Astray-Caneda et al. (2011) believe that social learning needs to be included in programmes so that inmates can better understand the consequences of their actions, thereby reducing recidivism rates. Despite the DCS (2019) acknowledging that education is the:

and reduce the high recidivism rates in South African prisons, we were curious to explore these different cultures, histories, and contexts with educators of inmates. Hence, two social learning frameworks underpinned this study: Vygotsky’s (1978) socio-cultural perspective of learning, and Bandura’s (1977) theory of self-efficacy.

Vygotsksy’s (1978:57) well-known concept of the More Knowledgeable Other (MKO) and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in his socio-cultural theory refer to learning that occurs as we close the gap between what we know and what we still need to know. As the MKOs in the literacy field, we aimed to create a dynamic interaction between ourselves and the educators to effect the gradual learning of the new strategies that could be used to improve the teaching of reading for meaning for inmates. We created a safe social environment and, through guided instruction and modelling of each of the teaching strategies, intentionally being aware of working within their ZPD, the new strategies were shared. Collaborative learning opportunities were created for this new knowledge to be co-constructed among the participants, shared, and critiqued. During the debriefing sessions, the educators discussed how they independently understood these strategies and whether they were appropriate to use with the inmates in their classrooms.

Within social learning theory, Bandura (1977, 1986) defines self-efficacy as one of the most important elements which allows for judgements of one’s own capabilities and belief in one’s ability to execute courses of action until the desired performances are attained. As stated by Bandura (1986:186), ‘Unless people believe they can produce desired effects by their actions, they have little incentive to act’. Bandura’s (1977) theory suggests that people learn from each other by observing, imitating and modelling in a social context. Throughout the intervention, the strategies were modelled and then educators had the opportunity to develop lessons using the various strategies. During this process the presenters served as the MKOs, providing guidance to scaffold the learning (Vygotsky 1978). This augured well for the efficacy expectations of ‘performance accomplishment’ and ‘vicarious experience’, where there was substantial exposure to the strategies, modelling of the strategies, and the experience of self-instructed performance using said strategies (Bandura 1977). Bandura (1977:196) argues that ‘participant modelling provides additional opportunities for translating behavioural conceptions to appropriate actions and for making corrective refinements toward the perfection of skills’. Bandura (1977) further contends that seeing others perform a skill that generates good results will intensify the need for those seeking efficacy to persist in their efforts to attain success. This creation of personal agency contributes to the beliefs of personal efficacy. If people believe they can produce the desired effects, they build incentives to continue growing.

Warr (2016:23) states, ‘It was the joy of learning, of expanding one’s parameters beyond the stultification and psychological decortication that typically marks the prison experience’. Enrolling in classes while in prison allows prisoners to participate ‘in a discourse that produces them as scholars not inmates, learners instead of threats, people instead of numbers, which may contribute to good prison discipline’ (Key & May 2019:15). Placing prisoners in educational environments, with the provision of libraries, enables them to develop positive productive attitudes where their identities as students can be formed, instead of leaning on the negativity related to criminality (Clark 2016). Warr (2016) suggests that the benefits are also viewed to be based on opportunities to create informal, conversational, and critical discourses which would impact the development of prisoners on all levels: personal, emotional and cognitive. This supports Adams’ (2021) claim that during classes, students are given:

While education is regarded as an important tool for the rehabilitation process and reduces recidivism rates (Hall 2015), it was found that prisoners are not performing as expected within prison schools. In South Africa, at least 80% of prisoners do not complete Matric, and recidivism rates range between 80% and 90% (Louw & Magoro 2010). Stamp (2020) suggests that one of the reasons for students’ low levels of education is the issue of language. Maguddayao and Rosario (2019) agree that language becomes an issue, since learners must learn using their second or third language, which results in a breakdown in their learning. Added to this is the current curriculum that, according to Maguddayao and Rosario (2019), is not based on the diverse learner needs, which poses a barrier. Warr (2016) states that pedagogical practices used should be innovative and should develop critical thinking skills which, according to Clark (2016), would teach prisoners to challenge their own assumptions and think about solving problems. They should also be equipped with knowledge and skills that will render them employable when they are released, which would steer them away from re-offending.

The development of reading skills is imperative since it strengthens cognitive skills and lays the foundation for academic success. This fundamental skill supports language development by enhancing vocabulary, sentence structure, language patterns, and comprehension skills. In prisons, reading has the potential to transform lives, yet for prisoners, being specifically literate holds the potential for (Krolak 2019):

Reading in prison can be used as a powerful tool, creating a calming environment leading to increased productivity, improved knowledge and life skills and social integration opportunities (Opesanwo & Awofeso 2024).

For prisoner learners, developing literacy skills has greater value in the actual engagement in learning than the achievement of the qualifications. Only 50% of prisoner learners achieve the initial levels of literacy which, in South Africa, are Adult Basic Level One and Two, as compared to 85% in the population outside of prison, creating a challenge for prisoners leaving prison regarding employment opportunities (Creese 2016). These low literacy skills and the lack of the development of life skills have been found to directly increase recidivism rates. The South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (2017) provided the following statistics as justification: for prisoner learners, the one-year re-offending rate is 34% as opposed to 43% for those who did not participate in education opportunities during their sentences (Skipper 2023).

As part of a much bigger campaign to re-socialise prisoners through the promotion of reading, a new law, constituted in Brazil in 2012, gave prisoners the opportunity to engage in reading with the aim of reducing their sentences. Prisoners were granted 1 day off their sentences for every 12 h block of reading, to a maximum of 48 h remission. The new law aimed to create prospects for re-socialisation, sharing information, developing more critical thinking and guiding them; the prisoners became more independent once they were released (Krolak 2019).

Another reading programme, referred to by Skipper (2023), involves mothers who were incarcerated. The mothers were allowed to read books with and to their children through live video chats. The books were then posted to the children so that they could continue to read along after the reading sessions.

The creation of many prison libraries has been a means to provide a window to the world for prisoners whose physical space is already limited. Prisoners experience autonomy and are encouraged to take responsibility since they are free to choose the books they would like to read (Krolak 2019). He further states that reading initiatives in prisons boost self-esteem and self-awareness. This gives them the confidence to share what they think and what they feel and respect the perspectives and views of others.

Teaching in correctional institutions is very different to teaching in traditional classrooms. Educators of prisoners perceive themselves as different from traditional educators and often experience feelings of exclusion from other educators teaching in adult education (Bhatti 2010). As educators of prisoners do not receive special training for this job, they depend on their training and experience in traditional teaching and try to adapt it to the prison environment (Patrie 2017). They enter this environment with their experience and pedagogical approaches used to teach learners in mainstream schools, which do not fit in with the prison culture (Lukacova et al. 2018). Educators in prisons have voiced their needs, ‘I need new skills to help me teach such a diverse group in such a different place’ (Patrie 2017:18). The need, therefore, for professional development of educators of prisoners, is necessary to guide them on how to teach, what to teach and to be able to adapt to the different environment (Lukacova et al. 2018; Patrie 2017).

The DCS has the responsibility to ensure that mechanisms are put in place for teacher professional development. Educators, especially those newly qualified, need to be motivated, nurtured, and stimulated so that they can reach their full potential as educators for purposes of enhancing learning. However, Stamp (2020) states that in her study where she interviewed teachers of prisoners, they acknowledged that they lacked the experience to manage and deliver education in prisons. While professional training was available, very often it did not meet the needs of the educators. They should be given the freedom to create exciting ways that are aligned with the interests, experiences and knowledge of the learners in their classes with the hope of pursuing enjoyable learning experiences for all involved, and advance prisoners’ personal growth.

Rao et al. (2007) revealed that the assumption that skilled readers use reading strategies is truer for bilingual primary school students. They realised that successful learners exploited deep-level processing strategies such as inference, prediction, and reconstruction, while less successful students used surface-level processing strategies such as paraphrasing, re-reading, and questioning. They also suggested that educators should include deep-level reading strategies into their reading instruction.

Olifant et al. (2020) suggest that when various strategies are used to support learners with the development of comprehension skills, learners are helped to overcome language difficulties. Khalifa, Ahmed and Ismael (2020) agree, and add that the use of the strategies will improve learners’ reading and simultaneously will increase confidence in their reading. The following strategies are discussed further: anticipation guides, my turn, your turn, think aloud, philosophy for children (P4C), and the feature matrix.

The anticipation guide is a strategy used to activate learning by tapping into learners’ previous knowledge and challenging their existing world views, perspectives and assumptions. This is done by using a set of statements about a particular topic which learners are expected to evaluate by agreeing or disagreeing with the statements or rendering them true or false (Evans, Kodela & Khan 2022). Defrioka (2017) suggests that anticipation guides set a purpose for reading. This strategy encourages the skill of prediction and critical thinking, creating an awareness of how learner thinking changes, leading to improved comprehension of reading texts.

In the My Turn, Your Turn, and Think Aloud strategies, the facilitators focused on modelling the thinking process during reading. Teachers verbally share their thinking patterns while reading a text. Learners experience educators opening their minds, sharing their thoughts as they read, increasing awareness of comprehension processes (Sönmez & Sulak 2018). Skills developed through these strategies include ‘predicting, clarifying, paraphrasing and summarising, making connections inferring and creating questions’ (Tiba 2023).

Philosophy for children is a strategy that promotes a learner-centred approach, which encourages critical and creative thinking and improves reasoning and reading for meaning (Ab Wahab, Zulkifli & Abdul Razak 2022). Educators provide a stimulus to get learners to ask philosophical questions, and they further participate in the philosophical enquiry around the question. Lipman (2003) was convinced that through the P4C strategy, learners would learn to ‘reflect on their thinking, identify weaknesses and solve problems’ thus improving their reading for meaning (Jon 2024:4).

A feature matrix is a type of graphic organiser used to activate learners’ background knowledge. Teoh et al. (2014:1) suggest that how learners ‘process and handle information’ determines their learning. The educator provides informational texts to learners, and they use the matrix to organise the information. They then proceed to process the information in the texts by comparing, finding similarities and differences and in this way become more familiar with texts, allowing for deeper understanding of the information (Fatyela et al. 2021).

Fifty-eight educators volunteered to attend this five-day R4M workshop from 13 to 17 March 2023. These educators taught in 16 of the 42 correctional centres in 9 of the 29 management areas of the Western Cape. For ethical reasons, we withhold the names of the correctional centres. The educators taught in a variety of youth centres, medium-security and maximum-security centres, and taught offenders of a variety of ages, including child offenders (less than 18-years-old, making up 2% of the inmates), juvenile offenders (18–20-years-old, making up 2% of the inmates) and adult offenders (over 21-years-old, making up 97.4% of the offender population) (DCS 2019:69). The participants had all received formal teacher training degrees in the Foundation Phase, Intermediate Phase, Senior Phase, and Further Education and Training sectors, yet none of them had experienced teaching in a prison until they accepted these posts.

Our five-day workshop was held in the Drakenstein Correctional Centre in Wellington. On 09 December 1988, this prison, formerly known as Victor Vester Prison, became well known, as former President Nelson Mandela was transferred to this low-security farm prison after being in a maximum-security prison on Robben Island. He lived in a private house on the grounds of the prison, which has subsequently been declared a South African National Heritage Site. It was here that he spent his final days campaigning against apartheid. There is a large statue of President Nelson Mandela just outside the gates of this prison. He served another 14 months here until his release on 11 February 1990.

This facility offered us a large hall, where 10 round tables were set out with six chairs around each table. We were offered tea or coffee and a muffin on arrival, mid-morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea or coffee, served by the same two inmates wearing orange uniforms. Unfortunately, that week we experienced load shedding, which Erero (2023) explains as ‘[…] living without electricity for several hours or days’. Hence, although we arrived at 8:00 each morning, the groups collaboratively wrote and illustrated their own reading books until 10:00.

Having familiarised ourselves with the DCS (2019) policy document of the different educational needs of offenders, we intentionally planned the five-day Intermediate Phase workshop to introduce the educators to nine reading comprehension strategies (Anticipation Guides; Philosophy for Children; Think Aloud; My Turn, Your Turn; KWLS – What I know, What I want to learn, What I have learned and What I still want to learn; Feature Matrix; Cloze; Readers Theatre; Every Pupil Response) and three literacy activities: teaching inference, vocabulary activities, and graphic organisers. As hosts, we drew on these literacy strategies and activities to role model, scaffold, explicitly teach, and facilitate these strategies using PowerPoint presentations, texts, videos, and group discussions, always allowing enough time for practice. We ended our lessons reflecting on our practices.

The DCS (2019) states that prisons should:

Hence, our aim was to introduce the nine literacy comprehension strategies and three activities to the educators to agitate their curiosity, to collaboratively learn to interpret and integrate information, and to challenge their prior knowledge. They were encouraged to ask higher-order questions such as predicting, making connections, clarifying, inferring, and summarising information (Evans et al. 2022). Phillips (2023) reported that the benefits of using these strategies is that during reading, educators are encouraged to listen, develop active thinking, and engage in discussions, thereby improving their speaking and writing skills. During this process, educators were exposed to new vocabulary, which we believed would assist them to better understand their worlds and navigate their lives, assisting them in making informed choices.

We used a pre- and post-workshop questionnaire as our data collection tool for this small research project. At the start of the five-day IP, we invited all educators to complete a Google Docs form with 11 open-ended questions, where they were asked to quantitatively self-evaluate their level of confidence and ability related to the concepts that would be covered during the IP: (1) indicated they knew nothing of this topic; (2) they knew of this topic, but did not know how to use it; (3) they knew of this topic and had some confidence in their abilities in this area; and finally, (4) they had excellent knowledge and skill in this area and felt confident in sharing it with others. To our surprise, we realised the educators were not familiar with using this online platform, and the internet connection was poor because of load shedding. We printed out hard copies for all the educators to complete, which they did on the second day of the workshop. The advantage of using this open-ended quantitative questionnaire was that the educators could freely express themselves and it was anonymous. The results of the pre-workshop questionnaires indicated that many of the educators had never heard of these strategies/activities and highlighted only 1s. At the end of the programme, they were asked to re-evaluate.

On the last day of the workshop, there was the end-of-project data collection. A similar post-workshop, open-ended quantitative questionnaire, was printed, where they were asked to re-evaluate their reflections on their new knowledge and confidence of the nine strategies and three activities strategies. Additionally there were four qualitative questions, where they were asked to reflect on their experiences and how the workshop may have changed their pedagogical approaches: the strengths and the challenges of the R4M literacy workshop, how they felt the workshop could be improved, what they thought of the way the workshop was presented, and in what ways this workshop influenced their own teaching. We received 44 completed post-workshop questionnaires, which is a return rate of 75%. The educators circled 3s (I know about this topic and have some confidence in my abilities in this area) and 4s (I have excellent knowledge and skill in this area and feel confident in sharing it with others).

We began reading and rereading the 44 hand-written post-workshop questionnaires. After using a manual coding system, patterns and some regularities began to emerge from the data, which we categorised into more meaningful units (Henning, Van Rensburg & Smit 2004). We further refined the categories into themes, so that we could begin to formulate tentative answers to our research question, ‘What were the reflections of the educators of inmates after a five-day Reading-for-Meaning workshop?’ (Bertram & Christiansen 2014).

Since this R4M literacy project was part of a larger National Research Foundation funded project, we received ethical approval from our University of Technology’s Education Faculty on 28 August 2019, giving us permission to collect data up to December 2023. The ethical clearance number is EFEC 2-8/2019. Early on the first day of the workshop, we explained the purpose of the research project, informing the participants that they could withdraw from the research at any time and that we would anonymise their data by not using their names, thereby protecting their identities. All participants agreed and signed the consent forms.

Twelve literacy pedagogical strategies and activities to enhance inmates’ R4M and critical thinking skills were taught to this group of 58 educators. These educators were given the opportunity to engage with each strategy in collaboration with their colleagues creating a safe and brave space within which to work (Trowell 2024). In attempting to answer our research question, ‘What were the reflections of the educators of inmates after the five-day Reading-for-Meaning workshop?’, and after inductively and deductively analysing the data, four themes emerged: gaining new knowledge and skills; elevated confidence levels; making mind shifts; and transformed thinking about changed teaching approaches.