Research summary for Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service: Reading for resilience in a prison community: an investigation into the transferability of open reading techniques to the way that personal futures are imagined by offenders

Abstract

The aim of the research was to understand the role of the imagination in development of resilience and hope in offenders. A key concern was whether engagement with imaginative texts allows for the development of plural reading techniques. In other words, is the ability to hold multiple interpretations of meaning in play, without reducing understanding to a single answer, transferable to the way that offenders could think about their own futures? This small project took place at a Category D institution in 2015. Previous research had investigated the interplay between reading literary texts and understanding adult resilience (Hoult, 2012). A key finding of that project was that particularly resilient adult learners (those who have faced significant trauma, disadvantage and setbacks and yet who still thrive and succeed as mature students) might be characterised as being able to perform the following capabilities (among others): 1) They engage in open readings (of texts and of life in general), resisting closed meanings and final answers; 2) They are open to the unknown and to transformation. This project set out to explore whether it is possible to teach these capabilities to learners in a prison, through the structured ‘reading’ of science fiction texts (including films). Science fiction was chosen because of its highly imaginative content and because of its explicit emphasis on imagined futures. The project involved an initial group of eight prisoners and this reduced to five who were committed to the project and worked intensively on the films over a five-month period. At the end of the period each participant took part in an interview about their interpretation of the films, and the way that they imagined global and personal futures. The outputs include several conference papers, three peer-refereed articles and one peer-refereed chapter