TOPICS: PRISON EDUCATION in Summer 2024 (HI2091)

Professors: Michelle Kuo and Hannah Taïeb

Summer 2024 – six week session

June 4 – July 15

Tuesday and Thursday, 9-11am, at La Santé prison

Wednesday, 9-12, at AUP

Telling stories, crossing borders: mutual learning in prison education

This innovative class brings AUP students into a shared educational and creative space with people detained at La Santé prison in Paris.

After introductory classes at AUP, ten AUP students will spend the semester sharing readings, discussions, and creative activities with an equal number of detainees. In the past, authors studied have included Malcolm X, Bachir Kerroumi, Rigoberta Menchu, Azouz Begag, Jimmy Santiago Baca, W.S. Merwin, Alison Bechdel, Paulo Freire, and Franz Kafka. Tuesdays and Thursdays will be at La Santé prison, and Wednesdays will be at AUP.

In each class session at the prison, AUP participants (“outside students”) and people detained at La Santé (“inside students”) will participate in ice breakers, and read short texts in English and French together as a group. In small mixed groups inside and outside students go on to to exchange ideas and reactions. Circle pedagogy, deep listening and other egalitarian approaches are used to make the learning experience mutual. In the last three or four sessions of the class, inside and outside students put together a collaborative final project, which will be presented in a celebratory event, attended by invited guests from AUP and from the prison.

This class emerges from a collaboration between AUP and the cultural activities department of the Centre Pénitentiaire Paris La Santé, a newly-renovated remand prison in the 14th district of Paris. Detained participants, who primarily speak French (but also other languages), will learn alongside AUP participants, who primarily speak English (but also other languages). A creative, inclusive and experimental multilingual environment is maintained in the classroom. AUP students can participate with a low-intermediate conversa