation efforts through the provision of professional development, technical support, and technical resources. Faculty looking to learn more about OER can access available resources and information about OER and can view archived or register for upcoming webinars. Faculty looking for an OER text or materials can search available and reviewed resources by discipline, by CSU General Education, by Transfer Model Curriculum, or by C-ID descriptor.

Intentional Insights: Theming Lessons and Discussions

An English faculty's perspective. There are plenty of successes to share regarding building a new or existing course. However, I'd like to share an experience I had building a course that did not go as well as I had anticipated, mostly because I let my own bias and perspective on the selected theme cloud my ability to make a more thoughtful and informed choice.

A few years ago, I chose to theme my Critical Thinking and Literature course. I was considering using horror or monster fiction, and was encouraged to explore this further after chatting with an instructor I had met at the National Conference for Higher Education in Prison a few years ago who themed her class around science fiction and dystopian fiction. This – coupled with students' articulated desire to discuss elements of their incarceration, hardships, and struggles – made me think horror and monster fiction would work well…what could go wrong?

Well, about halfway through the semester, I realized that the theme was just such a downer, no matter how positive or passionate I was about the content or context. Students still did awesome and engaged with the material in a thoughtful and productive way. But talking about horror in a space that is horrible, and about monsters, when that's often what society labels those who are incarcerated, came with a heavy tone, and sometimes this birthed some pretty bleak reading discussions and responses.

Yet, I decided to re-think the way I facilitated the class and try it out again the following semester. I thought I could still salvage the theme, especially if I were more thoughtful about how we'd engage with the readings. Then, the pandemic hit, we rapidly shifted to emergency correspondence, and I scrapped the whole theme altogether. At that moment, I felt that I could not responsibly or respectfully facilitate the class, still centered around horror (which often presents discussions on social and cultural fears), when everyone was already so afraid for themselves and their families.

I went in a more positive direction with the literature selections for the remainder of that course, as well as future courses.

None of this is to say that students who are incarcerated should not read horror or monster fiction. I've had many wonderful and insightful discussions with students who legitimately enjoy reading Stephen King's novels and short stories, for example. However, maybe framing a whole class around a theme that is emotionally dark in a space that is already immensely, emotionally dark might not be the most thoughtful choice. Not the way I was going about it, at least.

Had I been more concerned with what students needed or wanted out of a course theme, considering their environment [more closely], I might have made a more mindful choice when initially building that course.

Reflections and Resources for Building the Course