Principles of Adult Education at Work in an Early Women’s Prison: The Case of the Massachusetts Reformatory, 1930-1960

Abstract: This paper discusses the role and significance of adult education principles as espoused by an early corrections official Austin MacCormick and how his philosophy and aim of adult education for prisoners relates to the educational programs and practices implemented at the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s

Critical Anthological Imagination: Looking Historically at Prisoners Writing About Themselves as Adult Learners in the United States (1966-2006)

This paper presents some initial findings from an analysis of published anthologies written by prisoners in the U. S. about how they view their own educational advancement, schooling, and their role as adult learners within the context of their incarcerated lives

Beyond Illiteracy and Poverty: Theorizing the Rise in Black Women’s Incarceration

This paper explores the impact of poverty and low literacy on the increase in Black women’s incarceration. Using critical race theory as a guiding framework, we present the argument that neoliberal policies of welfare reform and crime control laws are primary reasons for the increase. We emphasize gender-responsive strategies in planning programs for low-income, low-literate, and incarcerated women

A Bridge from Behind Bars: A Look at Prison Literacy Programs1

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate—using four U.S. based case examples—how writing and literacy education practices are connected to prisoner self-reflection, knowledge development, and re-visioning of prisoner lives. While we explore prisons as sites for literacy education, we also complicate the picture by acknowledging that education for prisoners needs to go beyond adult basic education and literacy

Expanding the Conversation on Adult Learning Theories: Theorizing African American Women’s Learning and Development in Predominantly White Organizations

This study is a qualitative, interpretative examination of nine African American women’s (AAW’s) experiences while working in a leadership position at a predominantly White organization and the learning experiences that emerged from these encounters. Black feminist theory (BFT) is used as a sociocultural framework to explain how the participants learned from these experiences. Three main learning themes emerged: learning from influential sources, learning through divine guidance, and learning through affirmation of self. We posit that sociocultural theories derived from AAW’s ways of knowing is necessary to move the field of adult education toward more inclusive ways of theorizing learning

Working for It: The Other Work in Graduate School, Procuring Fellowship Funding & Designing the Research to Accompany the Funds

Two current fellows at a state literacy center with University affiliations and a former doctoral fellow at a national center will discuss their experiences procuring a major fellowship to help pay for their graduate studies. How these fellowships allowed them to participate in the design and implementation of research are also discussed

Who are we becoming? A critical, communicative, reflective, transformative, timely inquiry into the coming-to-be of adult education in the early 21st century

The perspectives included in this collaborative document reflect the authors‘ initial inquiry to explore who are we becoming as adult educators. We present five unique points of view that our role as adult educators holds potential to help adults seek ways into their own deep inquiries of what are true, beautiful, and just ways of life. Our inquiries give expression to how might we create conditions for truth, beauty, and justice to emerge in our communities, in the systems that we work in, that govern us and that make way for our individual collective humanity? The time is ripe to ask what are the diverse structures, systems and expressions of an evolving humanity where justice, grace, beauty and truth take new shapes to meet unseen demands placed on adults around the world and what role adult education will play

Critical Points of Resistance: Preparing Adult Educators to Educate Inside the U.S. Prison System

This is a proposal answering the call for the Special Theme Issue on Adult Learning and Mass Incarceration. The purpose of this proposed research article is to present a case study that demonstrates the application of innovative critical pedagogical teaching methods used in a University classroom setting with adult educators who were preparing to teach inside the U.S. prison and jail system. While there is a body of literature that discusses the nature of adult education in the prison classroom, there has been a lack of data-based research that specifically highlights the critically overlooked issue of how do we develop adult educators for the task of teaching on the “inside� This article will be an example of engaging alternatives and reformulating the conceptualization of how to approach preparing adult educators to teach behind bars by discovering and creating new possibilities for the role of adult education in prison