Introduction to the Resource Guide: Welcome!

This Canvas resource guide serves as a professional learning platform for the Rising Scholars’ Equity-in-Curriculum Development Program. The program represents a network of resources and communities working in, and supporting, higher education in carceral spaces. As an ongoing and ever-evolving network of California Community College faculty, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students and graduates, and nonprofit activists and professionals, we aim to provide holistic, humanistic, equitable, and transformative education for incarcerated individuals and populations.

Rejecting the replication of historically oppressive dynamics reinforced through postcolonial primary-through-higher education, racism, classism, and beyond, we labor in turn to prioritize, centralize, and revere student insight, and lived and shared experience as collectively invaluable to processes of higher learning. This program and resource aim to empower educators through collective knowledge-building and community inquiry, critical and social-scientific scholarship, and participant feedback.

As in every other college classroom, our students’ individual and collective learning and success motivate the work of all faculty and educators who continually contribute to this work. There are distinct challenges to teaching within carceral space. The materials and structure provided throughout this resource have been developed through a process of "co-operative co-authorship," wherein professors of practice within carceral spaces (faculty teaching across disciplines and specializations) collaboratively:

Assessed the broad, specific, and ongoing needs of the professional development training/resource (i.e., "What expectations and experiences should be introduced and discussed for new and returning faculty teaching within prisons and jails?);
Gathered, produced, and curated content applicable to the needs of each module (we closely reviewed perspectives and materials contributed by professors of practice teaching in carceral spaces across more than 10 different California community colleges); and
We coordinated and met with panels of formerly incarcerated students and graduates who reviewed our work, providing productive feedback along with an invaluable foundation of insight.

The "co-operative co-authorship" process is meant not only to support a collaborative approach to the initial development of this resource, but also to facilitate the continual development and improvement of this resource far beyond the tenure of the first groups of contributors. Given the importance of acknowledging, articulating, and constructively responding to the vast needs of higher education programming and students within the prison/jail system, our collaboratively organized development process helped produce a guide/resource with the potential for ongoing growth and improvement, in order to continually reflect on and better characterize best practices within these spaces.

Navigating Expectations

No two educational settings are the same, and this is especially true in incarcerated education given the blend of unique institutional and educational cultures, and the diversity of faculty, students, and personnel coexisting/cooperating together. There is no singular mode of operation for an educator working in carceral education, so experiences and recommendations throughout this resource are nuanced, finite, and primed for continual improvement. As a result, while the material included in these modules has been developed by a diverse group of educators with broad experiences across carceral higher education, the information, practices, and recommendations throughout may be more helpful to some than to others.

As you navigate and digest the information within these modules, continually reflect on how such practices may be of use to you and the work you do with students. You are encouraged to engage with the material as well as with the larger community of educators who, like you, work with or teach justice-involved students.

Foundational Principles and Practices in Curricular Equity

Each module includes within its introductory page a list of distinct key terms useful for understanding the broad and nuanced needs of populations of students and others who are incarcerated. The following principles and practices act as foundational concepts and key terms useful for more effectively understanding, utilizing, and assessing the terminology and recommendations discussed throughout the training.

Inclusive Teaching: In the simplest terms, inclusive teaching represents an instructional approach designed deliberately both to acknowledge and productively respond to the inherent diversity of every given group of students. Inclusive teaching requires openness and immediacy from an instructor invested in facilitating learning environments wherein all students can be authentically encouraged to contribute. As inclusive teaching recognizes individual student contributions as a source of significant learning for other students, inclusive teaching also continually updates and incorporates, as appropriate, lesson materials to exemplify an endless diversity of individual, cultural, social, and other human experiences.
Equitable Learning: Because we cannot learn on our students’ behalf, we can and should build into our inclusive teaching practices a conscious concern for equitable learning, which denotes the opportunity for all students to attain equivalent subject knowledge and experience without prejudicing certain forms of knowledge over others. Simply, equitable learning recognizes two important points:
- First, learning is a human imperative motivated through universally shared human experiences and needs, such as the persistent need for freedom of thought and expression shared by all educators, students, and other people;
- Second, learning is never entirely universal, and other students simply do not, will not, learn exactly as we have learned; and some will persistently and productively learn very differently from us.
Bracketing Bias: The practice of bracketing bias, which emanates from critical-qualitative methods used for social-scientific research, constitutes communicating internally (admitting to oneself) one’s specific biases, assumptions, and learned attitudes as they relate to any given subject. As we teach, and as we work on deliberately recognizing and mitigating all reductive forms of selective bias (and accordingly modeling the importance of doing so), bracketing our own bias when designing curricula, lesson plans, discussions, assignments, etc., requires that we comprehensively articulate to ourselves, and then directly challenge, potentially uncomfortable truths about how we have come to view or obscure others, and their differences.
Implicit Bias: Like other forms of reductive preference and prejudice, implicit bias is learned through individual, cultural, and social experiences; however, implicit bias is practiced rotely, automatically, absent of any deliberate or conscious intentions. Recognizing our own implicit bias is therefore an ongoing necessary effort for educators, especially as we tend to expect and prepare students to demonstrate academic and disciplinary rigor within extremely diverse, trauma-informed, intellectually and creatively rich environments. Recognizing one's own implicit bias requires remaining receptive to, and even actively inviting, thoughtful outside critique and feedback.

Contributing Communities

The work contained within these modules is a product of hours of individual and collective reflection, research, and dialog centering incarcerated education. The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, utilizing grant funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, recruited faculty from across California colleges to participate in the development of these modules as part of its Equity-in-Curriculum Project. Participating faculty represented ten California community colleges geographically spanning the state, from College of the Redwoods in the far north, to Southwestern College near the southern border.

As counselors, teachers, and faculty coordinators, contributing faculty engage with students across all security levels at more than twenty California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation facilities and within the Los Angeles County correctional system. Faculty and formerly incarcerated students and graduates, who have invested labor and time producing and reviewing these materials, work also with various networks of educators and advocates, such as Project Rebound, working to maximize the individual and social impact of higher education within and beyond prison walls.