A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life shares stories from APEP students, faculty, and staff. These stories aim to give insight into APEP: how it works, and how it impacts participants.

APEP TEACHER PERSPECTIVE

Farah Marklevits

1. What inspired you to get involved in providing educational opportunities to incarcerated individuals through the APEP program?

I wish I could say I was sparked by some noble, high-minded purpose, but if I'm honest the biggest push and pull was personal, the feeling that I had fallen into a rut as a teacher and person. I have really always been interested in what makes people tick and the various ways that people live, but I realized my circle of interactions had shrunk over the years. And so my life felt small, constricted, even though as a college professor planted steady in the middle class my options were and are pretty open, my choices pretty wide.

These feelings of same old, same old in combination with the reckonings of 2020 made it clear I have a lot to learn and I needed to take a risk to do that learning. Education has always been a core value. It's been in educational spaces that I found stability and purpose, most importantly when my family life growing up was anything but stable or concerned with me finding purpose. I believe education can connect us with our unique gifts and what matters most in our humanity, individual and collective. APEP opened the door to learn about the US criminal justice system in an active, authentic, and messy way, by getting to know people right in the middle of it.

And already I've been challenged and enlarged. Teaching in APEP has challenged my assumptions and revealed what I believe but have lost sight of, that people carry beauty and promise with them, even when conditions try to deny it and its flourishing. The conditions in a prison actively work to deny the development of beauty and promise. There are plenty of conditions outside prison that work against that, as well, but now I'm rambling.

2. Based on your experiences, how have you seen the APEP courses and curriculum impact the personal growth and rehabilitation of the participating students?

A former student who never published before submitted a creative nonfiction piece written in my creative nonfiction class that will be published in a local anthology alongside another APEP student who had an impressive record of publications when he started APEP in Spring 2024. Another student rewrote the first few assignments three times (three!) and in his third attempt showed that he understood and could apply the literary element I was teaching.

In general, I see APEP students grow in their capacities to trust their peers, share more of their emotions, and listen to and mentor their peers. It was a big deal when one of my more serious, reserved students laughed in the fall semester, and I think it happened around Week 9 or 10, maybe later. It takes time to break down some of the unhealthy self-protective walls built in response to incarceration, but liberal education's emphasis on thinking in conversation with texts and readers chips away at that wall, and builds listening, empathy, communal support, and other skills that are so important to live a life of meaning and purpose.

3. What are some of the unique challenges you face in delivering effective educational programming within the correctional facility setting, and how do you address those challenges?

Time changes when you step foot inside a prison's fences. The stated start and end times already pit my educational goals against the clock. There just aren't enough minutes to begin with. And so often the clock time we have for learning swerves or evaporates altogether due to the way prison controls time and space--movement freezes, call passes that take individual students out for medical or other appointments, and other events, small and large and often unexplained. The way that time doesn't sit still is one part of the challenge, but when you add in the fact that the time we are together in class is the only time when students can ask questions, get clarification, and communicate about the work, time begins to seem like an unstoppable supervillain.

Part of the way I address the challenges that time throws at us, I learned from trial and error. I realized I need to zero in on the work that's most central to the knowledge and development that class is seeking to achieve at the end of the semester. "Backward design" is a core concept in education, and APEP reinforced its power by necessity.

Also, I realized that when I first taught I operated with the philosophy that APEP is a vehicle to counter scarcity. So, I filled my first course with as much content as I could with the mentality that if we don't get to it, at least they have it close at hand. Like if someone's dying of thirst, the solution is to give them a tanker full of water with a side of several hundreds of gallons of Gatorade. That's not a healthy way to teach for several reasons. For one, it's overwhelming and puts on students the challenge of sorting through what's more and less important. Students in prison, like all college students, have several competing demands on their time and attention. So, now I seek to select my reading and writing assignments with a mind to what's essential and give a few optional additional resources for those who may be able and want to dig deeper, clearly labeling which is which.

4. How do you believe the skills and knowledge gained by APEP students can positively influence their prospects for successful reentry and reintegration into their communities post-release?

I'm far from an expert on reentry, but I have learned in the last few years that the obstacles to reentry are steeply stacked against individuals. It's a mistake to think that educational transformation is so powerful that it erases or even makes those obstacles manageable. For that to happen, we need education plus policy change and the creation of a clear, accessible social support system that kicks in for individuals upon release.

That said, APEP students who persist and work through their degree gain a powerful tool--the powers of mind that get us to step back and make sense of experiences, events, and ideas before reacting. Asking questions and thinking about things from more than one perspective (especially thinking past the perspective that pops up instantly, delivered by the lightning of what we've heard or been told before) puts in students' hands some measure of decision-making and, therefore, control.

And, ideally, an APEP education reconnects and deepens students' ability to appreciate. As a creative writer, I hope students can rebuild and then develop further their sense of wonder and curiosity, to begin to see and explore the beauty in and around us. Art offers many things, one being that beauty can be relentless, sneaking into even in the darkest and most horrible moments.

5. What advice would you give to other educators or institutions interested in developing similar prison education programs, based on the lessons you've learned through your work with APEP?

Try to get in touch with your own sense of curiosity. Actively seek out and wonder about your own assumptions about education, the criminal justice system, and people in and around that system. Flexibility is also huge. To teach effectively, you need to understand the core thing you are trying to teach in a class period and have that clearly in mind. That way, you know what you can drop or adjust when the conditions don't allow you to enact your more elaborate plans.