Graduate Student, Education
Green Templeton College
Thesis Title: How Incarcerated Undergraduates Use Higher Education to Make Sense of Their Lives
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Viv Ellis
Mary Bosworth |
About
My current research is a mixed methods investigation of an undergraduate education program at a maximum-security correctional facility in the United States. While most work in the field of prison education asks whether or not participation reduces re-offending after release, my research asks how students engage with the processes of education – what it means to them to be college students in the larger context of the prison, how education changes their day-to-day lives and their plans for the future, and how they use the tools offered by membership in the social world of the prison college to reframe their understanding of their own experiences.
My methods, while including some quantitative data collection and analysis, were largely based in ethnographic tradition. I completed the fieldwork for this project over a six-month period, during which I engaged in participant observation within the college program in question. From this vantage point, I was able to identify some of the key elements that facilitate the success of an educational provider in the prison context: a strong organizational identity fostered by heavy alumni involvement; a grassroots initiative that grows from the bottom up; and program leadership who can competently navigate the idiosyncrasies of prison.
The inquiry is set in the tradition of socio-cultural activity theory. I draw heavily on the literature of identity and agency to see how participants in higher education reconstruct their practiced and projected concepts of self. To that end I also conducted data generation and collection through the facilitation of two autobiographical writing workshops with a sample of students from the program. Over the course of two ten-week sessions, students in my workshops constructed educational narratives describing their experiences in education both before and during their prison terms.
In analyzing these data I will be focusing on how participants construct their identities as they author their narratives, and on how participation in higher education may affect that process of identity construction. This will be done on the socio-cultural premise that identities are lived for oneself as well as projected for others. I use both content and compositional markers to identify and analyze the ways that participants choose, build, and sustain their identities as “college students” in the face of unacceptable alternatives. I show how participants use these constructions of identity to regain the sense of agency that prison is designed to take away, and, in turn, how that agency influences their behavior. The hope is that these narratives will begin to shed some light on the question of why participation in education while incarcerated seems to ‘work’ so well, and on how the beneficial aspects of this work can best be facilitated.
Previous work includes a Master's degree on the motivations to pursue education while in prison, as explained by formerly incarcerated men and women. I also have a strong interest in adult education and adult literacy pedagogy and policy more generally.
