"What Is It that these People Want? Are We Part of Some Kind of Experiment?": Mentoring in a Women's Prison

Summary: Utilizing a "layered" account that overlies personal experience with feminist, sociological, and pedagogical theory, this article explores the material reality of student mentors assisting in college-level courses offered in a prison site to incarcerated women. The authors present analyses of their developing understandings of theory-in-action as they engaged in symbolic interactions within the carceral environment. The authors offer reflective representations of their experiences mentoring incarcerated women and they explicate a variety of epistemological positions. The article draws attention to structural boundaries and barriers, both physical and emotional; to the construction and maintenance of "safe" classroom space; and to mirror reflections, that is, to seeing self in the "other."