Presenter Overviews
(Organized by Session)
Session I: Patience, Persistence and Programming: Starting and Sustaining a Prison Education Program
Jenifer Drew, an Associate Professor at Lasell College, maintains a joint appointment in Justice Studies and Social Science. She has been involved with prison education for more than a decade, first as a professor and, as of 2010, the administrator of the Boston University Prison Education Program. Drew recently completed a sabbatical during which time she explored perspective transformation as a function of prison postsecondary liberal arts education in prison. She has presented at Sociological and Criminal Justice professional gatherings on the subject of prison education, as well as DOC professional development meetings, and organized panels of formerly incarcerated men and women to speak in classrooms and at conferences in Massachusetts.
Boston University has offered credit-bearing, degree-granting coursework in Massachusetts state prisons since 1972; until 1994, BU headed a consortium of MA schools who participated in prison postsecondary liberal arts education. Since 1994, BU has donated the entire cost of the program: faculty and staff salaries, books, materials, and full scholarships for 120 students each semester. The program operates in two state prisons: the largest men's prison, and the only women's prison in Massachusetts. During any given semester, we offer approximately 18 courses to 120 students, delivered by 15 professors, who come from BU and a number of other colleges and universities. The program is situated within the department of Applied Social Science, a graduate department within Boston University's Metropolitan College, BU's school for working adults. Students earn a Bachelor of Liberal Studies (a broad degree, designed on campus to meet specific career goals and/or prepare students for graduate school).
Tanya Erzen is a founder and acting director of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University. In Fall 2013, she will be a Soros Justice Media Fellow through the Open Society Foundation to finish a book on religion in American prisons. She is currently the Catherine Gould Chism Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Puget Sound and formerly an Associate Professor of religion at Ohio State University. She is the author of Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement (2006), Fanpire: The Religion of Twilight (2012) and co-editor of Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City (2001). Her writing has appeared in the Nation, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Salon and various academic journals, and she is the recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Association of University Women, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
The Freedom Education Project Puget Sound is a college program in the Washington Corrections Center for Women, the largest women’s prison in Washington. Since January 2012, the program has offered 15 college courses in Sociology, Literature, Comparative Religion, U.S. History, Psychology, American Politics, International Relations, Spanish and Critical Theory, College Preparatory Reading and Writing and a monthly lecture series. An accredited Associate of Arts degree program at the prison, in partnership with Tacoma Community College, is scheduled to begin in September 2013.
Emily Guenther began volunteering in prison in 2004, when she was a student at Grinnell College. Since graduating in 2008, she has served as the first fulltime coordinator for the Liberal Arts in Prison Program. In this role, Guenther has developed and implemented the First Year of College Program, which offers a year of Grinnell College coursework to men at the Newton Correctional Facility.
The Liberal Arts in Prison Program at Grinnell College enrolls cohorts of incarcerated students in a demanding, rich college program equivalent to the first year at Grinnell College. The program hosts an expansive, multi-tiered student volunteer program that supplements and supports our accredited program. The Liberal Arts in Prison Program at Grinnell College fosters reciprocal learning and intellectual exchange that enriches lives both inside and outside the fences and affirms the transformative power of a liberal arts education. The program is a member of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison at Bard College.
Doran Larson is Professor of English at Hamilton College. He has led The Attica Writer’s Workshop, inside Attica Correctional Facility, since 2006. He is the founder of the Attica-Genesee Teaching Project (2011). He is now working to create a low-to-no-tuition model of post-secondary prison education involving a community college, several private colleges, and Mohawk Correctional Facility, in Central New York, and is working to build The American Prison Writing Archive—an open-access digital archive of essays by American prisoners, prison staff, and prison volunteers. Larson’s essays on prison writing, prison teaching, and related issues have appeared in Salmagundi, College Literature, English Language Notes, Radical Teacher, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is the editor of two forthcoming volumes: “The Beautiful Prison,” a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society (UK), in which incarcerated writers, prison teachers, and prison critics imagine what the American prison would look like if transformed into a socially constructive institution; and Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, the largest collection ever amassed of non-fiction essays by Americans writing about their experience of incarceration (Michigan State UP, 2014).
The Attica-Genesee Teaching Project (AGTP), is a traditional, full-tuition community-college-in-prison program; the AGTP now offers four courses enrolling fifteen men each. The AGTP offers a General Education Certificate at 36 credit hours. The Mohawk Consortium College-in-Prison Program (MCC), is an in-progress effort to create a low-to-no-tuition model of community and private college collaboration, offering three courses per semester enrolling twelve men per course. Each program leads toward the AS Degree in General Studies (history, literature, math, social sciences, and art).
Barbara Sherr Roswell is the Founding Director of the Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP), and has been teaching at Goucher since 1983, where she has directed the Writing Program, Writing Center, and the First Year Colloquium. From 1999-2008 she served as Editor of Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service Learning and is the co-author of Reading, Writing and Gender (Eye on Education), Writing and Community Engagement (Bedford), and, with Simone Weil Davis, Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation (forthcoming from Palgrave). Roswell serves on the Executive Board of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program and has collaborated with students and colleagues to lead ongoing writing workshops at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women since 2005 and the Baltimore County Detention Center since 2010.
The Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP), directed by Amy Roza, was founded in January 2012, to give men and women incarcerated in Maryland the opportunity to pursue an excellent college education and to stimulate awareness and meaningful dialogue in and beyond the Goucher community about justice, incarceration, and educational access. GPEP currently offers eight courses each semester to 30 men and 45 women incarcerated in two prisons in Maryland at no cost to the students. The GPEP curriculum mirrors the Goucher campus curriculum and GPEP students earn Goucher credits; some courses co-enroll GPEP students and students from the main campus. GPEP also provides tutoring, enrichment programs, and college preparatory (non-credit) classes in writing and math. Courses are taught on site by Goucher College faculty as well as by outstanding professors from nearby universities. Tutors from the main campus and the community participate as volunteers; the program is funded by grants and individual donations. GPEP is a member of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison.
Session II: Making The Ask: A Case Study in Funding a Prison Education Program
Bridget McDermott Flood graduated from St. Louis University with a Master of Arts in Urban Affairs. Her B.A. is from Saint Louis University in English and Political Science. She serves as the executive director of the Incarnate Word Foundation, a conversion foundation sponsored by the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio. In addition to overseeing the Foundation’s grant making budget, Flood also works collaboratively with other funders to address community issues, e.g. youth empowerment, foster care, and collective impact. Under her leadership, the Foundation has piloted micro-lending projects to empower women in low-income communities. Currently, the Foundation is targeting its resources toward projects in North St. Louis, an urban core area with a primarily African-American population.
The Incarnate Word Foundation collaborates with organizations and other community stakeholders to achieve shared goals in: funding that improves the quality of life of the poor and marginalized; convening others together to discuss, educate, prompt action, and/or foster collaboration; collaborating with others to pool resources and to achieve a common goal; representing the poor and marginalized to the civic arena; and educating others to gain knowledge about issues and our target populations.
Lisa Masters is a fundraiser with more than twenty years of experience in nonprofit marketing and ten of those in development and fundraising-specific positions. She is a graduate of Southwest Baptist University where she studied marketing and business management. Masters’ work experience includes the United Way of Greater St. Louis, the St. Louis Arts & Education Council, and Saint Louis University and she has consulted organizations such as the Edwardsville Children's Museum, African Vision of Hope, and Studio STL. Additionally, she offers marketing and fundraising services to the schools her children attend on a volunteer basis.
Kenneth L. Parker is the Director of the Saint Louis University Prison Program and Associate Professor of Historical Theology. He has been a professor at SLU for twenty years and involved in higher education in prisons for six years.
The Saint Louis University Prison Program began six years ago as a pilot certificate in Theological Studies at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri. It is now a program that includes an Associate of Arts degree for incarcerated men and prison staff, delivers a speakers series and workshops, and includes a burgeoning project assisting the Missouri Department of Corrections in delivering required core reentry courses for men preparing to leave prison.
Heather Rich is the Vice President for Development and Marketing at Provident, Inc. She spent four years working as the Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations at SLU, where she raised funds to support the SLU Prison Program. Rich is currently serving as the Board Chair for the Saint Louis University Prison Program.
Provident, Inc., is a social service agency that serves over 39,000 individuals annually in the Greater St. Louis Region through counseling, crisis intervention/suicide prevention, and community programs. Provident staff work closely with probation and parole, and offer treatment programs for ex-offenders, with emphasis on addiction, sex offenses, and domestic violence. Provident is the second largest recipient of United Way funds in the region.
Session III: Creating the Prison Classroom: From Policy to Practice
Brenda Dann-Messier was nominated by President Obama as assistant secretary for vocational and adult education on July 14, 2009. On Oct. 5, 2009, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and began her official duties on Oct. 13, 2009. As the first assistant secretary who is also an adult educator, Dann-Messier leads the Department's efforts in adult education and career and technical education, as well as efforts supporting community colleges and correctional education. She runs the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), which oversees the administration of seven grant programs in these areas, totaling approximately $1.7 billion annually. In her role as assistant secretary, she has led extensive strategic planning and policy initiatives to craft a blueprint for reform in the U.S. career and technical education system and codified new legislative priorities for the reauthorization of the Workforce Investment Act in order to transform service delivery and build viable career pathways for low-skilled youths and adults. Dann-Messier received her Ed.D. in educational leadership from Johnson and Wales University.
The Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) oversees the administration of seven grant programs in these areas, totaling approximately $1.7 billion annually. OVAE's vision is that all youths and adult students (1) are ready for, have access to, and complete college and career pathways; (2) have effective teachers and leaders; and (3) have equitable access to high quality learning opportunities on demand.
Rebecca Ginsburg is a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the director of the Education Justice Project, the campus’ prison education program. She received her Bachelors degree in English from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, her JD from the University of Michigan Law School, and a PhD in Architectural History from the University of California at Berkeley. It was while she was a graduate student at Berkeley that she first became involved in prison education, through the Prison University Project. At the University of Illinois, she is on the faculty of the Department of Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership and the Department of Landscape Architecture.
The Education Justice Project (EJP) is a unit of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. EJP has been active since 2008 and currently serves about 120 men at the prison; 26 alumni; 200 family members and loved ones; and 70 instructors from the University of Illinois and the community. The heart of EJP exists at our Danville prison campus, a men’s state prison in central Illinois, where a learning community of incarcerated students and instructors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign come together multiple times each week to engage in a range of different programs. We offer for-credit classes; extracurricular reading groups; and science, math, business, and writing workshops. EJP also has theatre and mindfulness groups and an English as a Second Language program through which our students serve as peer ESL instructors to men in the general population. On the Illinois campus we host monthly forums on issues related to incarceration and criminal justice. Our outreach components include a weekly radio program, an alumni program for our released students, and outreach to family members and loved ones of EJP students, most of whom are from Chicago. We also have an active research group and make a priority to produce scholarship about our work at the prison.