Dangerous Worlds: Teaching Film in Prison

When I first heard that my college had formed ties with a prison and that some of our teaching assistants were already offering courses to inmates, I leapt to join on. I don’t know how to prove that these prisoners have learned something useful and enduring. Though I think that each week was momentous, revelatory, this is a common teacher’s delusion. Sit in the back of your own classroom sometime—as I have—and discover how far away the teacher and her enthusiasms can be. But the students were so sure it had all made a difference. On the evaluations they mentioned bits of new knowledge—several described with enthusiasm those militant suffragists—and said that, yes, they had explored new ideas and learned how to look critically at movies.