Dear Friends,
As the Academic Director of CPEP, I’d like to give you an update on our work to stay connected with our students in prison and to allow some continuity of their studies during this pandemic.
Hampered, but not halted
On March 13 – which seems an eon ago – we sent a memo to all 219 CPEP students across the four prisons announcing the pause in in-person instruction, explaining we were exploring options for completing all 38 spring courses underway, and affirming our commitment to them and their educational journey despite our temporary absence.
Within April and May, two one-credit introductory writing courses were completed, and six other courses were brought close. Imagine a masked Stephen Kim (doctoral candidate in English, and CPEP instructor) stepping over Cayuga CF Program Coordinator Betsye’s yipping dogs to retrieve an envelope of essays on Notes of a Native Son collected and mailed back by that prison’s Deputy Superintendent of Programs. Picture Keisha, Elmira CF Coordinator, in gloves and mask in our otherwise empty Kennedy Hall office, feeding student homework picked up from that prison’s sally port through the scanner for another instructor, now states away.
These improvisations to continue eight courses by paper-based correspondence comprised a pilot; we knew much would be lost – the arguable heart of what CPEP offers is human connection in the classroom, the chance to co-create a safe and stimulating environment for thinking and questioning, inside institutions that work otherwise to foreclose these. But we were holding out hope that some ideas could be conveyed and digested, some resolution of a course’s arc be attained, in the laborious exchange of envelopes.
Between logistical hiccups and signs of student frustration (alongside expressions of gratitude for our effort), the pilot can claim mixed success. Student notes taped to homework pages caused paper jams in the scanner, and their general tenor was resonant: Apologies to Dr. X,- This isn’t my best work, I don’t grasp the materials as well without the discussion; I find it hard to focus this way. Because at many prisons – in the NYS system, as many as half – there is no college presence, many CPEP students have tried correspondence education before, through more and less dubious institutions in Ohio, in Colorado; many have already decided that learning across distance is too difficult, too lonely.
Not what they signed up for
Another letter came to the office from a student withdrawing from English 101 altogether for this good reason: He thinks he could do the assignments and pass, but he knows he wouldn’t learn the skills and ideas very well, and so he wonders at the point. He isn’t in it for the credits alone, doesn’t want to turn in assignments just to get by. If we needed it, this was a good reminder: Before the semester was interrupted by the pandemic, CPEP students were busy doing much more than accruing credits. They were writing creation myths for the cultures with which they identify inspired by the Sunjata Epic in World Literature; turning the corner with independent research projects on children’s rights in ADHD treatments, racial bias in local Syracuse media, deportation policies for green card holders after incarceration, for the culminating assignment of the Certificate Program; about to learn how vaccines work in Introductory Immunology. They were daring to care about this stuff, to say “I don’t know,” and to respectfully disagree. They were learning to be college students and to believe in themselves as such: an identity already under constant assault in prison.
I don’t want to overestimate our role as advisors and instructors in affirming this sense of student self. I will always remember a new student orientation at Auburn where CPEP veterans prompted the new cohort to write down why they were there in the classroom, what motivation or inspiration had brought them to that admissions session – and to hold fast to this personal spur, as what would get them through the challenge, the years. But I also know the regular reinforcement in the classroom of their intellectual potential and of their value as interlocutors and thinkers, as worthy company, is critical, for some especially. We all worry about those at risk of giving up on themselves, in the absence of CPEP’s kind of support.
How did others keep busy in the wake of the pause, those CPEP students not enrolled in one of the courses continued by paper-based correspondence? One read Madame Bovary. Another sent a letter critically reviewing each of the remaining novels in his Contemporary American Literature class, saying he missed us all. Many instructors sent in optional inroads to the remaining material—assignments that could be attempted independently. Geology students: Review the most common minerals (quartz, feldspar, muscovite, biotite, pyroxene, olivine, calcite, garnet, and amphibole); 19th-century American History students: Consider reading Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest in its entirety. Subsequent memos from us, the staff, attempted to be consoling, assuring that our thoughts were still with them, sending best wishes for the continued health of all (with no cases in these four prisons officially reported to date), and expressing condolences to those who might be grieving losses most acutely.
But, for the most part, because this is prison, we don’t know what, or how, the majority of our students have been doing since March—and that is the hardest part.
Expanding the improvised remote classes pilot
By late May we had come to accept that the change in conditions we’d been waiting for – the availability of “non-essential” prison program staff to help facilitate screenings of recorded lectures, the possibility of technology for synchronous remote teaching – was not coming as soon as this summer. For the sake of bringing resolution to the semester begun in January, it was time to move forward nonetheless. This month we have sought to expand the correspondence education pilot, warts and all, for the completion of the remaining 30 total spring classes – so as not to “lose” the semester entirely, and so we can all look ahead to new possibilities with clear decks.
We sent the students another letter, and a form to return indicating their wishes to remain or withdraw from the program, since it will not be the same program they signed up for. Only a smattering have withdrawn; many more of those forms have come back with thanks for “finding a solution,” for “letting [them] finish what they started.” One note read, just: Thank you for not forgetting about us!
Hardworking, creative, and tenacious instructors and students
We pass on that gratitude to our dedicated instructors, who stayed engaged all the while and who turned around adaptations of their courses to us in short order. Basic Drawing students received instruction to continue working on hatching, cross-hatching and stippling as a way to create shading, and will also mail in an essay on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing; Contemporary Math students now have the instructor’s solutions to a batch of word problems, and must independently study two more textbook chapters and complete an open-book exam; Latin American Literature students will select a single text per category – poetry, short fiction, theory – from the remaining readings and write a final paper weaving together their selections. Instructors took the judicious hatchet to their carefully-crafted initial syllabi, in preparing the paper packets to go to their students, and usually included thoughtful cover letters, ruminating on the relevance and value of their curriculum in a time like now, and in which their feeling for their students was palpable. We on staff read these with nearly as much emotion as we read the notes from the inside.
Earlier mention of Stephen Kim’s class has me thinking about James Baldwin and the advice the mother in the canonical “Sonny’s Blues” gives the narrator about his duty to his vulnerable brother: “You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there.”
Thank you all for remaining there for CPEP students throughout this time of crisis and separation.