Toward achieving the unthinkable: transforming conversations about criminalized others through service-learning in correctional facilities

ABSTRACT

Building supportive communities and improving programming for incarcerated persons can be difficult due to stereotypes derived from culture, media, and personal upbringing. Such stereotypes, like the narratives from which they are derived, are socially constructed. To develop an understanding of how those narratives construct “others” and to transform stereotypes of incarcerated “others,” we adopted a communication perspective on the problem of overcoming stigma, designed a course to promote transformative learning, and employed service-learning as a way to bring students into contact with incarcerated men in a regional prison facility. Students’ reflections over two semesters in the service-learning course revealed that interaction with people who were incarcerated transformed their beliefs and values about those with whom they worked, resulting in an attitude of “just mercy” toward people who were incarcerated and making possible a more humane understanding of themselves and those members of our communities who are incarcerated.

KEYWORDS:

• service-learning
• transformational learning
• PCARE

Notes

1 Stephen John Hartnett, “The Annihilating Policies of the Prison–Industrial Complex; Or Crime, Violence, and Punishment in an Age of Neoliberalism,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 3 (2008): 491–515; Stephen John Hartnett, Jennifer K. Wood, and Bryan J. McCann, “Turning Silence into Speech and Action: Prison Activism and the Pedagogy of Empowered Citizenship,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 4 (2011): 331–52; Edward A. Hinck, “Introduction,” Argumentation and Advocacy 51, no. 3 (2015): 135–38; PCARE, “Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2007): 402–20; “Reflecting on a Decade of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education, While Looking Ahead to New Challenges and Opportunities,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 288–310.

2 The literature on critical pedagogy is vast; see, for example, Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Seabury Press, 1970); Henry A. Giroux, Educational Leadership and the Crisis of Democratic Culture (University Park, PA: University Council of Educational Administration, 1992); bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1982). See also Jack Mezirow, Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Penguin, 1990).

3 Clint Smith, “The Lifelong Learning of Lifelong Inmates,” The Atlantic, June 27, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/why-prison-education-is-about-more-than-lowering-recidivism/531873/; “Complex Sentences: Searching for the Purpose of Education in a Massachusetts State Prison,” Harvard Educational Review 87, no. 1 (2017): 585–625.

4 Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015).

5 Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984).

6 Anne Colby et al., Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).

7 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), 236.

8 Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Radicalized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 31.

9 Tracy Huling, “Building a Prison Economy in Rural America,” in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: The New Press, 2002), 197–213; Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western, “Poverty, Violence, and Black Incarceration,” in Policing the Black Man, ed. Angela J. Davis (New York: Pantheon, 2017), 294–321.

10 Travis and Western, “Poverty, Violence, and Black Incarceration.”

11 Ibid.; Kristin Henning, “Deserve Ain’t Got Nothing to Do with It: The Deconstruction of Moral Justifications for Punishment through The Wire,” in Punishment in Popular Culture, ed. Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 117–60.

12 Stevenson, Just Mercy, 314.

13 Mezirow, Learning as Transformation, 3–4.

14 Ibid., 4.

15 Ibid., 6.

16 Ibid., 6–7.

17 Ibid.

18 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam, 1995), 34.

19 Mezirow, Learning as Transformation, 6–7.

20 Ibid., 22.

21 Mitchell J. Moore, “The Transtheoretical Model of the Stages of Change and the Phases of Transformative Learning: Comparing Two Theories of Transformational Change,” Journal of Transformative Education 3, no. 4 (2005): 406.

22 Edward W. Taylor, “Building upon the Theoretical Debate: A Critical Review of the Empirical Studies of Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory,” Adult Education Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1997): 34–59.

23 Moore, “The Transtheoretical Model of the Stages of Change and the Phases of Transformative Learning,” 406.

24 Ibid.

25 Ernest Boyer, “The Scholarship of Engagement,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach & Engagement 20, no. 1 (1996): 15–27; Janet Eyler and Dwight E. Giles Jr., Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning? (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

26 Alexander Astin et al., “How Service Learning Affects Students,” Higher Education 144 (2000): https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/slcehighered/144; Eyler and Giles Jr., Where’s the Learning in Service-Learning?; Pamela Steinke and Stacey Buresh, “Cognitive Outcomes of Service-Learning: Reviewing the Past and Glimpsing the Future,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 8, no. 2 (2002): 5–14.

27 Ann E. Green, “‘But You Aren’t White’: Racial Perceptions and Service-Learning,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 8, no. 1 (2001): 18–26; Valarie Hill-Jackson and Chance W. Lewis, “Service Loitering: White Pre-Service Teachers Preparing for Diversity in an Underserved Community,” in Problematizing Service-Learning: Critical Reflections for Development and Action, ed. Trae Stewart and Nicole Webster (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2011), 295–324.

28 Robert G. Bringle and Julie A. Hatcher, “Implementing Service Learning in Higher Education,” The Journal of Higher Education 67, no. 2 (1996): 221–39.

29 Rebecca A. Litke, “Do All Students ‘Get It?’: Comparing Students’ Reflections to Course Performance,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 12, no. 2 (2002): 27–34.

30 Shelly S. Hinck, Edward A. Hinck, and Lesley Withers, “Service-Learning in Prison Facilities: Interaction as a Source of Transformation,” in Working for Justice: A Handbook of Prison Education and Activism, ed. Stephen John Hartnett, Eleanor Novek, and Jennifer K. Wood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 39–59; Shelly S. Hinck and Erin L. Scheffels, “Transforming Argumentative Dialogue through Prison Service-Learning,” Argumentation and Advocacy 51, no. 3 (2015): 585–625.

31 Mezirow, Learning as Transformation, 13.

32 Ibid., 16–18.

33 Ibid., 18.

34 Ibid., 19.

35 Bringle and Hatcher, “Implementing Service Learning in Higher Education.”

36 Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin, Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990).

37 Mezirow, Learning as Transformation.

38 Richard Kiely, “A Transformative Learning Model for Service-Learning: A Longitudinal Case Study,” Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 12, no. 1 (2005): 5–22.

39 Hartnett, Wood, and McCann, “Turning Silence into Speech and Action.” For an example, see Wood’s comments.

40 Cacho, Social Death; Stevenson, Just Mercy.

41 Patrycja Humienik and Sarah Sunderlin, “PCARE Epilogue: ‘The Pistol of Hope’; or, Imprisoned Workshop Participants Respond,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2017): 311–15.

42 Stevenson, Just Mercy, 294.