Literacy education in prison: developing a social literacy programme in the prison school of Cyprus

ABSTRACT

The current paper presents data from a social literacy programme implemented in the prison school in Cyprus for 18 months. The programme was theoretically informed by critical literacy, genre pedagogy, multimodality and non-formal education and it aimed to opt away from skill-based, autonomous and corrective models of literacy education that are widespread in prison education. The current programme approached literacy from the ideological and social perspective. The methodology adopted was a combination of intervention (design and implementation) and ethnographic research (reflective diaries, field notes of the implementation process) along with texts produced by the prisoners. The main findings indicate that the prisoners were very responsive to this type of literacy education since it provided them space to reflect on their own experience, freedom to express themselves and produce texts, away from corrective educational models, and the programme as a whole was appropriate for prisoners of varied educational and social background.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison education
• social literacy
• Cyprus
• implementation programme

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to the prisoners, men and women, who participated in the programme and with whom we shared this journey into texts and into literacy. Also, we would like to thank the two teachers of the prison school who facilitated the process and were by our side from the beginning of the programme. Finally, many thanks to Professor Helen Simons who provided valuable feedback for the current paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, the 2007 Report for Prison Education (cited in Kleanthous 2014) lists the following main areas of education and training: (a) vocational training, e.g. graphic arts ;(b) arts and entertainment, e.g. traditional dances; (c) languages, e.g. English; and (d) social and personal development, e.g. social psychology.

2. The decision to start our intervention in the Women’s Prison was deliberate, after our realisation that the school was located in the Men’s Prison and women had no fully equipped school room, only a multi-use room; this resulted in women-prisoners having fewer options in programmes and modules.

3. Icebreaker activities help ‘break the ice’ in various ways. They encourage participation, bonding and relieve of tension among group members.

4. Energisers are activities used to ‘clear the mind’ encouraging vitality and enthusiasm.

5. In this Ted-X (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca7uu0IvUe0), Orphanos shares his struggle with life and with his inner self which guided him to become the kind of the artist he really wanted to be.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Ioannidou

Dr Elena Ioannidou PhD, MA, BA (Author ID: 36,901,125,400, http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6465-2436)

Elena Ioannidou is an assistant professor in Language Education and Sociolinguistics at the Department of Education, University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus on the concept of a social theory of language, on language variation and on the interrelations of language and identity. In terms of language teaching her focus is on literacy as a social practice, genre-based education and multiliteracies and multimodality. Elena Ioannidou is an ethnographer, with a special interest on linguistic ethnography and discourse analysis as dynamic research tools. Her research projects have been funded by EU, Leventis foundation, the Ministry of Education of Cyprus and the University of Cyprus. She is a founding member of the Literacy Association of Cyprus and a board member of the Linguistic Society of Cyprus. Her work has been published in international journals (e.g. Language and Education, Journal of Early Literacy).

Elisavet Kiourti

Elisavet Kiourti, PhD, MA, BA ([email protected])

Elisavet Kiourti is a part-time lecturer in Humanities and Social Sciences at the Department of Languages and Literature, at University of Nicosia. Her research is on the correlation of literacy as social practice, language and social identities in digital and non-digital contexts. More specifically, her interests focus on online video gaming (problem-solving, scaffolding literacy, metagaming), non-formal education, neuroscience and video games and the correlation with social well-being. Her PhD Thesis is a comparative ethnographic research with title: (Dis)connecting literacy practices: From online videogame Counter Strike Global Offensive to Classroom. She is the press officer of the Linguistic Society of Cyprus. She has worked at primary, secondary institutions, and adult education and she has been involved in projects researching language and literacy practices in different settings. Her works has been published in international journals (e.g. Frontiers).

Christina Christofidou

Christina Christofidou, MA (Ed), MA, BA ([email protected])

Christina Christofidou holds a degree in Primary School Education (University of Cyprus, 2007) an MA in Educational Leadership (European University of Cyprus, 2009) and an MA in Language Arts (University of Cyprus, 2011). She has worked and taught in both primary and tertiary educational institutes. While working in tertiary education she had taught subjects on literacy and language arts and she also provided academic support, supervision and evaluation of trainee teachers. She has also participated in educational programmes about teaching Greek as a Second Language to citizens of foreign countries and refugees and she was one of the core members of the research team working on Prison Literacy Education (2013–2015). She currently works as a primary school teacher as well as a teacher trainer.