Blog #6 -- Heather

The Bean chapter resonated strongly with me in relation to the incarcerated population of students with whom I work.  In weekly study halls I see students struggle not only to understand the readings they've been assigned, dating back from our preliminary Speaker Series offerings, which included separate reading assignments and lectures by individual faculty members over a 14 week abbreviated semester to students currently working in Jen Stone's 1030, but also to process and analyze them. Incarceration, especially for a long period of time, takes away a person's agency in ways that are not yet fully or well understood. People in prison only get to make about a third of the regular decisions that people on the "outside" do.  In fact it's been documented at 28,000 plus daily decisions for an outsider individual, and below 6,000 for someone who is incarcerated. That institutionalization sometimes damages students' ability to reach beyond what is obviously stated.  I've spoken with students who understand what they've read, and even what the larger, less obvious point is of what they've read, but their ability to synthesize text or draw inferences is handicapped by the environment of the correctional facility. This is not true of every student, some have no trouble making connections, reading and clearly understanding an author's point, and clearly re-stating that point in writing, but many struggle at the very point of entry for this exercise.  On page 174 Bean has a section about helping "Students see that all texts are trying to change their view."  And says that "students tend to see texts as conveyers of inert information rather than as rhetorically purposeful messages aimed at effecting some change in the reader's view of the subject."  My fear, and the thing I think tutors working with incarcerated students struggle most with, is that our students are "programmed," for lack of a better descriptor, to do the opposite throughout the course of their daily lives. They are encouraged to question nothing, and this is a big obstacle to overcome.

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