For the Reckord | Coard used the performing arts to teach Grenadian inmates - Pt II

Imprisoned for 26 years for his role in the 1979 coup d'etat in Grenada, Bernard Coard, author of How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System, spent most of his time organising an education programme for inmates and teaching himself.

"The programme went from prisoners learning to read and write to getting master's degrees and everything in-between," explained Coard. Specifically, it included school-leaving courses in five or six subjects, including maths and English, 13 Cambridge O level and CXC subjects, A Level subjects, and bachelor's degree subjects for London University's external exams.

The programme also included non-academic subjects, and Coard said that he devised and for 11 years ran a programme called How to Set up And Run Your Own Small Business. He wrote a book to capture all the lectures, and his Jamaican wife, Phyllis, who was also incarcerated, wrote a version in simpler language for those at a lower academic level.

BUSINESS OPERATIONS

Coard explained, "At the end of the 11 years, we had about 200 prisoners who had been taught the business course. About 150 of them set up small businesses when they got out - small shops, [rearing] chickens, pig farms, farms with cash crops, operating buses and trucks. Many of the businesses are still running, and the education programme still runs in the prisons, nine years later."

Coard said that because there were no trained teachers, he organised an each-one-teach-one pyramid structure. "I primarily taught those who were sitting exams for university degrees, and they taught those doing A Level. The A Level students taught those doing O Levels, and the O Level students taught those on the school leaving certificate programme. They, in turn, taught those learning to read and write."

He emphasised that helping with the inmates' character development was as important to him as the academic programme, and in weekly 45-minute meetings with his teacher-students, he stressed the importance of improving self-esteem. For example, he showed them how their prison experience could be used positively - to write interesting essays for overseas examiners, for one. Coard would tell that examiners in Cambridge would be excited by essays that started like this: "The handcuffs were cold as they snapped on my wrists behind my back. The cell door slammed in my face. I shivered and cried."

Additionally, he highlighted the difference between failing 100 times and being a failure, showing the importance of teacher expectation to students' success, and taught the 'salami tactic' of breaking down a complex subject into small, simple concepts and teaching them one by one.

He also said that lively cultural, sporting and religious programmes were established in which many inmates wrote their own lyrics and composed their own music. Musicians from outside taught prisoners how to play the guitar and keyboard and how to read and write music.

PRISON HALL CONCERTS

Concerts involving inmates singing their own gospel songs and plays filled with humour were staged two or three times per year. Members of the public came to see them in the prison hall, which held more than 300 persons, and the plays were frequently televised on Grenadian television.

"They were on different subjects - corporal punishment, the judicial system, marriage and relationships. They were funny, and at the same time each carried a moral message. They were written and performed by inmates, though prison officers took part on a few occasions," Coard said.

He said that the prison education programme will be the focus of one of the books he is now writing on the period of the Grenada Revolution. Copies of the first in the series, published last year, The Grenada Revolution: What Really Happened, are available in the University Bookshop at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

entertainment@gleaner.com