The future of higher education in prison remains a pressing question more than twenty years after incarcerated students were denied access to Pell grants. We are still considering questions about who should be incarcerated and why. The forces were different in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, but we still have much to learn from those who labored in prison literacy classrooms in those times. This project, based on oral history interviews with six teachers who taught in writing workshops and higher education in prison programs in the 1970s and 80s, a time when prison arts, education and literacy programs were undergoing drastic shifts resulting from social, political and cultural forces, can help us understand the evolving nature of this practice. Additionally, the interviews can help us understand how these teachers’ experiences of teaching in prison at a time when carceral environments were often dangerous and challenging reflect and refract the prevailing narratives of literacy at the time. As Stanton, Giles and Cruz note about their investigation into the history of service-learning, “we should build on the insights of those who have confronted these challenges before” (xiii). This project provides not only reflection on these experiences and the ways they can help us understand the past and future of literacy teaching in prison, but access to insights that are, because of the marginalized nature of this teaching, in danger of being lost to history

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This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a preliminary step in describing and understanding this transformative experience. The differences between the prison writing teachers and the teachers Shaughnessy describes illuminates how much the field of composition has grown in the last forty years. The interviews with these six teachers speak to the experiences of teachers in community outreach teaching situations and may be a step in understanding and articulating these experiences.

This article is a teacher narrative examining the experiences of a teacher in a correctional facility writing workshop and how those experiences led her to understand that in order to effectively teach the workshop, she had to achieve a deeper understanding of the world of the prison as well as see that the success of the workshop depends on honoring the expertise of all of its members. Inmate work is included in the article that comments on both the importance of writing in their lives as inmates as well as reveals how the workshop setting allows for reflection upon and examination of their lives.