The Art of Bridging Learning Resources
On behalf of the large community of people involved, I’m delighted to introduce ‘The Art of Bridging: Learning resources’ from the ‘Distant Voices: Coming Home’ project’ which ran between 2017-21 and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (via grant number ES/P002536/1).
These resources are intended to help learners and teachers in any context — community groups, high schools, colleges and universities — to explore the impacts of state punishment (in particular, imprisonment). More specifically, our project focused on the challenges of reintegration that punishment creates or exacerbates.
It has been my pleasure to compile these resources with Lucy Cathcart Frödén who produced the podcast series (released in 2021-22) of the same name. It fell to Lucy and I to try to pull together some of the huge range of materials produced in the project by people with diverse and varied experiences of criminal justice. We’ve done so basically by ‘exploding’ the six episodes of the podcast, providing a range of learning activities and linking to the many kinds of media that we (and others) have produced on each topic.
So, if you dive into any episode, you’ll find conversations, stories, songs and poems, videos and various forms of writing that bring the issues alive and, we hope, might help you develop new understanding through engagement with different kinds of lived experience, art and academic research.
We have included an index so that you can search for the themes that most interest you; that index also serves as a glossary explaining any technical language that might be less familiar to some readers.
Thanks to the generosity of our funders, we offer these as open access, free-to-use materials; all we ask is (1) that no-one seeks to exploit them commercially and (2) that you let us know what you make of them and how you use them.
To that end, you can contact me at fergus.mcneill@glasgow.ac.uk
[There are two links below to two downloadable PDF versions; the ‘pages’ version presents the document one page at a time and is probably better for phones and tablets; the ‘spreads’ version lets you see two pages at a time if you’re working on a bigger screen.]
Hope you enjoy!
Fergus