Teaching and Practice

Abstract

In this article, Kathy Boudin recounts her story as an inmate and literacy educator at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women. While the standard literacy education curriculum for the facility emphasized instrumental, workbook-based reading skills, Boudin sought to make the literacy program more relevant to the women's lives and experiences. By working with the women in the literacy program, Boudin incorporated critical literacy teaching practices into the skills-based curriculum, using the subject of AIDS in prison as a means of linking the women's experiences with their acquisition of literacy skills. Although the article focuses on prison education, the women in Bedford Hills are like other women in urban communities for whom literacy is only one of many problems. Thus, the pedagogical and social issues raised here have many implications that extend beyond the prison bars.