30 with the VC | Dr Fairleigh Gilmour

[00:00:00] Grant Robertson
Kia ora, I'm Grant Robertson, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Otago - Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. Welcome to 30 with the VC, a series where we talk with the amazing kaimahi at the University of Otago about their research, about their teaching, and about their service in the community. Today's guest is Dr Fairleigh Gilmour. Kia ora, Fairleigh.

[00:00:20] Fairleigh Gilmour
Kia ora, Grant.

[00:00:21] Grant Robertson
Fairleigh is a senior lecturer in criminology and gender studies. Your research areas, according to the blurb, is in sex work governance, gender and class and media representation of crime, and prison education. It's fantastic to have you here. As part of this series, we invite our guests to bring in an object to help describe their work and what we're going to talk about today. Fairleigh has two objects. Would you like to introduce them to us?

[00:00:46] Fairleigh Gilmour
I would love to introduce them. So, when you asked me to bring in a prop, I was actually a bit unsure what to bring in, because the area of research I wanted to talk about today is the prison education aspect. And part of teaching in a prison is you tend to not bring almost anything in, and you don't take almost anything out. But one of the few things that we do bring in sometimes is things like our coloured markers to make posters, is what we were doing. And I brought in some excerpts from an exercise we did. So, this was part of the Inside-Out teaching that we do, which is when we bring a group of campus students into the prison, and they learn with incarcerated students, and they do a for-credit course. So, this happens, it was developed about 25 years ago, a bit more, in the US. And this is the first time it's been done in Aotearoa New Zealand. And as part of the exercise they did, I asked people to develop a political party to try and address some of the issues in Aotearoa New Zealand.

[00:01:50] Fairleigh Gilmour
And these are some of the examples of the political parties they wanted to do.

[00:01:54] Grant Robertson
Oh, that is so good.

[00:01:55] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yes.

[00:01:56] Grant Robertson
Amazing. That's such an interesting point that I think I hadn't really even thought about, where you're going into a prison to teach, to help people learn, but there's huge restrictions about what's available to prisoners. How have you navigated that? You just, I guess, have to adapt to what you can bring in.

[00:02:16] Fairleigh Gilmour
We have to adapt to what we can bring in, and sometimes that is quite challenging. We do have support here from the library who help us with resources, but there's really restricted access to technology. So, that's one of the things that my research at the moment is looking at. It's developing learning resources that could be on laptops not connected to the internet, and that could be used by our incarcerated students.

[00:02:45] Grant Robertson
Because just for people who don't know, prisoners don't have access to the internet on a regular basis.

[00:02:49] Fairleigh Gilmour
No. Particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand, no access to the internet. Some people have some access to a computer, but it's an offline computer.

[00:02:57] Grant Robertson
Yeah.

[00:02:58] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yeah.

[00:02:58] Grant Robertson
Let's go back to the beginning.

[00:03:00] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yes.

[00:03:00] Grant Robertson
How did you, as a person teaching in criminology, decide, I want to go inside the wire? Where did that come from?

[00:03:11] Fairleigh Gilmour
So, when I first started engaging with Otago Corrections Facility, it was because I remembered I was teaching about prison sentences and prisons in Aotearoa New Zealand to my very big first year criminology class. And people had very strong opinions about what prison sentences should look like and how they should be experienced. And I checked, I was like, who's ever been to one? As a visitor, on a field trip, anything? And almost no one in the class had. And I thought, maybe there's some ways, particularly for a criminology class, people who want to work in this field, to have some experience. So, my first engagement with the prison closest to us was actually bringing in a group of student volunteers to run art classes and creative writing classes. So, it was while I was doing that and I was meeting the education tutors, talking to people at the prison, that one of them suggested to me, maybe some of the guys in here could do one of your classes.

[00:04:16] Fairleigh Gilmour
And I was like, what a great idea. Let me see if I can make that happen. So, for a few couple years, it was just, I was the first lecturer in Aotearoa New Zealand to teach at a university level inside the wire. And so, the guys would get the recording of the lecture, but then I would go in and run the tutorials with them. So, that's how that started.

[00:04:40] Grant Robertson
It's amazing. And that's a really amazing connection between teaching a 100-level paper that then takes you to this whole other area of research and teaching as well. It's like it's the sort of the ultimate kind of research and teaching interface in a way, isn't it? It's fantastic that that's what led you there.

[00:05:01] Fairleigh Gilmour
Absolutely. So, my teaching definitely took me to this area of research.

[00:05:04] Grant Robertson
Yeah, so good. I'm interested in what you say about the views of those students, as you know, and as I've written about my father spent time in prison and one of the things that I kind of crystallised in my mind was that for a lot of New Zealanders, they don't see being sent to prison as the punishment. They think people are being sent for punishment.

[00:05:27] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yes.

[00:05:28] Grant Robertson
And so, actually, their experience, the prisoner's experience, why they're there, should somehow or other be a punishing experience. What you're doing is running really counter to that. It's saying these people have, their liberty's been taken away from them, their freedom's been taken away from them. That is the punishment. But while they're there, we're looking for something else, something more. How do you see that? I mean, I've read you talk about education as a right and that not being taken away. How do you see the experience of those prisoners?

[00:06:03] Fairleigh Gilmour
I think that perhaps there's sometimes an underestimation of the extent to which being away from your whānau and community for important parts of their lives, not getting to see your children grow up, not being there when people pass away or are unwell, that to me is the punishment. And it's a very significant punishment. And particularly in long sentences, people are not going to have a youth outside of prison. It will be spent entirely in prison. So I believe very strongly that that is the punishment and that while people are inside, they should be able to have paths or opportunities to apply themselves to something meaningful.

[00:07:02] Fairleigh Gilmour
So that when they do leave, they can make a really positive contribution to their whānau and to their communities.

[00:07:07] Grant Robertson
Yeah, and that's the thing, most people, almost everybody who goes into prison will get out. And the point at which they do, it's not only in their interests that there's been some form of education, some connection to society, but also the rest of society's interests are well served by these sorts of programmes, I would have thought.

[00:07:30] Fairleigh Gilmour
Absolutely. And it's been shown very clearly, particularly in the US, where there is a lot of higher education in prisons, that it significantly reduces re-offending. And people are going to leave prisons and be someone's neighbour, someone's community member. It's really important that they have opportunities to have really productive lives.

[00:07:53] Grant Robertson
Yeah, exactly. So for those who are thinking about, well, how does this actually work? Could you run us through, literally, how it works to deliver a course in a prison? Like, what do you go through? How does the teaching operate? How does communications operate? How does it work?

[00:08:10] Fairleigh Gilmour
Sure. So the way we do it is that the guys inside get a recorded version of our lectures. But then we go inside to deliver interactive tutorials. The process to get inside, we do do safety inductions, all of those sorts of things, which is really important when you're going onto a corrections site. And then we go in and there's a programmes building where education is done and we teach in that space. We work quite closely with the education tutors. So there are people on site whose work is to help provide and facilitate educational opportunities. So they're a great support to the work that we do and particularly the education tutors at OCF are really supportive in allowing this to happen. There's also a few things that people might not think about, like we have to make course outlines that work in that space.

[00:09:11] Fairleigh Gilmour
People can't access the same student services, so all that information is removed. People can't access our learning management system, so updates have to be communicated in alternate formats. And assessment can't require the level of independent research that people do on the outside. So there is a bit of admin in making this all work.

[00:09:34] Grant Robertson
But it's not just admin, is it? It's also a quite thoughtful process about pedagogy in a different setting. How did that work for you? I mean, that's very different from teaching a 100-level class in Castle One to going out to there. Pedagogically, that's quite a big shift.

[00:09:52] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yeah, I do think in some ways perhaps it's not so hard to adapt what I do because in my CRIM 101 class I'm very focused on a problem-solving pedagogy. So I'll teach, when you're teaching CRIM 101, you're teaching theories from, you know, almost 100 years ago, more than 100 years ago, but I don't think that's purposeful unless people can apply them to today. So my classes involve, my tutorials already involve, so these theories that you've heard talked about discuss how they're meaningful in terms of contemporary issues in Aotearoa New Zealand. Let's unpack this idea, this media report through them. So they're very discussion-based and they already draw from people's, what they know about, from the media, from their own experience, from their parents' perceptions. And I'm already encouraging that kind of dialogue and discussion.

[00:10:45] Grant Robertson
Yeah, not too different.

[00:10:47] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yeah, I think it's easier in some ways because that's already a focus where that kind of lived experience or existing perspectives and having a dialogue about it and learning to dialogue well about it was already key to how we teach.

[00:11:00] Grant Robertson
Are the prisoners good participants in tutorials? Do they, do they, are they keen to discuss? Because, you know, some 100-level tutorials, sometimes a bit hard to drag things out of people, possibly not in criminology, but yeah, do they engage in the tutorials well?

[00:11:17] Fairleigh Gilmour
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Often it actually keeps me on my toes a bit because people do the readings so carefully that they'll call me on something, on page three it says this. I'm like, I haven't read that one for a couple of years. Oh, you're right. So I'm very engaged and very keen to participate.

[00:11:37] Grant Robertson
Yeah, that's brilliant. This is a hard question because I think it would really best be answered if there was someone from the programme here to answer it, but you're here. What does it mean to the prisoners? And it'll be an individual experience, obviously, but can you characterise what it means to the prisoners to have this opportunity and to learn in this way?

[00:12:03] Fairleigh Gilmour
One of the reasons that I really liked this political party exercise is every single group working separately, developing their own political party, all of them developed policies that were primarily about making Aotearoa better for young people, whether that's through one group wanted community gardens and excellent free school lunches, one group wanted more things for young Māori people, one was really focused on having more artistic and creative and, you know, kind of really pro-social things for young people to do in their community. And something that comes up so much through people engaging with these courses and studying is having usually gone through difficult life experiences themselves, what they would like is to make the world better for other young men, in particular, going through those difficult experiences.

[00:13:00] Fairleigh Gilmour
And partly through studying things like sociology, criminology, they can think of ways and tools with which to do that. So a lot of people start seeing themselves very differently rather than all of their past experiences being overwhelmingly negative. They're like, I can draw from this to hopefully work with community or with a specific service or even in policy one day to make my world a better place. And for other people, they tend to be very kind of other-focused in what they would like to do. And I think that that's really inspiring for people to be able to see what is sometimes a past where they have both been harmed a lot and then harmed other people, but then find a way to move forward into what is trying to make Aotearoa a better place, and particularly for young people. So I think it can change their whole perception of their past and self.

[00:13:52] Grant Robertson
Which is brilliant, isn't it? So we didn't cover this at the beginning, but it's primarily sociology and criminology that you've been teaching?

[00:14:00] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yes, and social work. So Shane Walker, for several years it was just me and Shane, just two papers going out. So social work has also been taught. And the main reason that social work was introduced is, like I said, people really want to help people. And when I was talking to the man I was teaching, I'm like, what else would you really like to learn? They said social work. So I asked my colleague, Shane, and he said, of course. So, yeah.

[00:14:26] Grant Robertson
And that's, I mean, you've only been doing this for a little while. I'll ask the classic academic question, but evaluation, you know, how are you thinking about how you would evaluate the success of the programme?

[00:14:42] Fairleigh Gilmour
Some forms of evaluation are challenging in this space, in the sense that for good reason people in a prison setting are a relatively vulnerable population. And I also actually think it's important that people going into a prison don't, like, they're my students.

[00:15:01] Grant Robertson
Yes.

[00:15:02] Fairleigh Gilmour
And criminalised people are often over, not under-researched. So, not really wanting to research them. But also, we do evaluate how things are going for their students. So, one of the things about running the full credit classes, like actual classes, is they do standard student evaluations.

[00:15:21] Grant Robertson
Right.

[00:15:22] Fairleigh Gilmour
Which have been, like, uniformly positive. And we also did, a couple of years ago, ask people to write in anonymously across the motu about what higher education in prison meant for them. And that was both people studying with us in person and people studying with Massey by distance. And, again, was overwhelmingly positive. We are doing some work at the moment to develop those learning resources. How we're, at the moment, looking to improve and develop those is working with formerly incarcerated students. So, developing them and then having our formerly incarcerated students trial them, give feedback and develop them. Hopefully, at some point, we'll also get to use them in the prison setting and hear how that goes as well. But we're, yeah, at the development stage at the moment.

[00:16:14] Grant Robertson
That's pretty cool. I mean, yeah, I didn't really mean it in terms of the prisoners themselves. It's more, in a way, I guess another way of saying the same question is, what's Fairleigh Gilmour learned in this process?

[00:16:27] Fairleigh Gilmour
One of the things that's been kind of exciting but also needs a lot of developing is, so, I am a trained Inside-Out facilitator. So, I did that training through the US. And then I've also gone over and worked alongside people doing the Learning Together approach, which is, again, campus and incarcerated students in Ireland, and helped facilitate Inside-Out in England. And I've also done additional training for prison teaching over in the US. And there is so much information about how to adopt a good pedagogy in these spaces, but it's not Aotearoa New Zealand specific. So, one of the things that we've been really looking at and trying to learn is to how to make these excellent approaches appropriate for this setting, which is different. There's a few aspects that are different, particularly that we're a bicultural society.

[00:17:25] Grant Robertson
Yeah.

[00:17:26] Fairleigh Gilmour
A lot of the Inside-Out resources, they're designed in the US, and they're designed really well to address issues around race and privilege, but they use a language which is US-specific and doesn't actually translate here. Another thing, which I think this is a good thing, is that we don't have many people in New Zealand who won't be released from prison.

[00:17:47] Grant Robertson
Prison, yeah.

[00:17:48] Fairleigh Gilmour
But in the US, the lifer organisations do tend to provide a lot of guidance and mentorship as to how these approaches can develop in a prison because they're in for such a long time. I think it's good that we're not holding people in prison for, you know, 30, 40 years. That's a good thing. But it does mean that there is not that ability to have that same leadership. Having said that, the Global Freedom Scholars Network has started developing here in Aotearoa New Zealan, and that's for people who have previously been incarcerated to help mentor and support people who are currently incarcerated and studying. So that's quite a recent development here.

[00:18:27] Grant Robertson
Yeah, and that's a fascinating thing because this often happens where resources are developed overseas and there's no te ao Māori lens. Obviously, our prison population is heavily over-represented for Māori as well. Presume you've had Māori students in the programme?

[00:18:44] Fairleigh Gilmour
Yeah, so approximately 70% of our students so far have been Māori because there is a real over-representation.

[00:18:55] Grant Robertson
So, yeah, that's a really interesting contribution to the whole global way of looking at it is how to support Indigenous peoples through this. So, good on you. On the question of the interaction between previously incarcerated and currently incarcerated, is one of the things you're thinking about how people can leave and continue their tertiary education journey? Is that something the students talk about as well? Is it that they'd like to take this when they leave prison?

[00:19:25] Fairleigh Gilmour
Absolutely. And we already have the experience with... Some students have. They have started studying with us and then once they've left, they have continued to study. So... And for some people, they had not even contemplated university study as their future. They do one course with us while inside and that kind of changes their pathway entirely. So sometimes there are challenges to making that happen. People are not always able to be released to a specific area, things like that. But particularly in the space of prison education, different universities seem really keen to work with each other. If we can help someone progress at a different university... I shouldn't say this, Grant, to you.

[00:20:13] Grant Robertson
No, no, without a doubt.

[00:20:13] Fairleigh Gilmour
If we can help them progress at a different university, we do. And we tend to communicate and try and make that easier to move their credits over and so on.

[00:20:20] Grant Robertson
Oh, no, I think that's fantastic collaboration. The funding system makes us think about individual universities, but it's these sorts of outcomes that we all exist to do.

[00:20:30] Fairleigh Gilmour
Absolutely.

[00:20:31] Grant Robertson
Challenges, let's pick that up. So you mentioned there are some challenges for people when they're exiting and coming into a more mainstream setting. Any specific examples of that? And I'm really thinking about this as to what, as universities, could we do better and differently for people who are coming from those settings?

[00:20:50] Fairleigh Gilmour
I think the main thing would be is that currently the University of Otago has an excellent relationship with the Otago Corrections Facility and we communicate really well and support each other in supporting these students. Community corrections and probation do excellent work, but we're not really networked with them. So sometimes when people are coming out of prison and they would like to continue their education pathway, there are sometimes limitations put on them which make it hard and there's not that wraparound communication. So I think what I'd like to see moving forward is for those three groups to help, particularly if someone's coming up to leaving who's been a student, to help make sure they can continue that pathway in a way that's meaningful.

[00:21:34] Grant Robertson
It's one of the classic problems of New Zealand, but no doubt other jurisdictions as well. There's a lot of things that are there for you in prison that evaporate quite quickly when you leave. And it's an irony. Everybody wants their freedom back, but accessing those services when you've left is often actually really challenging because we all know how hard bureaucracy is to navigate and especially hard when you come out of prison. So I think, yeah, that's a good challenge to us to be able to do a bit more about that. What about for you? You've talked a lot about the positives of this. What are some of the challenges you've encountered in trying to roll the programme out?

[00:22:20] Fairleigh Gilmour
Even though I'm actually really excited about the potential that technology could bring if we could increase some of their access to offline databases, this sort of thing, overall the shift to online has made it harder for incarcerated students. So people actually could do a degree about 15 years ago by correspondence. We've actually lost access for some people by moving online. And even now a lot of systems are actually only online at the university. So sometimes I create a fair bit of work for some admin staff who I'm very appreciative of. I'd just like to say that. To actually create offline versions of enrolment forms and all sorts of things. I think sometimes it's something good to keep in mind as we move towards more tech-based. It doesn't always bring everyone with us.

[00:23:16] Fairleigh Gilmour
So that has been a challenge.

[00:23:18] Grant Robertson
Yeah, that's a super interesting one because it sort of mirrors a few other things in society where, like you say, technology rolls on and we all adapt to it in different ways. But we know in society, particularly for older populations, they lose accessibility sometimes. So yeah, I love these sessions. I learn something every single time. That's actually not something I'd really thought about that actually it's almost harder if you, for example, don't have access to the internet to actually be a student today. Wow, super interesting. Fairleigh, where do you see all of this going? Where would you, what's your dream?

[00:23:57] Fairleigh Gilmour
So we were the first university to offer in-person university study, but we're no longer the only, which is so exciting. So there's other universities who we're in conversation with who are using our model and trying to push this forward. And I think that's so wonderful to see people collaborating across different universities to provide more opportunities. I very much hope that there can be a greater development in higher education in Aotearoa New Zealand prisons and that it can be properly evaluated. We actually have a similar prison population to Queensland, where I'm from, and they have ballpark, 600, 700 people in higher education. We probably have about 60, 70. So with the same prison population, they've got about 10 times as many people in higher education.

[00:24:53] Fairleigh Gilmour
Sometimes there's an assumption that the people in prison don't have the capacity. I think Queensland's a good example that Aotearoa is not yet giving people enough opportunities to do that. So I hope that we can develop more of those.

[00:25:10] Grant Robertson
What's Queensland doing that we're not?

[00:25:13] Fairleigh Gilmour
So they've done really well at particularly the University of Southern Queensland, who we work with as we develop our learning resources. They've done really well to develop offline approaches that work and to expand those to as many places as possible. They have had significant government support, which obviously makes these things easier.

[00:25:39] Grant Robertson
Yes.

[00:25:43] Grant Robertson
I just want to, in the last few minutes that we've got, just talk a little bit more broadly about the subject of criminology. So at the University of Otago, we're moving to a major in criminology, which is super exciting. What are the students who are coming along today, what are they saying to you about why they're studying criminology?

[00:26:04] Fairleigh Gilmour
Sure. I think there's so many people these days who study criminology because they want to help people, which is really interesting because I don't think it's always been seen as that profession. I think young people have a real awareness that there are ways that we could be more unified and support each other better as New Zealanders. I think a lot of people are also very interested in the overlap between things like criminology and social work, criminology and sociology and wanting to work in those spaces.

[00:26:40] Grant Robertson
So exciting. So just to give you some props here, when we had the open day at the university in May, I was standing outside St David Lecture Theatre where you were giving the presentation and just the students and the parents coming out so inspired by what was possible and your vision for what it means to learn criminology. So thank you so much for that. I also want to really acknowledge the work that you're doing through Inside-Out and more broadly in prisons. This is a challenging area for people in society as we were talking about at the beginning and it takes courage and bravery and a real determination to do the right thing and allow people to achieve their human rights. So just on behalf of the university, Fairleigh, thank you for the work that you've been doing here. The work you're doing outside the wire is great but the work inside the wire is really inspiring as well. So thanks so much for that.

[00:27:37] Fairleigh Gilmour
Thanks, Grant.

[00:27:38] Grant Robertson
Now, at the end of each of these sessions we give our academics a chance to tell the Vice-Chancellor anything that you want. So you'll have about probably 60 seconds or more just to say anything you want to the Vice-Chancellor.

[00:27:50] Fairleigh Gilmour
I think the main thing I would like to say to you, Grant, is a lot of the time working in this space people have a real hesitation about what might it look if we're seen to not be punishing prisoners enough. How might that seem to people? And one of the things that I've enjoyed so much working at this university and particularly in recent years is how much support there is for seeing students who are otherwise quite excluded primarily as students. And I think that's wonderful and I thank you for that and I would really love to see that continue as we grow these programmes. Kia ora.

[00:28:34] Grant Robertson
Awesome. Thanks, Fairleigh. Thanks for joining us on 30 with the VC. I'm Grant Robertson, the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Otago - Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. We're here to celebrate the amazing work that's done by kaimahi across the university and please join us next time when we talk to another member of our staff here at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka. In the meantime, nō reira. Tēnā koutou. Tēnā koutou. Kia ora koutou katoa.