Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning in Prison

by Deborah Appleman

Overview

Incarcerated bodies, liberated minds: a narrative of literacy education behind bars.

Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college- level classes at a high- security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman’s classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories.


The students’ work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation’s prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the “school to prison pipeline,” she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393713671
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	360,728
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Deborah Appleman lives in Minnesota and is the Hollis L. Caswell Professor of Educational Studies and director of the summer writing program at Carleton College. Since 2007, she has taught language, literature, and creative writing courses at a high-security prison for men in the upper Midwest.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Prelude: Education: Life or Death

1. A Tough Sell: Education and Incarceration

2. The Geography of Incarceration: The Glass Bubble in the Big House

3. Of Freire and Frost: Reading the World Behind Bars

4. "No Hugs for Thugs": Surveillance and Control

5. "I Write Myself Out of Prison": Rewriting the Self

6. Writing in the Dark: Profiles of Incarcerated Learners

7. "What If I Had Started to Write in High School?": Interrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

8. "Songs from the Genius Child": Words No Bars Can Hold

Epilogue: Thoughts Beyond the Bars: The Dark and the Light

References

Selections of Writing by Incarcerated Writers

Index

Editorial Reviews

An educator cannot read this book without being challenged to see all people differently, to recognize his or her complicity in the prison industrial complex, and to insist on literacy instruction rooted in agency, voice, power, and love.

Ernest Morrell

Reading it, we learn so much about the power of writing, about teaching, about what education makes possible, and about the urgent human capacity to define who we are.

Mike Rose

The result is an eloquent meditation on how the art of narrative defines what it is we mean by education itself.

Daniel Karpowitz

Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning in Prisonsharpens our analysis and does the necessary work to break our hearts. Written with a fluid and accessible voice, this essential text invites a wide range of readers to view radical literacy work as a key tool to strengthen national movements to end our prison nation.

Erica R. Meiners

Words No Bars Can Holdis a guidebook for those looking to improve education within correctional institutions as well as for those of us working to keep students far away from the school-to-prison pipeline.

Carl Jago

I anticipate this will become a seminal text for those who want to educate men in one of our nation's darkest spaces.

Alfred W. Tatum

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