ABSTRACT
I have an insatiable curiosity. My history of curiosity, like so many love affairs, has been kindled passionately by a wide variety of enticing and seductive ideas. Very few, however, have held my attention as long as the art of teaching. When I look at my history of teaching as a narrative arc, the setting that I find myself returning to again and again for lesson after lesson is the prison. As a teacher or facilitator of arts education in prison settings, I find the praxis of teaching to be informed by feminist pedagogy extracted from the writings of Paulo Freire and John Dewey: all students have something worthwhile to contribute to the teaching and learning within a classroom; all knowledge is constructed by participants, with no one person being considered the expert; and students discover their own questions, which they pursue with help and encouragement from teachers and fellow students as facilitators. Teaching in prisons is contradictory at times. As a teacher, I hope to give prisoners a sense of freedom to explore, the very thing that they are denied on a daily basis. I despise the prison system, but have decided to work within it to effectuate change from the inside, if in small bits and pieces. My work is filled with rewards, struggle, and compromise.
