ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that students’ experiences of reentry must be understood and incorporated into the design of prison writing classes and workshops. Here, it theorizes reentry as a form of rhetorical practice of attunement, and suggests teaching writing and rhetoric that encourage problem-exploring and repurposing through the critical transition of reentry. Drawing on research on the transfer of knowledge from Writing Studies, the chapter offers a few suggestions for incorporating a teaching for transfer approach in carceral classrooms. The clear limitations of this approach are that it cannot account for the value of literacy instruction for people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, nor does it count for the immediate uses of writing and rhetoric instruction for incarcerated people. Thomas Meisenhelder, drawing on the work of Husserl and Heidegger, argues that a human being is “temporally structured through and as a casting of oneself toward the future”.
