May 2023 OPEEP Instructor Training

In May 2023, OPEEP offered its first-ever in-house instructor training program, preparing more than a dozen new faculty and teaching staff to teach inside Ohio prison facilities! Fourteen new instructors officially completed the training and have joined the OPEEP teaching ranks: Sierra Austin-King, Amy Close, Brittany Collier-Gibson, Molly Farrell, Linda Mizejewski, Alvaro Montenegro, Dai Newman, Adrienne Oehlers, George Rush, Lisa Shabel, Monica Stigler, Lyn Tjon Soei Len, Virginia Tompkins, and Elizabeth Weiss. The project’s newest instructors hail from multiple OSU campus locations, including Columbus, Lima, Mansfield, and Newark, and represent ten disciplines across three colleges.

Day one of the training took place at OSU Columbus, with instructors and OPEEP staff gathering inside Hale Hall for a day full of introductions, classroom activities, and logistical training. OPEEP Directors Mary Thomas and Tiyi Morris began the day by giving an overview of the project’s development, trajectory, and the history of prison education at OSU more broadly. With a mix of presentations, icebreakers, and team-building exercises, the goal was to equip new instructors with the necessary context, information, and confidence to spend day two at Southeastern Correctional Institution (SCI), a men’s prison facility roughly 45 minutes southeast of Columbus.

OPEEP staff and instructor trainees all traveled down to Lancaster, Ohio to spend all of day two at SCI. Gaining direct experience inside is a critical step for new instructors, and especially for those with little-to-no prior experience inside prison facilities. There are a whole new host of factors to consider when teaching in carceral settings. Whether designing a brand-new course, adapting one taught previously, or re-thinking teaching strategies more broadly, many factors simply do not become fully apparent until encountered first-hand. To be sure, it's impossible to predict all possible scenarios ahead of time, but instructors who have direct experience inside are much better equipped to handle unexpected issues as they arise, having already familiarized themselves with facility rules and processes during their own visit(s).

Training day two served as an opportunity for new OPEEP instructors to gain this type of critical first-hand experience. OPEEP staff and faculty trainees worked closely with a group of incarcerated student leaders at SCI who co-facilitated various discussions and workshops throughout the day. Through increased OPEEP course offerings and regular meetings for an interdisciplinary OSU learning community, Philosophy for Humans (“P4H”), OSU has consistently expanded academic programming at SCI in recent years. Greater educational opportunity has fostered the intellectual development of a group of budding scholars at SCI, whose first-hand experience and expertise proved invaluable to the overall success of this first instructor training.

Incarcerated co-facilitators helped run several pedagogical workshops with instructor trainees, discussing and modeling different strategies for effective teaching and learning in prison settings. Trainees and facilitators participated jointly in various classroom activities, including “think-pair-shares,” mind-mapping exercises, and group discussions. All of this demonstrated the profound impact of centering student voices and agency in teaching and learning - especially in carceral settings. One instructor stated that hearing directly from incarcerated students “about their experiences, expectations, and goals for this program helped me think more deeply about my approach and strategies for teaching.”

The group also got to pause and enjoy lunch together midway through the day, giving folks time to interact, reflect, and share in the collective joy of newfound knowledge, community, and inspiration. Seemingly mundane or everyday interactions and conversations often carry profound meaning for incarcerated folks, which instructor trainees got to witness first-hand. According to one co-facilitator, the best part of the experience was “the energy of everyone, the commonality, and the breath of fresh air." Day two not only served as a unique opportunity for the faculty to learn from incarcerated students, but also for those incarcerated students to learn from and help shape the future teaching of these instructors. Through genuine discussion and collaboration with educators who care deeply about their students' intellectual growth and overall well-being, this group of incarcerated men proved themselves as fully capable facilitators with unique, invaluable sets of expertise to offer. This integral part of the training simply could not have happened without them!

The group returned to Columbus for the third and final day of training, which included debriefing the day prior at SCI and wrapping up various logistical portions of the training begun on day one. OSU colleagues Dr. Bryanna Stigger and Eric Brinkman from the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning also provided an OPEEP-specific version of their “Trauma-Informed Teaching” presentation, which challenged the group to think more deeply about holding space for the various histories of trauma often present in OPEEP classrooms. By the end of the day, lots of laughter, tears, joys, anxieties, and dreams were shared amongst the group, with one common denominator: a renewed sense of hope in the liberatory potential of education grounded in freedom and humanity for all. 

Note on next year's OPEEP Instructor Training: