Fragile Learning

The Influence of Anxiety

David Mathew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367103316
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913914
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

What are the barriers and obstacles to adults learning? What makes the process of adult learning so fragile? And what exactly do we mean by Fragile Learning? This book addresses these questions in two ways. In Part One, it looks at challenges to learning, examining issues such as language invention in a maximum security prison, geography and bad technology, and pedagogic fragility in Higher Education. Through a psychoanalytic lens, Fragile Learning examines authorial illness and the process of slow recovery as a tool for reflective learning, and explores ethical issues in problem-based learning. The second part of the book deals specifically with the problem of online anxiety. From cyberbullying to Internet boredom, the book asks what the implications for educational design in our contemporary world might be. It compares education programmes that insist on the Internet and those that completely ban it, while exploring conflict, virtual weapons and the role of the online personal tutor.

Part I
Challenges to Learning

CHAPTER ONE
Prison language

I present and analyse the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007. In doing so, I look at the adolescent who becomes an offender, and how his language is thereby altered, here exploring language in groups and drawing on Freud and Bion, as well as the sociological contributions of Emery, Goffman, and Messerschmidt, and the linguistic contribution of Teresa Labov. Examining the social structures that the language enforced, I examine my own role within and outside the prisoners’ language, and explore what the prisoners learned from me and my language, and vice versa. I explore the nature of learning a language inside a prison, and examine the need for a homogeneity of language and the social adhesive in the language used. I look at my experience of one-to-one teaching vs. group teaching: specifically, the differences in the language used by the prisoners in these different scenarios, and try to determine to what extent language comes from outside influences and to what extent it forms and permutates inside. Using actual examples, I argue that despite the exuberance and inventiveness of the language, its usage follows Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in that there is an attempt to reduce excitation. Finally, I regard prison language as a psychic retreat, drawing on the work of Steiner, Meltzer, Emanuel, and Leader (among others); and I ask questions not only about the prisoners, but also about the function of learning inside a prison itself, while regarding the language used as a depressive defence.

No identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the places that are alluded to throughout have been rendered anonymous.

Introduction

In this chapter, I present and analyse the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken by offenders within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007, at which time I worked on site every weekday. Reflecting on this time of my life and career, I see that I had at least two choices with reference to this new means of communication: I could ignore it and insist on a more orthodox mode of speech from the young men in my care (and no doubt fail to achieve my aims); or I could embrace these linguistic deviations and this creativity, and learn something new and exciting (although to what end was not immediately apparent). As Goffman writes in Asylums:

any group of persons—prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients— develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable, and normal once you get close to it . . . a good way to learn about any of these worlds is to submit oneself in the company of the members to the daily round of petty contingencies to which they are subject.

(Goffman, 1961, p. 7)

What I experienced was immersive learning in its truest, most obvious application. I worked as an education coordinator, managing a team of ten lecturers in literacy, numeracy, and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ironically enough), but I also had a full teaching timetable. From the beginning of my time at the prison, I had no choice but to be aware of a powerful language that was spoken by the offenders, and immediately I became intrigued by its variations and its energy. Partly for my own amusement, partly for reasons of career progression, and partly spurred on by instincts of personal safety, I started to note down some of the key words and phrases used, some of which were brand new to me, some of which were well-worn words given freshness and new life by being grown in a different context, and some of which were deliberately confusing.

What I heard was not merely slang, or not exactly—not if we assume a broad definition of slang to be ephemeral terms used by a group in order to distinguish them from other groups—for I believe the purpose of prison language to be both more ambitious and more complicated in intent. Nor was it contemporary street slang (although there was cross-pollination between the street and the prison); it was not modish adolescent slang either, although again one must take adolescence into account, given the actual and emotional ages of the offenders in question. Prison language is not simply jargon either, if by jargon we might agree on a definition of a professional language that lends itself to the precise discussion of subjects related to a given vocation. However, by concatenating slang and jargon, and by bringing in cant—a form of verbal delivery that is employed to muddle comprehension completely for those not accepted by the group—we might arrive at a clearer picture of prison language.

Adolescent to offender (or, "Back in the day, now on the in . . .")

In order to examine the phenomenon of young offenders and their language inside a prison, it seems germane to unpack the two concepts in this symbiotic relationship. The first of these, of course, is that of the prison itself. In summary, the prison holds approximately 400 young male adults (aged eighteen to twenty-one) who are serving long sentences for crimes of violence, sexual offences, repeated thefts, and other repeated misdemeanours. It is an extremely challenging population—challenging for the prison staff who manage the day-to-day running of the establishment, but also for the inmates themselves it is regarded as a tough prison—and it includes a large number of men who are serving indeterminate sentences for the public’s protection (IPP).

Some of the accommodation dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. There are eight wings, including a wing that houses prisoners who are at risk from other prisoners (known locally as Fraggle Rock¹ or the Puppydog Wing, both of which references to youth—a children’s programme and a childish reference to dogs, respectively—are the result of the incorrect but self-defensive perception among other inmates that most of the offenders on this wing are not only sex offenders, but specifically child sex offenders). Another wing is nicknamed the Honeymoon Wing (a reference to shared cell occupancy, otherwise unknown in the prison). There are kitchens and gardens, an industrial laundry, and a waste recycling factory. There are exercise facilities—a gym and a swimming pool—and then of course there is the education block, where I spent most of my working day.

Goffman (1961, p. 15) classes a prison as a type of “total institution”—one “whose total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside”. He adds: “A third type of total institution is organized to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the persons thus sequestered not the immediate issue: jails, penitentiaries, P.O.W. camps, and concentration camps” (p. 16). Fifty years on, there might be campaigners who would dispute the part about the prisoners’ welfare not being a key issue, but for now, let us remind ourselves that the interrelated tasks of a modern prison fall under the headings of punishment and rehabilitation.² Or to put it another way, in the more recent words of Emery (1990, p. 513), prison differs “from hospitals— medical and mental—and from religious, educational, and political institutions in that it is based on the premise of doing something against the wishes of its inmates, and usually against their interests”. The more things change, we might say, the more they stay the same.

“A basic social arrangement in modern society,” Goffman continues, “is that the individual tends to sleep, play, and work in different places, with different co-participants, under different authorities, and without an overall rational plan. The central feature of total institutions can be described as a breakdown of the barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life”, where “each phase of the member’s daily activity is carried on in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike”, and in which “all phases of the day’s activities are tightly scheduled, with one activity leading at a prearranged time into the next, the whole sequence of activities being imposed from above by a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials” (p. 17).

Compare this situation with our perceived notions of young offenders having been (until fairly recently) running wild, and I believe that Goffman’s delineation goes some way to helping to explicate the prison’s unpleasantly bleak psychic environment. Nearly everything that an offender has held dear (or at least close) has been snatched away from him, and most people inside the prison’s walls could feel the loss, or the subsequent lack, in kind. For it was undeniably the case that throughout my time there, and certainly throughout the physical space that the prison takes up, a somber, gloomy atmosphere was palpable. Even as an employee of a college (rather than an employee of the prison itself) and with a set of keys that meant that I was fairly free to come and go as I pleased, I was conscious of the enduringly oppressive mood inside the prison. But what caused it?

Perhaps it was simply a strong example of my own fears and prejudices, projected not only on to the prisoners themselves but also on to this, the safest of contained spaces. If so, I would also believe that it was furthermore a strong example of the offenders’ fears and prejudices, projected into the same space, but also on to me, an outsider from “on road”, whether I wished to receive the projection or not.

If we accept that the vast majority of the offenders, despite any outward appearance of cocksure bravado, are secretly terrified of their incarceration, we might have a plausible explanation for the “herd” instinct of a shared, protective language, might we not?

Referring to adolescence per se, Meltzer (2008, p. 145) writes:

In a strange way language becomes very concrete and at the same time fluid, so that argumentation tends to lose its anchorage in observation and experience and becomes a duel of verbal facility, of aggressive assertion, and moral blackmail where the implication of cowardice is intimidating above all.

How much truer do Meltzer’s words appear when we incorporate the fact that these particular adolescents will give up what remains of their youths to the rigours—and the boredom—of a punitive system?

Into this container comes the offender. In order to assess how this offender learns a new language inside the new establishment, we should look at where he has come from and take into account the linguistic systems he carries with him. Referring to adolescent slang, Labov (1992, p. 341) writes:

I find three main categories of terms: (1) those for labelling people; (2) those for painting people, activities, and places positively or negatively; and (3) those for ways of spending leisure, focused upon having fun (including sex, parties, and substance use and abuse)—as well as doing nothing at all.

It is interesting to note that, although these categorisations were present among the offenders’ speech in the prison (broadly speaking), the referents had understandably changed for the speakers. Labelling people, for example, had a fairly low currency: apart from labelling the offenders on the Wing for Vulnerable Prisoners “Fraggles”, and apart from the occasional disdainful reference to an offender’s crime (as in “He a rapist”,³ the implication being that he, the subject, disgusts the speaker of this sentence), for most of the offenders, people were either “on the out”, “on road” (i.e., free, outside the Prison) or “on the in”. These were the key distinctions—although there were some other ways of labelling, such as “hench” for “big” or “muscular”, and “yoot” for “youth” or “boy” (“That yoot hench, blood!”), which are terms that are also used outside the prison—it can perhaps to some extent be said that they have “leaked” out. (More examples are discussed in a later section of this chapter.)

Labelling terms did not include offensively racist terms, or at least not routinely. Interestingly, the prisoners seemed enlightened when it came to inter- and intra-racist politics—far more so than one might have imagined. In the prison, there was little in the way of class or race distinction, and neither was there any “template” of a young man who used prison language. Although Goffman’s words—”The world view of a group functions to sustain its members and expectedly provides them with a self-justifying definition of their own situation and a prejudiced view of non-members” (1961, p. 8)—rings irrefutably true, it is important to note that prison language is not race-specific, being utilised equally and without prejudice by white, black, and Asian prisoners.

Neither is it defined by social class: although it is fair to remark that, at that particular time, the vast majority of offenders were from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, it was by no means a guarantee, and apart from anything else this argot achieved, or tried to achieve (such as secrecy from prison officers or from other staff), it also went some way towards homogenising accents and destroying class fences.

Most peculiarly, perhaps, in an establishment where there was a very tightly observed hierarchy, with (say) a gun crime regarded as “better” or more “noble” than a sex crime, this language was largely generic from the perpetrator of one offence to the next. As Emery (1990, p. 517) puts it:

Unlike most cultures, the inmate culture does not arise from evaluations of men who are freely engaged in common endeavours, and consequently it does not define the characteristics and potentialities of the inmate group beyond a crude typing of inmate and staff roles and a cultural definition of inmate suffering and its conditions . . . It is a culture without heroes or villains . . ..

Or to put it another way, prison language was a great leveller. But why should this be the case? In the footsteps of (inter alia) Freud (1921c) and Bion (1961), we know that we can assume a recognisable convergence of language function between most members of any group, however loosely defined and informally congealed; but is this need for a homogeneity of language in order that prisoners can fit in with each other? Or is there an element of being moulded by the environment (regardless of how strenuously this would be denied by the speakers themselves)?

Furthermore, is the language—or the function of the language— even as radical as it seems? It is certainly true that, in a prison, one of the very few matters that cannot be controlled by those in charge is that of speech—or more specifically that of lexicon and syntax—so shall we assume that the offenders used the system as a form of rebellion, or paradoxically as a mode of comfort, following Freud’s (1920g) theory of reducing tension in “Beyond the pleasure principle”? Arguably, to all of these questions we could answer yes.

Offenders who have been found guilty of crime X do not necessarily associate only with others who have been found guilty of the same crime. Putting routine disagreements aside (of which there were many, and which were occasionally murderous, literally murderous, in intent), the use of language acts as a sort of social adhesive; but what does this say about the prisoners themselves? Emery (1990, pp. 513–514) continues on from the quotation above:

The basic psychological fact about the inmates of a prison is that they are, with few exceptions, confined against their will in conditions of life not of their making and seen by them as depriving and degrading relative to the life they would be leading if free . . . the inmates (the “objects” handled by the institution) are defined by the State, not by a subordinate part of the society, as a morally inferior class of persons . . ..

And then, in a sense corroborating Labov’s findings, Emery adds: “They see themselves as deprived of their normal freedom of access to pleasurable and interesting pursuits and to those things (alcohol, tobacco, gambling and sex) that play an important role in their culture in handling intra-personal tensions” (pp. 513–514). Not to mention, of course, the things that were responsible, in one way or another, for landing them in prison in the first place.

“The existence of hatred,” Emery goes on, “creates the psychological schism between inmates and staff that is a necessary prerequisite to the emergence and maintenance of a secret inmate world within the prison” and “the hatred of officers, insofar as it emerges as a common feeling, provides a common denominator for joint inmate action that is otherwise lacking” (p. 516). Although Meltzer believes that adolescent “recklessness smacks of despair and suicidal longings” (2008, p. 146), it is perhaps Žižek (2000) who sums up the prisoner experience with more realism, optimism, and more chilling precision, in The Fragile Absolute:

The only true solution is therefore to fully accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.

(p. 139)

Learning a language inside a prison (or, "Are you listening?")

The first encounter I had with inappropriate language while inside the prison had nothing to do with anything that ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTOR
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I CHALLENGES TO LEARNING
• Part II ONLINE ANXIETY
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX