Prison Education Workshop

Prison Education Workshop

Professor Hannah Taïeb

Applications for the 2024 workshops are no longer accepted

Telling Stories, Crossing Borders: Mutual Learning in Prison Education

The Prison Education Workshop is an innovative class that brings AUP students into a shared educational and creative space with people detained at La Santé prison in Paris.

After one introductory class at AUP and a prison-organized training session, eight AUP students spend the semester sharing readings, discussions, and creative activities with an equal number of detainees. Readings are selected based on the themes emerging from the interactions between the particular participants in the class. 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.

In each class session, students and detainees read together as a group, then in small mixed groups, developing creative ways to exchange ideas and reactions. Circle pedagogy, deep listening, and other egalitarian approaches are used to make the learning experience mutual. In previous workshops, students and detainees put together collaborative final projects that were presented in a celebratory event, attended by guests from AUP and the prison.

This workshop 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), learn alongside AUP participants, who primarily speak English (but also other languages). Sessions are held principally in French, and AUP students must have an intermediate conversational French level to participate (B2 or higher).

Interested students are asked to fill out this application. The cut-off date for applying is set according to the prison’s requirements. However, we encourage interested students to fill out the application questionnaire as soon as possible, since the prison also allows only a limited number of students to participate. Students are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Pre-selected applicants are contacted for an interview. Queries about the class can be addressed to Professor Hannah Taieb at any time, at htaiebaup.edu. On request, interested students can be put into contact with AUP participants from previous semesters.

Summer Workshop: Interested students may also apply for the summer version of this class. The summer session, which involves two sessions per week at the prison and one session per week at AUP, is open to students with a low-intermediate French level (B1 or higher). Summer classes are multilingual.

The Spring and Summer 2024 workshops are the seventh iteration of the AUP prison project. Prison Education Democracy labs took place in Fall 2019, Summer 2021, Spring and Summer 2023, and Spring and Summer 2024, with classes co-taught by Hannah Taieb with prison educator, lawyer and author Michelle Kuo, historian Albert Wu, and legal scholar Roman Zinigrad. The approach and pedagogy of these classes are inspired by the Canadian organization Walls To Bridges, wallstobridges.ca and the US-based organization Inside-Out, www.insideoutcenter.org, which have created learning collaborations between universities and correctional institutions across North America, including at Yale University, the University of Michigan, York University, and Wilfrid Laurier. Hannah Taieb, Michelle Kuo, and others have founded an international non-profit, Dialogue & Transformation, promoting an egalitarian collaborative approach to prison education.