Frauke Thielecke is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought’s Track for International Writers. She is a German filmmaker and theater director, having helmed several TV series and features. Her first play, “Follow the...” won WashU’s A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Award in 2024.
“I'm a gym rat.”
“She's 52 and doesn’t look it!”
A ripple of laughter moved across the room. I had asked my students about their interests outside of class, and their responses covered everything from sports and the Civil War to anime and creative writing. We were in a bare classroom, plastic chairs scraping the linoleum and books and scripts spread across the table. It was the first week of class, and I was teaching in a women’s prison.
When I arrived at the facility, I remember seeing a modest orange-pink building and wondering how, at maximum capacity, 2,000 people were housed inside. Sixteen of them were in my class, aged 25 to 75. I’m a second-year PhD student at Washington University, but my background is in film and theater. I’ve worked with a wide range of people. Still, I had never taught inside a prison. That hesitation faded quickly. The students came prepared, asked real questions and brought insight to every discussion.
We were reading Louisa May Alcott. Rachel Tibbetts from Prison Performing Arts had proposed staging a play based on Little Women and Greta Gerwig’s adaptation. She and Ella Siegrist, academic program manager of the CAPS Prison Education Project at the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center (WERDCC) in Vandalia, Missouri, asked me to design and teach a course to prepare the students. Outside that classroom, there were metal detectors and rigid routines. Inside, there was curiosity, sharp debate and an intensity I rarely see in academic seminars.
The students were not looking to be inspired by Jo March, the headstrong sister who became a writer in Little Women. They were interested in Alcott’s contradictions — her progressive ideals, compromises and pragmatism. They recognized her as someone who navigated constraints using the tools she had. Her advocacy for women’s autonomy and creative lives resonated, especially in an environment where relationships between women are central, and survival often depends on cooperation.
We started with Hospital Sketches, Alcott’s semi-autobiographical account of nursing during the Civil War. I paired it with Hemingway’s In Another Country, set during World War I. Alcott’s voice — dry, sharp, unsentimental — stood out immediately. Her urgency to do something useful, to bear witness without embellishment, resonated. The class responded to her lack of self-pity, her quiet clarity.
From there, we moved to Alcott’s poetry and eventually to Little Women. The age range in the room shaped our discussions. Younger students related to Jo’s restlessness and need to push boundaries. Older students saw Marmee differently and recognized the emotional labor of holding things together. Some of the sharpest analyses came in discussions of marriage. Many questioned Jo’s decision to marry at all. Their reading of gender, power and compromise in the book was nuanced and unapologetically skeptical.
From the start, I included creative writing in our sessions, and the students embraced it with energy and depth. Some of their poems and short stories could easily be turned into published books. Their writing revealed clarity, complexity and an unmistakable sense of voice.
People often ask what it was like to teach in a prison. ... While the format was not new, the setting changed the stakes. The questions were more direct. Conversations about women’s roles, independence and survival were stripped of theory.
People often ask what it was like to teach in a prison. For me, it felt natural in so many ways. While the format was not new, the setting changed the stakes. The questions were more direct. Conversations about women’s roles, independence and survival were stripped of theory. And what surprised me most was how immediately relevant Alcott’s 19th-century world felt to this space. It was one of the most focused teaching environments I’ve been in. No distractions. No grade pressure. Just shared engagement with literature. The students were there to work. What they needed was access — to texts, dialogue, spaces where they could be taken seriously as thinkers and writers.
Alcott was a useful companion not because she offered escape but because she understood the limitations of her time. She worked within them, making art and meaning from what she had. This moved the students and, in many ways, inspired them to do the same.
