Expanding our Honors Neighborhood: Teaching In and About Jails and Prisons

Authors

Victoria M. Bryan, University of Tennessee at ChattanoogaFollow
Owen Cantrell, Georgia State UniversityFollow

Date of this Version

2024

Document Type

Article

Citation

Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council (2024) 25(1): 55–61

Abstract

Dr. Ada Long (1945–2024) advocated for equal access to quality education. Authors suggest that her reflections on neighborhoods, community, and intentional inclusion were not one-off musings but rather indicative of how she saw her responsibility as an educator. Drawing on Long’s establishment of a lecture series that brought faculty into a local Alabama prison to share research with incarerated students, this essay presents firsthand experiences teaching honors courses in prison, particularly those offered at Walker State Prison as part of Georgia State University’s Prison Education Project (2016–2023). While honors colleges often build programs to be as community-centric as possible, authors observe that the twenty-first century’s consumer-driven model of higher education leads students to act as consumers of community, rather than creators of community. The opposite is often true for incarcerated learners. In an environment determined to eliminate community and alienate indviduals, students in college-in-prison programs have to intentionally create, foster, and assert a sense of community among their fellow learners and instructors. For seven years, GSU’s Prison Education Project combined the best of honors education with the best of college-in-prison programming to create a program uniquely community-driven. Despite the Project’s budgetary challenges and resultant closure, this model of innovative programming merits discussion in the context of Long’s extensive and storied legacy.