On these walks, I have often thought about Foucault’s remarks on heterotopic spaces, for surely it is symbolic that the site selected for the new prison was near the waste facility.

But it was on one particular summer stroll, while I was thinking about Romantic poetry, that I found myself wondering about the other insidious proximities that marked our spaces. Standing on the trail, looking at the prison that was jarringly framed through both the green canopy of the forest and the dull grey barbed wire and chain-link fence, what came into focus was the uneasy silence in which these two radically different spaces co-existed. Questions pressed me: Where were the continuities between our spaces? In what ways were we all — perhaps with the exception of my dog, now splashing about in the river — suffering from what Blake famously called our “mind-forg’d manacles” (Erdman 27)? Could the incarcerated women see the woods? What did nature mean to them? What place, if any, did nature have in prison? Did they look at the woods or perhaps even the walking trail as Coleridge might have in “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”? What place, if any, did poetry have in their lives while in prison? These questions stuck with me. That moment became the germ behind a community-based experiential learning assignment that I developed for an undergraduate Nineteenth-Century British Literature course, a year-long, third-year survey class for English majors. In what follows, I describe the planning, development, and execution of the assignment before turning to a consideration of how community-based learning (CBL) initiatives, such as this one, activate the potential of three growing, but currently separate, sympathetic discourses within Romantic scholarship: the public humanities, the discourse of care, and the prison narrative.

As a pedagogy that connects the classroom and the community, while recognizing them as mutually informing bodies aimed at making a positive difference, CBL offers community partners access to a greater, engaged audience committed to social and community awareness and action, and offers students and scholars of Romanticism an expanded sense of how our field can make a positive difference in building communities when we turn our work inside out.

While the prison workshop itself was brief, preparations were months in the making and essential to its success. Photocopies of the poems to be discussed were shared with the inside students prior to the workshop. Both inside and outside students read, in advance, the same selection of Romantic poems that treat the prison as experience or metaphor. As I explained in some introductory remarks before we launched into a discussion of the texts, many Romantic writers were intensely concerned with questions of freedom, authority, social injustices, resistance and revolution. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! While some writers themselves spent time behind bars or had brushes with the (in)justice system (cf. Thelwall, Blake, Helen Maria Williams, the Lambs, De Quincey, Shelley), others were drawn to the imaginative space of the prison as a way of exploring various states of confinement (cf. Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Coleridge).

In the planning-stage of the project, I consulted with both community and campus partners: the prison’s Education Director and the program coordinators from the Walls to Bridges Collective (W2BC), which is a think tank based in Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Social Work that since 2011 has offered university-based programming at the GVI.

Emailing with the W2BC was essential to first determine if there was interest among the incarcerated women for such a collaboration. I secured funding from the RBC Foundation and Willie May & William H. Lumpkin Community-Based Learning Grant, which covered the cost of transportation to and from the prison and refreshments for the event. Teresa Hubel, then Chair of Huron University’s English Department, generously supplied workshop materials for the incarcerated students, which the women were able to keep. Finally, all workshop participants from the university were required to complete a background check a few months prior to the visit before being granted permission to participate. Like all visitors at the GVI, our class was subject to a security screening, much like in an airport. Photo IDs were scrutinized and hands were swabbed for drugs (a major security concern).

In the prison classroom, students sat in a circle, in keeping with the circle pedagogy central to both Canada’s W2B program and the US Inside-Out program. Within the circle, each student is equal and has a shared responsibility in the life of the class, while the instructor serves as group facilitator and shares, like everyone else, in the learning process.

However, outside the circle, my role in the outside classroom was more formal; I delivered a lecture-discussion on the history of incarceration and penal reform throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and assigned selections from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Bentham’s Panopticon, and Elizabeth Fry’s Observations in Visiting, Superintendence and Government of Female Prisoners.

This helped establish a general movement away from prisons as disorderly places in the eighteenth century toward orderly and strictly regulated places by the mid-nineteenth century. Such knowledge would further enhance our visit to a twenty-first century prison.

I also prepared my students by lecturing on the politics of incarceration and the role of prison-based educational programming in Canada. For the outside students, whose exposure to incarceration was virtually non-existent, it was important to stress that incarceration in Canada differs from that in the United States (where most of the media representations of prisons are based). In Canada, there is what Simone Weil Davis calls “the blistering and tragic scale of criminalization and overincarceration of Indigenous people,” a group which alone makes up 23% of Canada’s prison population, though in some provinces Indigenous peoples make up between 90-98% of the population in jails and prisons (Davis, “Beyond ‘Replication’” 259-60). In Canadian federal prisons, educational programs are understood to “facilitate inmates’ reintegration by increasing educational skill levels through the provision of accredited programs.”

While Adult Basic Education (grades 1 to 12) is Correctional Service Canada’s educational priority, additional education programs are available, including Additional Language Programs, Adapted Education Programs, and General Educational Development. Prisoners have access to post-secondary education programs, in most cases through paper-based correspondence with an accredited university, college or CEGEP, and normally pay the costs themselves, although the institution may cover some or all of the cost of education.

However, the mid-1990s in both the US and Canada saw government cutbacks and program closures to postsecondary educational opportunities for incarcerated peoples.

While there are differences between the Canadian W2B program and the American Inside-Out models, what is common to both is the semi-anonymous space of the incarcerated classroom:

students use only first names and are prohibited from communicating outside of the course or workshop. “It is important,” notes Lori Pompa, founder and director of Inside-Out, “that outside participants are not studying their incarcerated classmates; they are not serving in a counselling or teaching or advising capacity” toward the incarcerated students, nor are they privy to the details or circumstances surrounding their incarceration (“Breaking Down the Walls” 257).

Students collectively shared their personal responses to these texts and made intertextual connections between them. We all shared a laugh when one inside student commented on how “whiny” Coleridge sounded as he complained about his lime-tree bower. He wouldn’t have lasted, quipped another inside student, a single day in the GVI.

Conversation gravitated toward the major common threads within these poems, such as the positive influence of nature and the importance of the imagination. The incarcerated students described their own strained relationships with the natural world. A number of women spoke candidly about their combined efforts to save food to feed the squirrels and rabbits that breach the prison fences. Indeed, one inside woman, who admitted to being envious of animals’ freedom to cross the barbed-wire fence, reminded me of the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor who laments the beauty and freedom of the swan flying overhead while he remains mired in the “wide and melancholy waste” (273). Another incarcerated woman spoke of her attempt to save and germinate apple seeds in her cell as a way of bringing beauty and life into an inhospitable environment (they were removed by the prison guards during a raid). Beyond reflections on nature, another incarcerated student shared how one of the poems we read, Dorothy Wordsworth’s “Thoughts on My Sick-Bed,” spoke to her own feelings of loneliness as well as the freedom afforded by her memories.

At the conclusion of the workshop, inside students admitted that while they were not frequent readers of poetry (preferring mostly self-help books), they had enjoyed the poems and they might seek out poetry in the future.

Outside students participated in a debriefing of the workshop in the class following the event. Back in the university classroom, outside students were asked to evaluate themselves, specifically their engagement and performance within the experience, and to share their insights and observations with the class. Numerous outside students described how the space of the incarcerated classroom quickly felt familiar, and how jarring it was to be reminded at various points, such as when an alarm went off, that they were inside a prison. Some outside students confessed to feeling somewhat shadowed by the depth and intensity of the inside students’ comments and readings of the poems. One outside student shared that she felt emotionally overwhelmed by their stories. One student later wrote on course evaluations that this experience was the highlight of their entire undergraduate education.

My goal in designing this experiential activity was to recast Romantic poetry and inject it with new life and new lives, by bringing this poetry into meaningful connection with a greater public beyond the parameters of the traditional university classroom. Could there be a way to reduce not only the historical distance between our present and the Romantic past, but also the more challenging distance between the discourse and experience of incarceration? At its heart, this was a project about collapsing distances. If Romantic poetry about incarceration seemed doubly removed, discussing it in a prison classroom with currently incarcerated individuals helped make this poetry more accessible. For instance, the incarcerated women shared that in important ways their current conditions were not those facing Romantic prisoners. Their cells were not as Thelwall describes his in “The Cell,” with its “damp foul floor, the ragged wall / And shattered window, grated high” (5-6).

And yet, for as physically different as Romantic and present-day prisons are, the incarcerated women were quick to connect with the poem’s “Patriot” (2), who within the “noxious gloom” (1) is still able to “smile” (4) because of his memories, as he “Looks inward to his heart and sees / The objects that must ever please” (13-14). While outside students immediately read the poem’s “Patriot” as a political prisoner, having learned about the French Revolution in the early weeks of our course, one incarcerated woman thoughtfully offered a different reading of the word “patriot,” as someone who fights for what they believe in. The challenge of incarceration, she explained, is to remain a patriot, that is, to stay committed to those things worth fighting for, such as freedom, without losing hope. Many of the women spoke about the importance of returning to their memories as a critical way of managing their mental health and personal wellbeing while serving their sentences.

Beyond this one individual student success story, the hope and biggest payoff of this kind of learning is to trigger, as Pompa puts it, “a new way of seeing the world, in which everyone involved shares an opportunity to work through their stereotypes and myths” (257), and to which I would add and recognizes the importance of the humanities in building bridges across institutions and communities. The transformative pedagogical work of W2B and Inside-Out, and the linkages they create between the university and the prison, raise larger questions and new perspectives through which to cross-examine each institutional body. Is there a way to see their various crises as interlinked? For example, at a time when prisons are increasingly faced with growing populations, and humanities programs and classrooms the inverse trend, how might these two bodies in “crisis” speak positively to one another?

Indeed, prisons and universities might benefit from a more sustained thinking about the impact of humanities programming in the reduction of recidivism and in thoughtfully informing policies and processes around segregation and reintegration. After all, the number of complaints from incarcerated women at the GVI has dramatically increased (139%) within the last three years. Canada’s federal Correctional Investigator, Howard Sapers, received 344 complaints from the GVI in 2015-2016, a number that comprises nearly 41 percent of complaints from federally incarcerated women in all of Canada.

Romanticists are increasingly thinking through the relationship between classrooms and communities, and with good reason.

The payoff of community-based learning, such as that modelled in the W2B, Inside-Out and public humanities movements, is contributing to the public good, and to expand the range and impact of academic discussions beyond the parameters of the campus classroom. Yet one critique levelled against community-based learning is precisely on the grounds of this paternalistic drive to be helpful to the community Other (Mitchell 2008). Intentionally by design, this workshop was not curative; it was not aimed at healing individuals or the incarcerated community. In keeping with the spirit of W2B and Inside-Out, the workshop was “not about helping, researching, or mentoring incarcerated students; the pedagogical foundation is collaborative learning in which all students are equal carriers of knowledge” (Pollack “Building Bridges” 504). This, however, is not to deny the palliative experiences of this kind of learning, facilitated by our conversations of Romantic poetry. Indeed, as Nyki Kish notes, in reference to her experience of taking a W2B course while locked up in the GVI’s maximum security unit, there is “a healing quality to the circle setting” (Freitas, McAuley and Kish 308). In the class circles, Kish continues: ‘there was no hierarchy and there were not the power struggles that dominated my experience with both guards and other imprisoned women in max. In class circles I felt safe to think, and share, and interact, and especially as our class read texts and poetry relevant to oppression, criminalization and issues of imprisonment, I began to find something I had lost in the trauma of experiencing the penal system: my voice. (308)’ Helping incarcerated peoples to find their voices is often cited as a desired outcome of prison writing programs. Lisa Rhodes, reflecting on her time spent mentoring prisoners through Pen America’s Prison Writing Mentorship, sees writing as “the catharsis to help them [prisoners] through their struggles” (164). North of the border, Sylvie Frigon describes the goal of the creative writing prison workshops developed by the Ontario Francophone Authors Association as providing “les voies/voix de la fiction” (129;the paths/voice of fiction) to inmates in Québec prisons by publishing their texts on the outside. Writing is frequently framed as offering prisoners both a space for self-expression and a vehicle for reconnection to both the outside world and the self. Indeed, research specifically supports the impact of arts and writing programs on prisoners’ lives. In 2014, Larry Brewster studied projects modeled after the Arts-In-Corrections (AIC) program in four California state prisons and measured changes in attitude and behavior of inmates participating in a 12-week arts program (poetry, writing, theatre, visual arts). There was a positive correlation between participation in the arts programming and improved time management, social competence, achievement motivation, intellectual flexibility, emotional control and self-confidence, among others. The study also found a reduction in disciplinary reports and a greater participation in other academic programming. Thus, we can speak of education’s palliative work in the prison, and also more specifically of the arts.

What was interesting to learn, however, was that this experience was positive not only for the inside students but those outside as well, and this largely rested on how this learning happened. As students told me during our post-workshop discussion, they thought it was the larger experience of sitting in a circle, collaboratively working with new classmates from such different lived realities as them, listening to first-hand experiences of incarceration, and having intense discussions over the shared content that made it so meaningful. For me, their answers raised some more questions: what role, then, did these particular poems play in creating this experience? What if it had been a different genre?

And how did the fact that it was a one-time, intense but fleeting experience shape students’ impressions? What was the relationship here between the workshop’s content and form?

Increasingly the mission of the humanities is an outward-looking one: a key objective of public humanities initiatives is “to cultivate a renewed spirit of citizenship and engagement through arts and humanities research and collaboration,”

an objective deeply rooted in the Romantic ideals of Bildung. Similarly, the revaluation of Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education is at the heart of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s hope for the socially engaged humanities. We, who practice and study within the humanities, need to become, as Peter Brooks puts it in The Humanities and the Public Life, “less modest, and to stake a claim to the public importance of our task” (2). Tellingly, Brooks turns to a Romantic poet to sharpen his point: “Shelley was not entirely wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake” (2). Community-based learning projects, whether on a micro- or macro-scale, have the potential to transform and reinvigorate all those involved: faculty, students, community partners, research, activism, poetry and its publics.