Creating Connections beyond WWC Campus: Students Participate in Inside Out Program
Iris Seaton | April 7, 2022
Special to The Echo | Sarah Puterbaugh
Students participating in Lawrence’s skills for communication and partnering course.
For inside and outside students alike, the classroom for Skills for Communication and Partnering is within the walls of the Western Correctional Center for Women. Outside students, who participate in traditional Warren Wilson classes, drive to the Correctional Center in a WWC van every Tuesday and Friday. Inside students, prisoners at the Correctional Center, wake, attend class and sleep within the prison walls.
The Inside Out program at WWC is a part of a nation-wide program that is now active in almost every state in the U.S. The WWC Inside Out program is funded by the Laughing Gull, a family foundation that emphasizes its support of programs devoted to environmental justice, LGBTQ+ equality and higher education in prisons.
Lucy Lawrence, the director of the Inside Out program at WWC, spoke to some of the values of the program for WWC students. Firstly, Lawrence explained the value of the program for inside students.
“All students receive a Warren Wilson College transcript for each course that they successfully complete,” Lawrence said. “That is significant because of the impact that higher education in prison makes on reducing recidivism — so women returning to prison for subsequent sentences.”
Furthermore, Lawrence explained the social, societal and personal impact these classes have on these students.
“For them to choose to have an identity in an environment where identities are ascribed to them — you know, like inmate or offender — they get to have the identity of being a student,” Lawrence said. “And that is incredibly empowering and transformative in so many ways.”
The inside students were not the only ones benefiting from their experiences in the Inside Out program.
“For the outside students coming from Warren Wilson, I think it's transformative in different ways, in that they get to be in a classroom setting with people that, for the most part, they would not have a connection or relationship with otherwise,” said Lawrence. “And the Inside Out classroom holds space for multiple different racial, cultural, generational, gender, sexual identity (and) sexual orientation identities. And so students get to learn from lots of different perspectives, I think. I think for a lot of Warren Wilson students, it's refreshing for them to get the opportunity to be in class with folks who don't hold necessarily the same value set that they do.”
Special to The Echo | Sarah Puterbaugh
Students in the Inside Out program gesticulating.
Lawrence also acknowledged the anxiety that some WWC students may have over some aspects of taking a class with incarcerated students in a prison environment.
“For most students coming from Warren Wilson and going into Western Correctional, that's their first experience in an incarcerated setting. And it can be jarring,” Lawrence said.
However, Lawrence also spoke to her experience of students generally finding the experience not particularly fear or anxiety provoking.
“One of the benefits of being able to travel over together in a van is that the students do a lot of processing together.”
As for the physical processes of entering the jail, while some may find it intimidating, it is a simple process. And even in this process, there are benefits in understanding the experiences that students in the prison face.
“We all have to sign in, we have to go through a metal detector,” Lawrence explained. “We have to be patted down by the prison guards, and there is a strict dress code that we have to follow. And all of our movements are monitored. I think it helps Warren Wilson students gain empathy for what that experience can be like for their fellow classmates who don't get to leave after an 80 minute class and go back to their freedom and their privileges.”
Another difficulty for some WWC students, beyond anxiety over the procedures of Inside Out classes in Lawrence’s experience, is accepting the fact that their role in their classes at Western Correctional is not to attempt to fix the prison system or to attempt to offer their individual support to their inside classmates.
“I think some students maybe think ‘I'm going to go in there, I'm going to change the whole prison system,’ and we're not there to do that,” Lawrence said. “And I think students are able to learn that the advocacy, the experience that they have in the classroom founds their advocacy work that they do outside of the classroom.”
Lawrence also commented on a factor that WWC students who may feel nervous about the idea of taking a class with incarcerated students may not have considered.
“For the inside students who are incarcerated,” Lawrence said. “A lot of them have a lot of anxiety about being with ‘real’ college students. And are they capable of doing this level?”
Among the more obvious differences the Inside Out program brings for WWC students, there are some that may not first come to mind, but inform much of the processes of the class. Equity plays a central and vital role in the Inside Out program, which affects even the smallest details of the program.
All of the students’ work is completed on paper, as inmates do not have free access to computers in order to complete any online-based assignments. Lawrence affectionately referred to this difference by comparing it to taking classes in a different era entirely.
“We don't have assignments that are online, or readings or anything like that,” Lawrence said. “It's kind of like being in college in the 1990s where, you know, we're using hardcopies, students are printing out papers.”
The students participate in classes that are offered on a three-year rotation. Currently, the program is offering a theater course in voice and speech taught by Candace Taylor, as well as introduction to social work, and skills for communication and partnering both taught by Lawrence. In her skills for communication and partnering class, students completed a personal change project in which all students participate in personal logs tracking behavioral changes they hope to implement. They also partnered for a number of roleplays, often taking the roles of social workers and their clients as the class is a designated social work course.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, WWC had been unable to have a presence in the Inside Out program for almost two years. The recently reintroduced program immediately garnered enough interest from the WWC community that classes filled up quickly. Furthermore, this interest conceived the Inside Out work crew, which will become active for the first time next semester.
One of the two student workers on the Inside Out Crew will be Madison England, a rising junior at WWC. England is a current student in the skills for communication and partnering class offered through Inside Out.
“When I saw the email about the inside outside program, I was immediately interested because it looked like a really cool opportunity to learn alongside others who I probably would never get the chance to be in class with other than this program,” England said.
Her experience thus far this semester has lived up to her expectations. She explained that she held some concern before starting the program that the class would be a more stereotypical prison environment. The nature of the class she participates in has shown her that these assumptions were unfounded.
“I thought it would be harder to connect with the inside students,” England said. “But really everyone has been pretty open, and the nature of the classes that they choose to offer as Inside Out programs tend to be humanities classes — which give you an opportunity to all share about your life and how they relate to the material — which has given us a chance to get to know people in class context.”
Though the experiences England has been allowed through the program are overwhelmingly positive, she also spoke to some of the inherent difficulties that can be found in dynamics between inside and outside students.
“They're normally relatively cheerful, we greet each other and ask how each other's days were and we share good things and not so good things that have happened in all of our lives,” England said. “But I think sometimes it's hard to really address the elephant in the room, even though I think we do try to. Because obviously they have pretty intensely different lives, and they have to navigate a lot harder things than we do. And we have a lot of freedoms that we maybe take for granted. So I think even though everyone gets along and really seems to enjoy each other, sometimes it feels like there's a little bit of disconnect.”
That disconnect is not ignored, however. England explained a daily ritual shared by the entire class.
“We all stand in a circle, then you look at someone to your left or right, you look them in the eyes, you say, ‘I see you’ to them, and then you both try to clap in unison. Then they do that to the next person.”
Lawrence, as the head of the Inside Out program at WWC, was able to grant me clearance to attend one of their classes at Western Correctional. In many ways, the Inside Out course was not unlike other WWC classes. They went over assignments from the previous class, discussed readings and completed short written reflections. But with all of the similarities, the differences were a humbling reminder of the privilege myself and the outside students in the room held.
At the beginning of the class I observed the pleasant small talk typical of the moments before a class truly begins. I waited for Lawrence to welcome the class, discuss the work they would be doing. These things came in time, but not before our happy chattering was cut short by the appearance of a prison official to do the ‘counts.’
The inside students knew what to do. They filtered out neatly, stood in the hallway and were counted by the officials. When they returned, class began. The process happened once more in a different form, two officials ducked their heads into our classes to say ‘count,’ and every inside student raised their hand.
These experiences weren’t disturbing to observe, the incarcerated women weren’t treated violently or spoken to in any negative way by prison officials during these particular interactions. But for myself, who had never set foot in a prison, much less attended a class inside of one, this immediately changed the environment that had begun to solidify in my mind.
From that point on, I noticed just how different things were. A fellow newbie, taking pictures for the WWC Photography Crew, commented how similar the prison looked to their high school, and I agreed wholeheartedly. But our classroom, while almost equally as familiar in appearance, was decidedly different.
Our classroom had no clock on any wall. The door to our classroom was open throughout the entire lesson regardless of distracting noises, in order for checks of our conduct and the numbers of inside students to occur. And those checks in particular created an atmosphere of suspense that felt palpable to me. As we participated in a quiet group meditation, I had trouble focusing, waiting for an intercom or mandatory check of the student numbers.
In her interview, England went into a lot of detail about the importance in their classroom environment of seeing each other. In her experience, Lawrence placed a lot of emphasis on the necessity of nurturing that environment of both embracing differences and putting students on even ground for the purpose of learning together.
“Since then, I think it's become more routine,” England said about their clapping ritual. “But it's still nice to just remind each other that it's about seeing one another. Just treating each other as equals. I think the dynamic is just seeing people as classmates, as people, and as people to learn from and with. I think a lot of the inside students who are older adults than we are as college students have a lot of different life experiences than we do that they're very happy to share with and share about.”
The Inside Out program at WWC will continue next semester, and, Lawrence and England hope, will further its long history of success in connecting inside and outside students. The many benefits noted by Lawrence and England in their interviews serve as real insights into the value of the program, and the newly formed Inside Out crew will allow WWC to gain a further connection with Western Correctional.
Students interested in taking courses through the Inside Out program can contact Lucy Lawrence at llawrence@warren-wilson.edu.
More information on the program can be found on the Warren Wilson webpage: Turning Education Inside-Out.
More information on the Laughing Gull foundation can be found at their website.