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Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but ...

A powerful classroom experience results in a radical and lasting positive change, a metamorphosis. Transformation. Educators seek to define that process, to account for it, and especially to incite it, to open up possibilities for the kind of engaged learning and teaching that will prove transformational. This volume offers an extended reflection on the wider implications of one uniquely powerful pedagogical model. Founded in 1997, the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program weds community-based learning and prison education, bringing college or university students and people in prison together as classmates for a semester of shared experiential learning. Fifteen thousand incarcerated (“inside”) and campus-based (“outside”) students have taken at least one Inside-Out class, and in many areas, inside students are now taking multiple Inside-Out courses for credit in subjects as diverse as sociology, philosophy, performance art, social work, literature, and the law. While these academic classes are the core of our work, they have become an integral part of a larger mosaic of sustained engagement. We will see reflected in this volume the program’s emphasis on alumni activities on both sides of the wall, innovative region-wide collaborations, longstanding Inside-Out think tanks in prisons that engage in public education, trainings, and research projects, and an increasing number of initiatives that take the co-learning pedagogy to sites beyond the prison entirely. This book considers the broader lessons that Inside-Out provides for community-based learning praxis and for postsecondary teaching in general, on campus, in prisons, and in other community settings.

This chapter recounts a Round Table Discussion on power, privilege, and classroom dynamics convened in September, 2012 among nine members of the Inside-Out community, including instructors, Steering Committee members, staff, Think Tank members, and alumni.

Several years into what is still a new initiative, I reflect briefly in this chapter on Inside-Out Canada, the first national iteration of Inside-Out in a country other than the United States.1 Any US-originated program may confront questions as it moves toward international expansion—questions about national differences and how to see and act past the blind spots of internalized US hegemony. Educators who work in study abroad or in globally focused intercultural dialogue are deeply engaged with these questions, of course, and some propose answers.2 But many programs that start with a one-country focus, like Inside-Out, grow toward an international presence and understand the process only as they go. Perhaps Inside-Out Canada’s experiences can suggest some things about how program replication is best conceived and framed more generally.

The pressure to research and evaluate successful programs is certainly not news to faculty and professionals responsible for community-based learning, prison education, or—in the case of Inside-Out—the nexus between the two. Diverse stakeholders are interested in better understanding program impacts, from funders and administrators who want to know about the effects of their financial and institutional investments, to staff who may use program evaluation to improve training or curriculum, to faculty and campus professionals who want to understand and improve community-engagement practices and pedagogies. Others see campus-community partnerships as fertile ground to advance knowledge in a range of disciplines (and perhaps to add to their own publication records as well), and view community-engaged work not as the focus of but as a site or context for research.

Prison bars are meant to keep people in; they are also meant to keep people out. In tandem with the other powerful social forces that keep us divided, especially those that cluster around race, class and gender, the tall walls and razor wire fences of North American prisons and jails ensure that our internalized maps of what we consider home are skewed, pitted with lacunae. These blanks, blind spots, and alienations do not just impoverish us; they make it possible for things as they are to continue—including the United States’ unprecedentedly high rate of incarceration. With our sense of connection, community, place, and identity distorted, our ability to militate for change—or even to envision it—is severely limited. Inside-Out seeks to loosen the foundations beneath the conceptual walls that our carceral system throws up.