For a research project in one of her courses last semester, Cornell University graduate student Vera Palmer drove a total of 1,000 miles on 10 Friday evenings to lead a workshop on Native American literature and culture for inmates at Auburn State Prison.

But Palmer prefers that you don't call it fieldwork. Instead, suggests this student of English and Native American studies, call it "cultural engagement," as does Ben Olgu’n, her professor for "Writing Resistance: Minority and Third World Prisoner Discourse." He taught the graduate seminar (open to some undergraduates) this past fall for the first time through the Department of English and the Latino Studies Program.

Students in the course read 14 primary texts, including prisoner testimonials, and dozens of theoretical articles on penology. Like America's prison population, Olgu’n said, the majority of the authors of these texts are African American and Latino.

Olgu’n said the course has three primary goals: "to promote rigorous intellectual inquiry in the field of cultural studies; to foster critical understanding of the ethical responsibilities of intellectual work; and to bridge the town-gown divide by offering socially responsible community services that enrich students and instructors alike."

For their research projects, students have the option of designing and directing workshops for minority and/or women prisoners at one of four area prisons and juvenile detention centers. Working in small groups, they design all aspects of the workshops themselves, from teaching techniques to reading materials. By introducing young, incarcerated African-American women to books like Coffee Will Make You Black or Native American prisoners to poets like Sherman Alexie, students hope to provide positive role models that will reinforce prisoners' sense of cultural identity and ethnic pride.

"The selection of these texts is crucial," Olgu’n said, "especially in the prison context, where an author's testimonial authority gains relevance only if he or she can convince the reader that the author, too, has 'been there.'"

Last fall's workshop topics included young women's literature, at the Lansing Residential Center for Young Women; manhood and responsibility, at the Louis Gossett Jr. Center for Young Men; Latino expressive arts, at the Cayuga Correctional Facility; and Native American life and culture, at the Auburn State Prison.

For Palmer, a Tuscarora Indian who led the Auburn workshops with Sean Teuton, an English graduate student and Cherokee, the intertwining of theory and practice in "Writing Resistance" is both its beauty and its bane.

"It has always been very important to me to be able to combine my intellectual interests with my commitment to my own community," Palmer said. "This course integrates these two goals. But I am also greatly concerned that I not make an intellectual 'commodity' of my brothers, that I not turn their stories into an intellectual 'product.' I feel I'm walking two roads, being simultaneously accountable to the academy and to my community."

Olgu’n, a Chicano who joined the Cornell faculty in 1991 partly in response to the unrest then occurring within Cornell's own Latino community, said the seminar reflects his educational philosophy: "Instructors are learning as much from their students as they are from us, and I truly believe that the overall educational experience is enhanced when our students are actively involved in conducting the seminar."

He acknowledged that the seminar is not for everyone. "It involves a lot of internal strength, honesty and sense of social responsibility to work in what are sometimes extremely tense situations. For most students, the prison work is unlike any pedagogical experience they have ever encountered," he said.

For example, each time Palmer and Teuton entered the Auburn prison they went through an intensive security check, with guards sifting through their belongings and checking for contraband.

Cherene Sherrard, a graduate student of English, found it especially difficult to watch teen-age girls marching in unison and being restrained at the Lansing women's center. But she and her classmates said such experiences were more than offset by the rewards of reaching the incarcerated men and women with whom they worked.

"One student said this was the first time she had ever thought about writing a poem to express her feelings, and that doing so had been really helpful for her," Sherrard said. "That was a highlight."

Such moments have prompted Sherrard and several other students to continue their workshops (pending funding) throughout the current semester, even though the seminar has officially ended.

"We can begin making a difference in society by first making a difference in the way we, as educators, approach our work," Olgu’n said. "And we can begin doing this by bridging that great divide between the academy and the masses of people who are denied access to it because of structural conditions outside their control.

"The old dichotomy of activism versus scholarship simply does not hold in this class."