Texas A&M University

Faculty Member, Educational Administration and Human Resource Development

Assistant Professor

College of Education and Human Development

About

The light from the jail’s solitary overhead light in the basement classroom cut across the paper I was reading framing the left edge in shadow. My voice trembled slightly, but I covered it with a cough hoping none of the students sitting beside me noticed. I kept on reading the lines from Jamaica Kincaid’s poem “Girl,” and was getting ready to pass the task onto another student. I just needed to reach the end of the stanza and then it could be someone else’s turn to read.

It started first as what I thought was a hiccup, then a gasp, then a moan, and by the time I looked up it had become a wail. Slowly the wail became not one, not two, not even three but more wails than I could handle. Each one sounding slightly different from the other. One sounded bowed and long uhhhhhh. Another was sharp and piercing ehehehehehehehhh. I looked from student to student and out of twelve of them sitting around the table eight of them were crying. Tears flowed freely down some faces and others had cast their heads into upturned palms and were rocking from side-to-side.

What had I done? I pressed my own palms up to my face, squeezing on my eyelids, forcing myself to see pinks and blues behind the blackness of my closed eyes. I sat with my head in my palms not daring to look up again praying, hoping that when I opened my eyes this would all be over and I’d be back at home in my apartment, not here in this now, anywhere but here. I breathed in and steadied myself and somewhere from within came calmness. In that moment of being able to see my way past what seemed like an impossibility it came to me. This was my calling, this was what I was meant to do.

Shortly after that night, my first night of teaching women learners at Valhalla Jail in New York in 1996, I left the publishing industry and began my career in adult education. My work with women inmates became the impetus for my graduate research and my foray into the professoriate. While my undergraduate degrees were in English and History from Columbia University, and I have a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Sarah Lawrence, after working for a few years in NYC, I returned to school to receive a second Masters in Education and then my Doctorate in Teaching and Learning from Harvard University. In 2004, I began my position as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University.

I have three coordinated strands of research that I envision as a braid, strands overlapping one another and at times merging. Trained originally as a historian, my research focuses on the history of women’s and girls’ prison education in the United States. I use the history to create a traceable legacy to try and understand how history shapes and informs contemporary prison education practice which is my second area of research.  Both of these areas intersect within the educational context of adult literacy development, which is my third area of research as I believe that “marginalized learners,” such as prisoners, within adult literacy programs can learn to “read the world” and “read the word” (Freire and Macdedo, 1987). I believe it is possible for adult literacy classrooms to become sites to engage in critical literacy practices that allow adult learners to come to an understanding of the cultural, political, and social practices that constitute their reality (Degener, 2001). I consider myself an educator concerned with issues of social justice and diversity and continually seek to understand how the intersections of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, abelism, ageism, religious oppression, language skills, literacy ability issues, and other –isms affect adult learners.

While I have never had an entire class spontaneously combust into tears since my very first night of teaching, I do believe that each student requires you to respond with your entire being—body, mind, spirit (Katafiasz, 1997). Henry Ford creatively put it this way: “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” I try to espouse for my students that they “can.” As a professor in the adult education program, I recognize that the majority of my students have lives that extend beyond the classroom and overshadow much of their graduate studies.

I believe that as teachers we need to make learning relevant to our students’ lives. I share William Butler Yeats’ belief that effective teaching should be about igniting a fire not the filling of a pail. I also believe that teaching and learning is about becoming conscious. Many of my students come to my class feeling that they know little about the subject matter at hand, but I help them to realize that all of them come with the gift of prior experiences and background knowledge. They come to understand that I will learn from them as much as they will learn from me. We use this knowledge as our starting point to foster a learning community where I open up for my students a space where meaning-making is possible.  As one student wrote in an anonymous threaded discussion, “First of all, I’m not kissing up—I loved this class. In all these years, I have only come across two other professors who created such a warm and welcoming environment.  …This class was able to make me look beyond my world without feeling threatened.” 

At the start of all my interactions with my students, I make them this promise:  “We meet as strangers, each carrying a mystery within us.  I cannot say who you are.  I may never know you completely.  But I trust that you are a person in your own right, possessed of a beauty and value that are the Earth’s richest treasures. So I make this promise to you:  I will impose no identities upon you, but will invite you to become yourself without shame or fear.  I will hold open a space for you in the world and allow your right to fill it with an authentic vocation and purpose.  For as long as your search takes, you have my loyalty.”
--Author Unknown

In closing, I wish to return to the passion that drew me into the academy, my work with student-inmates, who share much and at the same time almost nothing with my University students.  Mark Twain once expressed that there had probably been more said about educating prisoners and less done about it than anything else in the United States. Through my service, research, and teaching, I am looking to change that for I believe that our task is not to imitate history but rather to understand it, so that its lessons can be used to face today’s educational crises with a creative spirit.



References

Degener, S. (2001). Making sense of critical pedagogy in adult literacy education. In J. Comings, B. Garner, and C. Smith (Eds.) Review of adult learning and literacy, Volume 2 (pp. 26-62). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey.

Katafiasz, K. (1997). Teacher therapy. St. Meinard, IN: Abbey Press.