Personal Blogs

Over the past couple of weeks I've been to two very different conferences about prison education.

The first was the European Prison Education Association conference in Dublin. It happens every two years and brings together colleagues from across Europe and also from the US. This year Thom Ghering (image from the Vienna conference in 2017) was there to discuss his work in California and there were also friends from Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. It was a large conference which filled almost every waking moment from the official opening at City Hall in Dublin on Wednesday evening to the close on Saturday evening.

The first morning of the conference was kicked off by a member of the Irish parliament, the Director General of the Irish Prison Service and then the Director of the Irish Teaching Council - that's a group of big-hitters right there and it speaks to the position of the EPEA.

There were a range of parallel sessions through each day and they included practitioner-led workshops looking at particular activities in prison; teaching mindfulness, facilitating community philosophy, or staging Shakespeare plays with a cast of lifers. There were more research-based theoretical workshops and presentations such as the fantastic work of the OU in NI and their oral history archive of journeys in British and Irish prisons during the years of conflict 1972-2000. We also had trips to see some of the work of the Irish Prison Service. I was part of a group which went to see the Progression Unit at Mountjoy prison and we were then given a brief tour of the main gaol. It was designed by Joshua Jebb, the army officer who also designed HMP Pentonville, and it is very similar albeit smaller. The image to the right shows a piece of public art being painted on the old entrance gates by the arts tutors from the prison.

By staying up late we also found time to have informal chats about how our world looks. How technologies are used in Dutch prisons, how "offender managers" work with their clients in Finland. Of course everything was conducted in English so colleagues from Europe were, at least, bilingual and many were proficient in three or four languages. I did manage to find a few German speakers so that I could share my mangled version of Deutsch. Some conversations are now continuing through email and social media and we're sharing our perspectives on how common problems might be addressed within the context of local constraints.

Yesterday I was at a smaller conference at the University of Westminster. It was called "Challenging Narratives in Prison Education" and was organised by PLAN (Prisoner Learning Academic Network) which is managed by the Prisoners' Education Trust. This was very much an academic conference and each of the speakers, including the OU's Anne Pike, problematised a particular facet of prison education and, in some cases, challenged the dominant orthodoxies. Jason Warr asked whether education ran the risk of becoming part of the regime, a function of the carceral processes and thus seen as a part of the systems of controls to which people in prison are subject. Morwenna Bennalick's thesis is based on a space I know well and she talked about the transformative value of education by telling us about a learner who didn't open the course materials - but carried them with him around the prison. This idea of the symbols of learning and what they mean to prison learners is powerful. In a small, dysfunctional community people privilege external representations of how they wish to be viewed by their peers. I know how much learners value anything with the OU logo - this isn't just the case for students in prison but in prison it is harder to come by OU-branded merchandise so it's value is higher. Carrying the unopened material is also part of an interior dialogue; it's part of how that learner thinks of who they are and that is also important to all of us but especially so in a custodial setting; it might even be an internalised symbol of dissent. Educators are also subject to some change, some transformation, while working in prison. Karen Graham feels that she has more freedom working with learners in prison because she is away from the formal constraints of a campus-based course. 

Two very different conferences with a small overlap in terms of attendees and both of great value in terms of understanding something of what is happening in prison and to make contact with other practitioners. Some of the folk at each conference are the movers and shakers, the people at the vanguard of understanding what we do and finding ways to do it better; simply being in the same space can be invigorating. It is also important to consider what we do and how it compares with the work of other HEIs in the arena. A point raised yesterday was that when they work with learners in prison other universities are working with a cohort with lower academic attainment than they are used to. That difference isn't there for the OU.