Prison Education Workshop

Democracy Lab: Prison Education

Professor Hannah Taïeb

Spring 2025 or Summer 2025

Telling Stories, Crossing Borders: Mutual Learning in Prison Education

This innovative class brings AUP students into a shared educational and creative space with people detained at La Santéprison in Paris.

After one introductory class at AUP and a prison-organized training session, eight AUP students will spend the semester sharing readings, discussions, and creative activities with an equal number of detainees. Readings will be selected based on the themes emerging from the interactions between the particular participants in the class. In the past, authors studied have included Malcolm X, Bachir Kerroumi, Rigoberta Menchu, Azouz Begag, Jimmy Santiago Baca, W.S. Merwin, Alison Bechdel, Paulo Freire, and Franz Kafka.

In each class session, students and detainees will read together as a group, then in small mixed groups go on to develop creative ways to exchange ideas and reactions. Circle pedagogy, deep listening and other egalitarian approaches are used to make the learning experience mutual. In the last three or four sessions of the class, students and detainees will put together a collaborative final project, which will be presented in a celebratory event, attended by invited guests from AUP and from the prison. 

This class emerges from a collaboration between AUP and the cultural activities department of the Centre Pénitentiaire Paris La Santé, a newly-renovated remand prison in the 14th district of Paris. Detained participants, who primarily speak French (but also other languages), will learn alongside AUP participants, who primarily speak English (but also other languages). Classes will occur primarily in French, and AUP students are required to have an intermediate conversational French level to participate (B2 or higher). 

Interested students are asked to fill out this application. The cut-off date for applying is November 30, according to prison requirements. However, we encourage interested students to fill out the application questionnaire as soon as possible, since the prison also allows only a limited number of students to participate. Therefore, we will be accepting students on a first-come, first-served basis. Pre-selected applicants will be contacted for an interview. Queries about the class can be addressed to the professor at any time at htaiebaup.edu. On request, interested students can be put into contact with AUP participants from previous semesters.

Summer 2025: Interested students may also apply for the summer 2025 version of this class. The summer session, which involves two sessions per week at the prison and one session per week at AUP, is open to students with a low-intermediate French level (B1 or higher). Summer classes will be multilingual.

This is the seventh iteration of the AUP prison project. Prison Education Democracy labs took place in Fall 2019, Summer 2021, Spring and Summer 2023, and Spring and Summer 2024, with classes co-taught by Hannah Taieb with prison educator, lawyer and author Michelle Kuo, historian Albert Wu, and legal scholar Roman Zinigrad. The approach and pedagogy of these classes is inspired by the Canadian organization Walls To Bridges, http://wallstobridges.ca and the US organization Inside-Out, https://www.insideoutcenter.org/, which have created learning collaborations between universities and correctional institutions across North America, including at Yale University, the University of Michigan, York University, and Wilfrid Laurier. Hannah Taieb, Michelle Kuo, and others have founded an international non-profit, Dialogue & Transformation, promoting an egalitarian collaborative approach to prison education.