Teaching at San Quentin, Installment 3

This week we present a third-installment of graduate student Annie McClanahan’s account of teaching at San Quentin correctional facility with the Prison University Project. Annie has contributed two previous posts on this topic, in which she addresses, first, the nature of the program in general and a short account of the class she most recently taught and, second, the nature of the prison itself as well as that of the students she teaches. In what follows, Annie speaks more pointedly on frequently asked questions about issues of safety and academic achievement specific to prison teaching.

Are you scared?/Is it safe?

The short answer is that no, I’m not, and yes, it is. In one way, it’s often very easy to forget that you are in a prison at all; it’s easy to slip up and say “Why don’t you email me your thesis statement?” forgetting that unlike at Berkeley, the students at San Quentin don’t typically have access even to word processors, let alone the internet. Almost every week a student will say to me as I’m leaving “Drive safe,” and nearly every time I have to bite back the quick-to-the lips commonplace “You too.”

In other ways, of course, it’s hard to forget you’re in an institution, and the guards at San Quentin constantly remind us, explicitly and implicitly, not to forget this important detail: one unique issue I’ve encountered there is the intense, difficult complexity of race and gender in the prison context; on this issue, it can occasionally feel like my students and I are speaking entirely different languages, and it is a continued challenge to walk the razor-thin line between understanding that we have on these questions fundamentally-different experiences and assumptions, and refusing to allow racist, sexist, or homophobic speech of any kind.

How does teaching at San Quentin compare to teaching outside of the prison, at Berkeley, for example?

I will say that my prison teaching has been particularly pedagogically challenging when it comes to the issue of classroom authority—not because the students there require more disciplining than students anywhere else, but because these are students who are in many cases older than I am, and who have a kind of “real world” experience that I obviously don’t. Being in the prison makes me even less inclined to rely on the kind of abstract authority behind “Why? Because I said so,” but once in a while I have to recognized that that’s the most appropriate answer. And the students there are, unfortunately, right to insistently ensure that they are being held to the same standard as students in any other college classroom—as Jody Lewen, the director of the Prison University Project and a former Ph.D. student in the Rhetoric Department puts it in her recent (and highly recommended) article in a special issue of PMLA dedicated to prison education, “many instructors [are] unsure of their students’ intellectual capabilities. Some of this may [be] related to the teachers’ lack of experience teaching adults with poor basic skills, but…it also [has] to do with largely unconscious stereotypes about the intellectual potential of people in prison…Trapped in these stereotypes, teachers fear frustrating or even humiliating students…The ‘look on the bright side’ attitude also seem[s] to reflect…the simple desire to feel positive about the program—to feel effective rather than inadequate” (Jody Lewen, “Academics Belong in Prison: On Creating a University at San Quentin,” PMLA May 2008, p. 693-4).

Jody goes on to point out that questions of grade inflation are nearly as likely to emerge in “normal” classrooms—certainly I’ve struggled with this at Berkeley too—but she is right in observing that the main challenge of San Quentin is not that it is frightening or intimidating to teach the students there, but that it is sometimes hard to know when to take their context and life experience into account, and when to hold them to a more universally-acknowledged standard of academic achievement. Lest this seem too intractable a problem, however, I want to note that this has become easier for me as I’ve gotten more accustomed both to teaching in the program and to teaching generally; confronting these questions has, I think, made me a much better teacher in whatever kind of classroom I’m in. And because I recently graded a fantastic bunch of revised critical essays from my students this semester, I can also say that it has not been hard with this particular class to know what standard to apply, since they are almost without exception performing at an impressively high level.

Teaching at San Quentin, FAQ

One of the ongoing ways in which some members of the English department involve themselves with the larger community of the Bay Area is, as we’ve already touched on here, through the Prison University Project. Below, graduate student Annie McClanahan continues her account of teaching at San Quentin by answering some “Frequently Asked Questions” about her experience. As the semester progresses, the blog will include a number of posts that describe the members of the departments’ involvement with the program in more detail.

What is the prison itself like?

It’s about as hard to generalize about the prison as it is to generalize about the students: for those who don’t know, San Quentin is located on one of the most beautiful pieces of property in the Bay Area, on a kind of headland near San Rafael, between the Golden Gate and Richmond bridges. Set up high, it overlooks the ocean. Parts of it look like the 19th-century building it is, with castle-like turrets and old stone. But you can see guards with guns up in watch-towers, and there are of course lots of very large metal gates to walk through. The courtyard in which you enter contains lovely manicured gardens in parts, while you find lots of concrete and asphalt in other parts of the complex. The education program used to be housed in a very old and somewhat unpleasant building, but in the last few years the classrooms have moved to new, much nicer spaces. They have tables, desks and blackboards, and inspirational posters decorate the walls just like any other classroom. And, yes, there are guards at the entrance to the building but not in the classroom with us.

What are the students like?

Two of my current co-instructors this past semester were new volunteers to the program, and both of them, after their first night teaching, said the same thing with surprise (and some relief) in their voices: “Wow, it’s just like any other classroom!” In other words, our students at San Quentin are in some ways just like our students at Berkeley: they complain about homework; they love some of the course texts and hate others; they are sometimes sleepy in the classroom; they disagree with each other sometimes and other times give each other support. Some are very adept and some struggle with the material. I’m often asked whether I hold them to the same expectations as I hold my Berkeley students — indeed, I’m most often asked that by the San Quentin students themselves, who want to be reassured that they aren’t being treated differently. The answer, of course, is yes. There are more non-native English speakers and far more students with learning disabilities in the San Quentin program, but there are also students there who are quite proficient. This past semester we had a few students with prior college coursework and a number of students whose writing skills are actually more developed than a typical Berkeley Reading-and-Composition student.

The students at San Quentin, however, are less likely to have experience with literary texts, especially poetry, and they are not always as familiar with certain customs of academic writing and language. But they are incredibly fast learners and hard workers, and they never take their presence in the classroom for granted. They are more likely to be curious about history, and very often know much more about it than I do. They are also more willing to be critical — of the texts we read, of each other’s arguments, and of their instructors! And they are as ready to admit that they don’t get something as they are to question our authority, though rarely in a disruptive way. They are argumentative, funny, and imaginative. To give one anecdote from this past semester, for instance, one of the students raised his hand after discussing Mina Loy’s futurist aphorisms. “Wait,” he said, “what do these have to do with Africa?” Puzzled, the teachers asked him to clarify: “Well,” he went on, “aren’t these supposed to be Afro-risms?” Laughing, the teachers explained the word aphorism more clearly, but asked, jokingly, if he had an example of an Afro-rism. “Yeah,” the student shot back, smiling. “How about ‘Pick your hair, not your nose!’?” The rest of the class burst into laughter.

Most interestingly, the students don’t necessarily want to think only about the kinds of “obvious” issues that many of us initially assume will interest and engage them. For instance, they don’t only want to read literature about prisons! In fact, many of them see the education program as a chance to escape intellectually or emotionally from their daily lives and the constraints of the institution. However, they do often want to talk about their personal experiences and their lives before and in prison; they just want to do so in a context that gives choice and doesn’t hem them into one particular way of using those experiences in the classroom. One of the most successful negotiations of this I’ve seen was in a class I co-taught a few years ago with another English grad student, Peter Godwin. Peter designed a fantastic literature course around the theme of islands. Texts from Robinson Crusoe to The Tempest, from Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” to Kurt Vonnegut’s Gallapagos allowed us to discuss a wide range of topics, including free will, magic, race, imperialism, and evolution. But the themes of isolation, seclusion, and the survival of the fittest also allowed them to speak and to think about their own experiences on another kind of deserted island.

English Dept Teaching at San Quentin Correctional Facility

In what follows, Annie McClanahan, a sixth-year PhD student in the English Department, gives a brief overview of her teaching at San Quentin Correctional Facility. This is the first of a number of posts about the English Department’s involvement with the program. In the future, both Annie and other members of the department will report specific stories from their classes as well as describing the different facets of the experience in greater detail.

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I imagine that most of us are pretty sure we’ll remember where we were on election night this year—I know I will, because I happened to be in prison. Lest you think the academic and financial pressures of graduate school have led the department’s students to a life of crime, let me explain: on election night, I was teaching my class at San Quentin Correctional Facility, through the Prison University Project’s program there. I teach English 101, a “freshman comp”-style course which is one of the main requirements towards the AA degree that students in the San Quentin program can earn. I learned of the election results from one of my students who had a portable radio with him; besides celebrating the news—and as if the scene couldn’t have gotten more surreal—that evening our class was dedicated to watching Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, a film whose image of the potentially apocalyptic results of political stupidity certainly amplified our shared sense of the stakes of this election!

The teachers in the San Quentin College program are all volunteers, though there is an incredibly dedicated and hard-working three-person staff that manages all the organizational aspects of the program as well as doing fundraising, outreach, and probably a thousand other things behind the scenes. The San Quentin program was started in the mid-90s when legislation was enacted that prohibited the use of federal Pell Grants for inmate higher education. This legislation effectively ended over 350 college programs in prisons across the country, but through the dedication of a number of people, San Quentin’s program persisted. Currently the program offers about a dozen classes each semester, and has graduated almost 70 students with an AA degree (though many more are paroled and continue their education on the outside).

This is not my first time teaching at San Quentin—in fact, I’m now in my sixth year in the Ph.D. program and also teaching my sixth class at San Quentin: I’ve taught a range of courses, covering the main curriculum of the English Department. I TA’ed for my first class during my first year at Berkeley, a class called 99B that is the second (after 99A) of the two “gateway” courses most students take before beginning the college-credit classes in the program. 99A and B are basic college writing courses but also introduce students to study skills, good reading habits, college-level classroom discussion, and a host of other skills that may be new to many of the students, especially those who haven’t been in school for many years. Since then, I’ve taught 101 a number of times and have also taught English 102, Introduction to Literature. This semester, I am teaching with a fantastic team of 3 other graduate students, two from the English Department and one from Philosophy—two of us teach on Tuesday nights and two on Thursday nights, from 6:30-8:45 pm. One of the best things about my work in the program has been this rare opportunity to try out team teaching. Teaching at San Quentin has allowed me to to teach with faculty and graduate students from colleges and universities all over the Bay Area, including both those with many years of teaching experience and those who are newer to teaching; I’ve thus been able to find great mentors and to do some ad-hoc teaching mentorship of my own.

This semester, we have a fantastic group of 7 students (an unusually small class). The reading for our course is designed around a specific topic: the manifesto, a type of text that offers a critical perspectives on the world as it is and a vision of the world as it might be. Manifestos we’re reading include Plato’s Republic; the Declaration of Independence and 19th-century feminist responses to it; essays by Thoreau, Ezra Pound, and Salvador Dali; poems by Aime Cesaire, Sonya Sanchez and Oscar Wilde; hip-hop lyrics; professions of religious faith; and platforms from both mainstream and marginal contemporary political parties. The idea of the course is to connect the reading students are doing to their writing: as I say in the syllabus, writing does not just describe the world, it brings a new world of ideas into being. And nowhere is that creative potential clearer than in the manifesto.

Stay tuned for future posts about teaching at San Quentin that will describe the nature of teaching in the prison, interactions with students and other anecdotes about this amazing pedagogical experience.