Professor Jessica Dobson teaches English at Norco College in Southern California. She has been teaching writing and composition to the incarcerated populated at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco since 2017. She’s currently a doctoral candidate for her EdD, where her dissertation is on the motivations of teaching within the prison system. We asked her to come up with five must-reads for us that would help us to center this population better. Here’s what she told us.
Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison, Mneesha Gellman, editor.
This series of case studies compiles best practices from people teaching college in prison, along withas an educator, you get to leave the prison, but you also have to walk through it. And there’s an element of being watched and being aware of your positionality in there — not just your positionality of power but your positionality of not-power with the custody officers. I think the more we can talk about this, the more we can create context around teaching in prisons. We need to demystify it from the place it’s currently in, this place of saviorism or exoticism.”
