Kathleen Venema Teaching Course at Headingley Women’s Correction Centre
Mon. May. 9, 2016
Professor Kathleen Venema is teaching a Walls to Bridges version of English 3717: Indigenous Literatures and Cultures at the Women’s Correction Centre (WCC) in Headingley this Spring.
Grounded in lived realities of criminalization and imprisonment, this course is offered at the WCC, where campus-enrolled and incarcerated students learn together under the rubric of “Walls to Bridges” (W2B). The Canadian Walls to Bridges Program (W2B) brings Frierian principles, Indigenous pedagogy, and anti-racist practices into the classroom to encourage transformational learning. Instructors interview students as part of the process of enrolling in this course. Campus-enrolled students travel to WCC for each class and must have received their security clearance before the course begins.
Indigenous Literatures and Cultures explores literary and other cultural texts by a range of Indigenous authors, with a focus on texts produced during and after the 1960s. The course studies texts that address issues about individual, communal, and cultural loss and renewal through new ways of thinking, seeing, and imagining.
Q: How did you become involved with the Walls-to-Bridges Program?
A: I was introduced to the Walls to Bridges (W2B) program in December 2012 at a Search Conference organized by UW Professors Judith Harris and Jacque McLeod Rogers to explore social enterprise opportunities for women transitioning from prison, and knew immediately that I wanted to pursue training. W2B courses are unique for two main reasons. First, they bring campus-enrolled and incarcerated or justice-involved students together as classmates, typically inside jails or prisons. W2B courses are also unique in their commitment to a deeply developed egalitarian circle pedagogy, which emerges out of Frierian principles, Indigenous pedagogy, decolonizing and intersectional analysis, and feminist anti-racist practice.
Q: Did you undertake any special training to teach this course?
A: Two years after my first introduction to W2B, I applied for, and was accepted into the 2015 Facilitation Training, which took place over five days in early June 2015 in Kitchener-Waterloo, ON, primarily inside at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, a multi-security-level federal prison. There, 14 other post-secondary instructors and I were directed in our studies by members of the Ontario-based W2B Collective, which is made up of both incarcerated and non-incarcerated people, all of whom have taken or taught at least one W2B course. Over the five days of training, we studied educational systems, criminal justice systems, the principles of Frierian, Indigenous, and experiential pedagogies, and engaged in extensive practice of these pedagogical principles.
Q: Do you have any reflections after the first few classes?
A: Three and a half years after first learning about Walls to Bridges, and having just completed my second 4-hour class of ENGL-3717 at the Women’s Correctional Centre, where eight incarcerated students are learning together with eight campus-enrolled students, I cannot say enough about the value of this way of learning, which instantiates UW’s commitments to build robust bridges between campus and community and to maximize opportunities for everyone to live up to their full potential.
I encourage all students interested in W2B-style experiential pedagogy to consider enrolling in ENGL-3180, Making Peace and War in Literature, which I’ll be offering in FW 2016-17.