Prison U.

I have often seen and heard the slogan: Educate to liberate.  Yet New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is giving a whole new meaning to this clarion call.  He has proposed a plan that will bring professors into prison classrooms, and for prisoners who desire it: a college degree.

Talk about transformative education.  His proposal has the potential to better-prepare prisoners for life after prison and cut the recidivism rate.  If prison studies can show prisoners who have dehumanized or oppressed others how to become more fully human as a form rehabilitation, then I am all for it.  For example, if education could help prisoners see themselves as productive, worthwhile human beings, and not the dregs of society, that so many of prisoners no doubt have internalized, that in of itself could be liberating.  If they could as Freire puts it: "reject this image and and replace it with autonomy and responsibility," then that would be transformative for themselves and their communities. 

I can imagine that prison might be a good place for praxis.  There would be plenty of time for reflection, and pursuing a college degree is a good form of action.  More importantly, prisoners might develop their own voice through education.  They could put in words or name the situations and circumstances that may have led to their incarceration in the first place.

 

Report: The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color--A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress

About two weeks ago, President Obama announced a public-private partnership, called my Brother's Keeper, to help young minority men to stay out of trouble, succeed in school and find good jobs.

During the kick-off of the initiative, President Obama said, "So often, the issues facing boys and young men of color get caught up in long-running ideological arguments — about race and class and crime and poverty, the role of government, partisan politics."

This semester I am teaching a course at Medgar Evers College, a predominantly black institution, in central Brooklyn.  My class of 29 students consists of about 4 young men.  About 70% of the college's enrollment is female.  It's great to see so many young black women in school, but I cannot help but wonder with whom are these young women going to marry and raise a family if the educational and economic plight of minority men is not set on a new trajectory.  Young women all of races are outperforming their male counterparts at almost every level of education.

As someone who is fairly well-informed about current affairs, I have been reading and hearing news reports about the crisis in minority male achievement for years.  One thing that teaching has done for me is to really allow me to see firsthand some of the challenges that these young men face.  What I know for sure is that too many young men are inadequately prepared to become productive members of society.

When I asked a young man in my neighborhood, a recent high school graduate, what he was going to do after high school. He replied, "Get a job with transit."  For years, having a job with transit was one way for young minority males in New York City to become part of the middle class.  The one problem: Now these jobs are increasingly difficult to acquire because of technology and because of austerity and job cuts.

In my family, my grandfather in the 1940s was able to provide a decent living for his family because he worked for Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore.  Today, Bethlehem Steel is no more, and Baltimore's largest employer is Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital.  Even to be a secretary at Johns Hopkins, you need a college degree.  As a consequence, a significant amount of young minority men are left out a job market that requires a significant amount of post-secondary training.

According to a report commissioned by The College Board Advocacy & Policy Center called "The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color--A Review of Research, Pathways and Progress," there are six post-secondary pathways available to high school graduates:

1. Enrollment in a two-year or a four-year college or a vocational school
2. Enlistment in U.S. Armed Forces
3. Employment in U.S. workforce
4. Unemployment
5. Incarceration in state or federal prisons, or in local jails
6. Death

Obviously, some kind of transformation is needed in the lives of these young men. It is imperative that society assists them realizing their full human potential.  We need to change the narrative surrounding young men of color.  Policymakers and the communities in which these young men reside need to make these young men a priority.  Here's why:

As of 2008, only 41.6 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds in the United States had attained an associate degree or higher. More alarmingly, only 30.3 percent of African Americans and 19.8 percent of Latinos ages 25 to 34 had attained an associate degree or higher in the United States, compared to 49.0 percent for white Americans and 70.7 percent for Asian Americans. (Lee and Rawls 2010).

Language, Society and Culture Conference

(Bronx, NY) On Friday, March 7, 2014, I attended the Language, Society and Culture Conference at Bronx Community College.  Some of the highlights of the conference were the sessions on "Using Digital Storytelling in the ESL Writing Class" and the talk, "Storytelling and Academic Discourse: Including More Voices in the Conversation," by Dr. Rebecca Mlynarczk

Both of these sessions were meaningful to me in several ways.  First, both sessions reinforced what I am studying in my "Adult Learners of Language and Literacy" and "Second Language Acquisition" courses. 

Our discussion at the session on digital storytelling and on bringing the world of the students into the academy certainly speaks to the one-sided narratives that Freire indicates as the basis of the banking model of education. Dr. Shoba Bandi-Rao, who led the session on digital storytelling, suggested that "academic discourse can seem like a foreign language" for many non-traditional students.  She said their stories and their language are not valued on college campuses. 

Her digital storytelling project was an attempt to affirm her students in the process of becoming English language speakers by using "problem-posing education" as a way to free her students from the rote memorization often associated with language learning.  Instead, she de-mythologizes the learning process by using creative methods for student to speak and write their truth.

Hi James, I have enjoyed exploring all the links to videos and news articles that you have posted on your blog. The design of your blog is very impressive. What I would like to see more of is your own reflective comments on the readings assigned for our course. I am looking for longer, more complex blog commentaries from you. Please consider these blog comments as an opportunity to consider and express your reactions to what you are learning and to engage in dialogue with me about those reactions. --Barbara Gleason

Freire Quote from "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

In his book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire argues that in traditional education, there is a narrator (the teacher) and a listening object (the students.)  "Education is suffering from narration sickness." (57) Freire insists that this situation minimizes students' creative power, and "serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed." They "react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality. (60)


My whole life I have heard it say that knowledge is power.  However, I have really never questioned how that knowledge is acquired until recently.  I had never heard of Paulo Freire, but reading his book has been a real eye opener for me.  It has given me a lot to think about in my dual roles as a teacher and a student.  How do I become an individual who helps to transform others and who is transformed at the same time?


Last semester, my class read Plato's "Crito" and Noam Chomsky's "Drug Policy As Social Control."
Students were asked to ponder several questions: What is the relationship of the individual to the state?  How much interest does society have in controlling individual behavior?  These are critical questions for any society.  However, for many of my students, critical thinking about these issues was transformation because they lived experiences .  I heard testimony about being "stopped and frisked" and the emotional toll it took on these young men.


In a sense of the "culture of silence" in which these students were submerged was brought to the surface through education and verbal and written dialog.  Students were able to look critically at their world and gradually come to perceive their own personal and social reality.  Through reflection and action or praxis.  The fact that they were able to do this by critically analyzing an ancient text is even more remarkable because they, you could argue, were able to use what could be perceived as the oppressor's text as a source of liberation.


 

Freire's "Banking Concept of Education"

Americans tend to believe that our nation should "invest" in education because it is a worthwhile economic and social endeavor.  Yet, after reading Paulo Freire's, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," I am left to question what kind of investment society is really making in education.  Frankly, I am shocked by Freire's attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher.  I am shocked because he might be on to something.

Friere, I think brilliantly, uses economic and capitalist terms to illustrate the cold and impersonal nature of the "banking" concept of education.  His stark description of students as objects or "receptacles" to be filled illustrates how this model of education is dehumanizing and oppressive.  Freire calls it "necrophilic."

Ultimately, it seems that the banking model's aim is to control thinking and behavior and stifle our creative process.  Instead of encouraging students to focus on social issues that have implications for their lives, the teacher-student relationship maintains the status-quo.  It certainly is not transformative because the banking model does not set up the kind of dialog between students-teachers where students can ask questions and create meaning for their own lives.

Indeed, education is a two-way street, yet, in my experience, both students and teachers fail to realize this synergistic relationship.  Unfortunately, some students are quite comfortable being empty containers waiting to be filled by a teacher's knowledge.  They give up control, for some of them do not even realize that they have a right to be heard. These students have not yet found their voice, or they have never been in a learning environment or a safe space where their humanity was fully acknowledged.  They do not know that is it perfectly fine to challenge and to question.  In 2008, I was  observed.  My observer wrote:

In this evening's 101 class, Prof. Dunn did something impressive: he relinquished control of the class to his students for almost all of the period.  Equally impressive was the way his students rose to the occasion and maturely took charge of their assignment which was to engage in a debate on the question,"Are individuality and non-conformity good for our society and culture?"  The question arose naturally from a class discussion the previous session on Emerson's "Self-Reliance."

By giving students control of the debate, my intention was to give students an opportunity to develop their own "generative themes."  Many of my students deal with issues of conformity and individuality everyday.  For many of them, attending a college is an act of non-conformity. Some of them do not have any real support from family or friends so many of Emerson's ideas really resonated with them in a meaningful way.