This update was written by Amy, IS and JWoo, members of the P4H learning community at the Southeastern Correctional Institution (SCI) in Lancaster, OH.
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Blooms and Plantings for P4H
As the days get longer in the spring, the idea of starting a big new project seems natural and even obvious. Less often recognized is how the magic of spring is only possible from energy built in winter. And so it goes for Philosophy for Humans over the past month. As IS put it, “Ideas planted and properly cultivated in previous sessions came to full bloom in the month of April. Liberated minds continue to be fertile in the P4H learning community.”
The beginning of our spring was marked in our April 7 meeting by a visit from nine formerly incarcerated people from across the country who are leaders in their home communities and fields. We proudly used up all of SCI’s volunteer badges between outside members and visitors going into our meeting. “As a team we were focused on creating bridges with this group to help us make an impact in our abolitionist stance,” recalled JWoo.
To explore possibilities for further collaboration, we began by asking everyone to offer a one-minute statement of what they were hoping to get out of the meeting that evening, and then we broke up into small groups spread over 6 stations. Those in attendance had time to visit three stations over the course of an hour; each station contained a series of questions centered around a distinct theme and large poster paper for notes. Themes identified as priorities by our members included collaboration, telling our stories, re-entry, creativity, education on the inside, and abolition. Finally, following a suggestion made by JWoo, we reserved time for an unstructured “hobnob” so that people could freedom dream one-on-one.
We are grateful to Elizabeth Shatswell for connecting us to these visitors; it simply would not have happened without her inspiring and tireless commitment to lifting up currently and formerly incarcerated people.
P4H will review our notes and continued engagement with these visitors over the summer as we formulate the big new projects we will develop with the Mellon funding extended to our learning community. During our pre-mortem for this visit, Alia also helped us to remember our core values, what we don’t want to lose track of in the process of building new bridges.
IS led the common activities of our next meeting in April. He chose to begin with 3 minutes of silent meditation, a chance to center ourselves. For many, this harkened back to the meditation practices featured in the philosophy of happiness course. Jesse, one of our newest inside members, remarked upon how rare it is to experience such silence in prison. He continued, “It almost felt uncomfortable.” After a brief personal check-in from each of us, IS broke us up into color-coded groups—yellow, green, pink, blue. Each group was assigned two to three paragraphs from chapter 3 of Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? IS provided two sets of questions for each group, allowing us to choose where we wanted to dig in given our assigned portion of the common reading. He supplied large poster paper for notetaking in our small groups and then asked a spokesperson from each group to share out the contours of our deliberations with the full community before a wider discussion of each theme. This scaffolded activity allowed us to gain deeper insight into Davis’s argument, and opportunities for further development of abolitionist thinking.
Finally, we continue to celebrate our recognition as a Program of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship. JWoo reflected, “This recognition marks a very big milestone for us and solidifies our position within the Department of Philosophy and OSU as a whole.”