Turning Teaching Inside Out ─ A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program brings campus-enrolled and incarcerated students together as classmates in postsecondary courses built around dialogue, collaboration, and experiential learning. Contributors to this book consider the broader lessons that Inside-Out provides for community-based learning praxis, prison education and postsecondary teaching in general, both on campus and in community settings. An international network of practitioner-scholars probe the challenges and contradictions inherent in community-based work, but especially charged in the prison setting: the intersections of race, class and gender, and the tensions between teaching and activism, evaluation and advocacy, and compromise with and resistance to oppressive and dehumanizing systems. At a time when many in the Academy are seeking to deepen the impact of the community-based learning initiatives on their campuses, Turning Teaching Inside Out offers a model.

Simone Weil Davis is the Coordinator of Inside-Out Canada, home-based at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener, Ontario. She works in collaboration with the Walls to Bridges Collective at the Grand Valley Institution for Women.

Barbara Sherr Roswell teaches writing at Goucher College, USA. She is Founding Director of the Goucher Prison Education Partnership and co-author of Bedford's Writing and Community Engagement.