The experience of teaching behind bars-without a scholarly library, internet, or efficient means of communication between teachers and students, and facing students whose eagerness for education and intellectual thought completely outpaces their skills and available resources, in short of dealing with all kinds of lack all the time-has ironically made us into more effective, thoughtful, and committed teachers. Of necessity, we have adapted and grown flexible as the very limits imposed have caused us to shift attention from the mechanisms of teaching to the humanity of it. 

I have seen the study of literature, culture, and history bring the best intellectual and spiritual qualities out of a group of students in an environment many would consider actively hostile to the human spirit. In a place where daily life is dehumanizing, I have seen rigorous and meticulous thought and discussion; and not just summing with insightful conclusions but to conclusions based on compassion and empathy for the human condition of others.

Currently in our High Adult Literacy class, we are reading Viktor Frankl's A Man's Search for Meaning, a novel in which the author depicts his experience in Nazis concentration camps and his search for meaning in love, deeds, and suffering. 

Grappling with the Holocaust--especially within the jail context-is no easy task, as the students are asked to address difficult questions that often hit close to home. For example: What made it possible for people to marginalize, exclude, incarcerate and finally annihilate their fellow-citizens? The starting point for our critical analysis was to practice attentive listening - to the texts and to each other. Sometimes, especially at the beginning of classes, students cling to entrenched views. But, more often and increasingly, an electric stillness pervades the classroom, an awareness and receptivity that come from engaging with questions that deeply matter to all of us. One student in the class, explaining how Holocaust education can be transformative, wrote that it had helped him "to value other people's point of view and to put oneself in the position of another." It is this kind of purposeful and reciprocal pedagogy, an integrative approach to learning that engages our minds, our hearts, and our souls.

Education inside can and needs to be a site for hope and renewal. If we can find the courage to view our society holistically, that is if we begin to be more deliberate in our awareness that we are all interconnected, then mutual accountability − the collective responsibility to care and to take care of one another − will become inevitable. Teaching inside has taught me that we as an organization have the privilege and the obligation to be a central part of this transformative vision.