Prison Education -- Policy, Practice and Process: A Transatlantic Comparison
Anita Wilson
About the research
Award
NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship
Award Year
2001
Institution
Lancaster University
Primary Discipline
Linguistics
Although much research is undertaken into the (lack of) educational ability of offenders, little work is concerned with the impact of educational policy and practice on the lives of those upon whom it is imposed and upon whom it is intended to have an efficacious effect. Rather than confining prisoners' literacy ability to a framework of deficiency and incompetence this paper intends to broaden the discussion and identify ways in which people in prison seek to retain a sense of their personal rather than their prison identity, using various literacy-related activities, practices and artefacts in order to socialise the institutional.
About Anita Wilson
Anita Wilson holds her Spencer Fellowship with the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University, England. She is a prison ethnographer and specialises in the field of communicative practice and identity. She has strong links to a number of US Universities and academics and is currently the international representative on the American Correctional Education Association Executive Board.