‘The video is an upgrade from them all’: how incarcerated fathers view the affordances of video in a family literacy programme

ABSTRACT

In response to rising parental incarceration rates, some correctional facilities now offer family literacy and read-aloud programmes to strengthen parent–child bonds. However, the technologies used in these programmes – including older technologies such as audio and video recordings – have received little attention. Parents in the Read to Your Child/Grandchild (RYCG) programme at Pennsylvania state prisons are video recorded reading a book for their child; the book and video recording are then mailed to the child. Drawing on interview and observational data with 11 fathers at a rural prison, this study examines how fathers perceived the possibilities (affordances) of the multimodal videos. RYCG provided the only opportunity to send videos outside the prison. Moreover, the video enabled children to see their parents despite physical distance, captured a more ‘lifelike’ portrait of parents, was lasting and repeatable, and created another line of parent–child interaction. The perceived affordances of video reflected the restrictive prison setting and the desires of incarcerated fathers, including the desire to be recognised as a father and to show their children that they cared. Fathers’ insights underscore the value of examining how people in marginalised educational sites use outmoded, receding technologies to forge new connections with loved ones.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• family literacy
• incarcerated parents
• multimodality
• video

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the fathers for their willingness to be part of this study, the SCI teacher and principal for helping to make the study possible, Marolyn Machen for helping to collect data, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This study was funded in part by a seed grant from the Criminal Justice Research Center at Penn State.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tabitha Stickel

Tabitha Stickel is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Pennsylvania State University’s Lifelong Learning and Adult Education Program. Her dissertation research focuses on adult basic education (ABE) students with diverse linguistic backgrounds, their educational experiences both past and present, and the socioemotional dynamics in adult education classrooms influencing how students experience such spaces. Tabitha graduated from Teachers College, Columbia University with her M.Ed. from the Adult Learning and Leadership program.

Esther Prins

Dr. Esther Prins is a Professor in the Lifelong Learning and Adult Education Program at Penn State, where she also serves as the Co-Director of the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy and the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy. Her research interests include critical and sociocultural approaches to adult education, particularly adult and family literacy, both in the USA and internationally.

Anna Kaiper-Marquez

Dr. Anna Kaiper-Marquez is the Associate Director and Assistant Teaching Professor at the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy and the Goodling Institute for Research in Family Literacy. Her research interests include adult basic education (ABE), critical and poststructural theories of English language learning, Southern Epistemologies, and qualitative methodologies in national and international contexts.