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Democracy Lab: Prison Education

Professor Hannah Taïeb

Applications for the Spring 2025 or Summer 2025 semesters

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TellingÌýStories,ÌýCrossingÌýBorders:ÌýMutualÌýLearning inÌýPrisonÌýEducation

This innovative class brings Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ students into a shared educational and creative space with people detained at La Santé prison in Paris.

After one introductory class at Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ and a prison-organized training session,ÌýeightÌýÂ̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ students will spend the semester sharing readings, discussions, andÌýcreativeÌýactivities with an equal number of detainees. Readings will be selected based on theÌýthemes 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 will read together as a group, then in small mixed groups, develop creative ways to exchange ideas and reactions. Circle pedagogy, deep listening, and other egalitarian approaches are used to make the learning experience mutual. In the last three or four sessions of the class, students and detainees will put together a collaborative final project, which will be presented in a celebratory event, attended by guests from Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ and the prison.

This class emerges from a collaboration between Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ 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), will learn alongside Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ participants, who primarily speak English (but also other languages). Classes will occur principally in French, and Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ students must have an intermediate conversational French level to participate (B2 or higher).

Interested students are asked to fill out . The cut-off date for applying is November 30, according to prison 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. Therefore, we will be accepting students on a first-come, first-served basis. Pre-selected applicants will be contacted for an interview. Queries about the class can be addressed to the professor at any time at htaiebaup.edu. On request, interested students can be put into contact with Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ participants from previous semesters.

Summer 2025: Interested students may also apply for the summer 2025 version of this class.ÌýThe summer session, which involves two sessions per week at the prison and one session per week at Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ, is open to students with a low-intermediate French level (B1 or higher). Summer classes will be multilingual.

This is the seventh iteration of the Â̾ÞÈËÊÓƵ 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, and the US-based organization Inside-Out, , 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.