The past month has been a busy one for us. We participated in three conferences (detailed below). OPEEP staff have also been assisting faculty and students for Autumn Semester class enrollment, and we are happy to see the vibrant interest in OPEEP classes for next semester! We welcomed reproductive justice scholar, activist, and Smith College professor Loretta Ross to a Liberation at the Margins Collective meeting, and we continue to build student services for the degree students at Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW), including a new learning management system (LMS) and the purchase of Chromebooks for the students. This last accomplishment has involved multiple units on campus, and we thank our many colleagues in the Office of Technology and Digital Innovation (OTDI) and Arts & Sciences Technology Services who worked over many months with us to develop the complicated new systems for our incarcerated degree students.
Loretta Ross’s visit was hosted by the FREE Center (Feminist Research, Education, and Engagement Center in the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies), and we are grateful to have been able to host part of Loretta Ross’s day at ORW. In preparation, LAM Collective read her new book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel, before her visit. It seems that every new book and visitor becomes their favorite, and this time was no exception. The lessons in Ross’s Calling In are ones we will carry forever – see Heather’s write-up in this newsletter for her perspectives on the visit to LAM. The book challenges us to reject our impulses to turn away from difficult conversations and to turn toward unlikely collaborators in acts of loving conversation and learning. The book is a memoir of Loretta Ross’s monumental career as a founder of the reproductive justice movement, as an activist in anti-fascist movements, and as an educator and non-profit leader. We have been teaching the words and work of Loretta Ross as long as we have taught, and her visit was a dream come true for us as educators and as students of her wisdom, struggle, and experience.
We had so many conferences this month that we had to divide the first two between us. Mary went to the Big Ten Coalition for Higher Education in Prison workshop (Big 10 CHEP) in Champaign, Illinois, hosted by the University of Illinois Education Justice Project and funded by their Mellon Foundation grant. We participate in monthly zoom meetings with other higher education in prison projects (HEP) leaders in the Big Ten, but there is no substitute for meeting in person to share our expertise and plan future collaborations. Nine universities participated in the two-day event. We discussed fundraising, student support, campus pathways for incarcerated students, state-level policy initiatives, and the reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated students. Mary brought back information about the amazing work being done in the Big 10, and more importantly, inspiration for future activities here at OSU.
Tiyi went to Cincinnati for the National Council for Black Studies to lead a session on her experience teaching Civil Rights and Black Power at the Southeastern Correction Institution (SCI) and at ORW. Babette Cieskowski went to ORW to facilitate the two incarcerated conference participants from Liberation at the Margins Collective (LAM Collective), while staff at SCI connected three of Dr. Morris’s former students there. This is the first presentation for OPEEP that allowed our incarcerated students across prison facilities to collaborate! Markeeta describes the experience in her write-up in this newsletter.
Finally, we both just returned from New Orleans and the 14th National Conference of Higher Education in Prison. Our trip to NCHEP was funded by the Knowlton Foundation, which is a key supporter of the conference and is based here in Ohio. This year’s theme was “A New Era? Pell Reinstatement and the Future of Prison Education.” We attended panels on disability and other student support services, state prison consortia (here in Ohio we are members of the Ohio Penal Education Consortium or OPEC), technology integration in HEP, the importance of incorporating student and alumni leadership in our projects, and more. We also met with several of OPEEP’s funders to share news of our project’s and our students’ successes, especially now as the first academic year concludes for the first ever degree cohort at ORW! Dr. DeAnza Cook and Dr. Amy Shuster joined us for the conference. Both work with the Philosophy 4 Humans learning community at SCI, and both are teaching OPEEP classes next academic year. There are a few seats left in Dr. Cook’s Autumn Semester History course, Citizens Behind Bars, so visit our Enroll page to learn more about it and the other Autumn courses at SCI, ORW, and Richland CI in Mansfield. Dr. Shuster is developing the GE Connections course for ORW, which she will teach in Autumn Semester (she is also teaching a philosophy course at London Correctional Institution in Spring 2026!).
We plan to have one more newsletter this academic year, in early June. May will be another whirlwind month for us, as we will hold our three-day instructor training for 23 faculty to join the teaching ranks in OPEEP. We also will spend several days at ORW working with the students on their new Chromebooks and learning management system (LMS). Some of the students have no experience with computers, and it has been many years for many of them since they even typed on a keyboard. We will show them how to use the Canvas-based LMS to do their coursework and provide time for them to practice typing. They are VERY excited to have relief from handwriting all of their assignments, especially since they will take their writing and information literacy foundations course this summer term. Their hands are sore, and they are tired of erasers.
Despite the relentless fast pace of ongoing new initiatives and activities, the end of the semester always brings a note of sadness with the many goodbyes being said between campus students and incarcerated students as classes wrap up. For these folks, the end of classes is the end of the connections built through learning in a new community. While our rules strictly prohibit any contact between people when classes end, the experiences will be remembered for lifetimes. We will share photos from Spring classes in our final 2024-2025 newsletter – see you then!
Dr. Mary Thomas and Dr. Tiyi Morris
