Drama: A Comparative Analysis of Individual Narratives

Introduction This narrative study explored how a selected group of educators made meaning of their experiences teaching college courses in prison. Drawing mainly from the theories of Bourdieu (1967, 1986, 1994) and Freire (1970/2003), we examined how higher education takes place in prison, an environment controlled by the state and dominant culture. The phenomenon of teaching college in prison exists within the tension between two contrasting conceptualizations of education: education as a means for social control and education as the practice of freedom. Our research questions centered on how educators who teach college in prison understand and experience their work as teachers of higher learning skills and how these experiences illuminate the influence of the educators' character and motivation and mediate the prison environment in the teaching and learning process. The five participants in this study were educators who had recently taught college courses in a Western state's correctional facilities contracted on a part-time basis through local higher education institutions. Two participants were women and three participants were men and the length of time they taught in an adult prison ranged from three semesters to 13 years. The participants taught both male and female inmate students in medium and minimum security prison settings, including military-like boot camps for young nonviolent offenders. One female participant also taught male inmates in a federal maximum security prison. Many college-level correctional education programs receive funding from the federal Incarcerated Youth Offender Grants (IYO) that Congress approved in 2002 (Baust, McWilliams, Murray, & Schmidt, 2006). The grants stipulate that subsidized students must be offenders who are 25 years old and younger and are within five years of release from prison. Older inmates may enroll in the college courses by paying the tuition. All inmate students must pass the General Education Development (GED) tests or have a high school diploma to participate in the college programs, which commonly focus on core general education courses. Typically, states receive the federal funding and the state department of corrections contracts with a local college or university to provide the curriculum and instructors for the college-level courses. Our discussion of this narrative study leads us to two central conclusions. It shows "the relation of stories to the worlds in which they circulate" (Gubrium, 2005) are as important as the content and internal organization of the stories. In order to understand the individual stories, we examined the narrative environment and institutional setting of prison. We offer a collective story; that is, an impression of the world that this particular subgroup of educators inhabits not a generalization about those experiences. Therefore, we determined that these stories had more meaning when situated in the context of the participants' everyday experience. Our discussion also reveals how the meaning of lived experiences is made visible through drama (Denzin, 2003). We piece large segments of interview data into the text of a drama to be seen and heard, requiring the reader or audience to relive for themselves the experiences of the participants. Our goal is to bring the audience back into the dialogue and create "a field of shared emotional experience" (Denzin, p. 470), which moves people to reflect and perhaps to take action. We present our explication of this study and the tension that serves as its primary contextual condition in three parts. First, we provide the theoretical background by examining certain insights about education offered by Bourdieu and Freire. Although our theoretical framework is partially based on Bourdieu's explanation of how the state's operation of the prisons reproduces the social structure that validates and distributes cultural capital, we also believe education may be a source of resistance to the dominant culture. …