Update on the Inside-Out Class

Katie D.

January 30, 2011 - 9:51 PM

This term's Inside-Out class, "Institutional Inequalities and Individual Lives" is going amazingly well.

I feel so amazingly lucky to be a part of the class, and to have a leadership role in an Inside-Out classroom. I have so much respect for the students (Inside and Outside) and for the Professor, Ellen Scott. What we have achieved already in the class is a learning community, working beyond the barriers to come together in a way that is all-inspiring for me.

When we met last week, we had missed a class session because of the MLK holiday. But when we arrived in the classroom there was an immediate feeling of comfort and recognition. We settled into the class with another icebreaker, a favorite of mine called "Forced Choice." The room is divided in half, and each round you have to chose which category you are more like. My favorite example is "cats or dogs." This is a question that breaks down all boundaries of age, race, class, religion, etc. and gets down to the basics of humanity: cats or dogs. You should hear the debate on this topic--people get so fired up. And everyone laughed at me for being the only girl in the motorcycle category when the other option was bicycles. When asked why, I first explained that I either want to be walking on my own two feet or getting places fast. But then I admitted to what you already know: that I am still working on a lifelong fear of bikes (for some reason, motorcycles don't bother me).

But then we got down to the book. And the class roared ahead.

The topic of the class boils down to the essential question of sociology: how much is my life course determined by individual choice, and how much by social structure? We've started the discussion with a book called Ain't No Making It, which I recommend to anyone interested in the social sciences. It's an ethnography of a housing project, conducted in interviews three times over thirty years. Jay McLeod started the project as an undergraduate student, interviewing two groups of teenaged friends, one predominantly black group and another white group. These youths had very different aspirations, and very different ideas about how to "make it" in life. By following them into middle age, McLeod created a portrait of society and structure and the intimacies of these men's lives.

As you can imagine, there's a lot there to discuss. People hold really strong opinions about these questions, particularly when tied up with race and class. It can be emotional, and heated. In the context of the prison, these issues became all the more poignant as some of the inside students identified strongly with the youths in the study caught up in bad childhood situations. Some of the outside students had surprising insight as well. We discussed social mobility and aspiration ideology (otherwise known as the American Dream). We talked about how social structures are inherited from previous generations, and how we perpetuate the expectations of us in a variety of ways. We talked about the various ways of "making it" and failing to do so.

This is the high point of my week. It demands creativity of thought and action, and allows for powerful dialogue. As a classroom, we have come together in a very real way to experience the text of the class, and to push ourselves beyond conventional understandings of the topics at hand, and the people with whom we interact. As a student of life, this is a powerful mandate. As a co-facilitator of the experience, it is a challenge and a joy. And as someone passionately involved with Inside-Out it is the ultimate honor to return to the classroom week after week as a student, teacher, leader, learner.

Class tomorrow includes a beginning discussion of Working Poor: Invisible in America. New book, new dialogue. Bring it on.