At the request of one of our inside students, we’ve started asking program staff and instructors why they work with PEP. We’ll be including responses on our website and in our newsletters, so keep an eye out!
Professor Steve Durrant, a professor of Chinese literature who’s been teaching with PEP for several years, shared a little about what motivates him to be involved in the program:
“When I think of the world around us, I think of the geographical space that reaches out to other cultures, but I also think of temporal space and history. I’m trying to give the men inside an experience of the world that is both physically–and in most cases, temporally–quite far removed and constrained. There’s that cultural dimension to it.
I also really believe in the transformative power of literature, the way literature challenges us and makes us think of subjects that might not otherwise come up. I believe in the power of literature to make a difference in these men’s lives–and from my experience, it does.
The students are fully alive in so many ways. I learn from them, they give me insight into ways to think about these texts that I haven’t thought about myself. It’s a reciprocal relationship. I get to teach something I like, and it’s always a joy when people respond to that teaching.
Students have mentioned how relevant so many subjects of the Chinese literature courses are to them as incarcerated men. You see that we are all human beings. The men are always able to emotionally and intellectually cross over that seeming gap, the space between where they are and the texts that they’re reading, to identify with and be moved by the things that we’ve been and the material we’ve looked at.”
