Just sayin’ | Laurel Rayburn | TEDxWashingtonCorrectionsCenterforWomen 2015

My talk emerged out of my years of experience teaching college courses inside the prison. I address the assumption that so many hold about our students — that their status as “prisoners” is the most crucial aspect of their identities, arguing instead that we are misguided as long as we think of our students inside the prison as fundamentally different from our students on the outside. My vision for my students is that they be taken seriously as academics, that no one is to question them otherwise, and that their identities as students become a way for them to rupture the bounds of the selves they thought they knew. Laurel Rayburn received her doctorate in English from Brown University in 2012, where she completed a dissertation on 20th century American lyric poetry. She teaches academic writing for the Harvard Extension School and Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a college program at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. She is also a dedicated yoga teacher and practitioner.