Ripping Off Some Room for People to "Breathe Together": Peer-to-Peer Education in Prison

The authors said let people start locating the two participants: As member of the Walls to Bridges Collective, a group of incarcerated and non-incarcerated people that meets regularly at the Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ontario, participants helps to coordinate the Walls to Bridges program. The Collective offers a reciprocal learning model and they seek to help usher into this world profound transformations of both educational and justice paradigms. Their work includes training and supporting faculty from around Canada who want to bring incarcerated and non-incarcerated students together to learn in community. While the "I" voice in this essay is the participants, (and I take full responsibility for the views I present), this piece emerges out of and introduces an ongoing conversation between the two participants, a peer-to-peer educator who has helped to found, facilitate, and grow a multifaceted, robust, entirely prisoner-run college program at the facility in a Midwestern state where he is incarcerated.