Exhibition: Time to Think

In the Time to Think collection you can listen to the reflections of thirty four tutors with different memories and experiences of the teaching and learning that took place in the prisons. They range from the tutor who described the security risk of the holly leaves brought in for a science experiment, to reflections on teaching conditions, pedagogy and reflective practice.

A Psychology tutor noticed the normality of the issues students faced, while a Politics tutor remembered his students coming back to him with questions from the tutorial they had in turn held with other prisoners on their Wing. John Allen, a member of a Geography course team, describes being given a political lecture in a Republican Wing of the H Blocks before he could hold his tutorial:

It completely threw me, because nothing had ever happened like that from previous prison experience and that was obviously the difference between, in their head, a political prisoner and just a criminal prisoner, as it were.

John Allen

In the first audio clip on this page Joanna McMinn reflects on teaching Women's Studies to male prisoners in the H Blocks.

Many OU prison students graduated in prison or after their release, and OU graduation ceremonies in prisons were a source of genuine pride and sense of achievement for students, their families and tutors alike. Mathematics tutor Maurice Kennedy remembered:

Graduation ceremonies were held within the prison and the prisoners' families and friends were invited in and we had several of these ceremonies and I often felt they were grand little ceremonies. It was a highlight to see that finally after years of teaching, they were coming out with degrees.

Maurice Kennedy

In the second clip on this page Margaret Gray, a Prison Education Teacher who liaised with The Open University, describes a quite different graduation day story.