Hello OPEEP community! We are having a great semester, and we hope you are, too. Paramount to our good time is the arrival of OPEEP’s fabulous new staff member, Education Program Specialist Kaitlyn Jones. Kaitlyn’s primary roles are to administer the degree site at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) and enhance student services for our majors. She brings a deep well of experience to our team in public health and social work, with prior employment and training in maternal and infant health, community programming with youth, and research administration. She’s a Buckeye through and through, with her higher educational degrees and former positions at Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the College of Nursing. Last week she completed her training at ODRC, met the students, planned new programming, and designed changes coming soon to our classroom space. Please read more about her in this issue’s Q&A and be sure to welcome her back to Ohio State when you’re able to meet her in person.
In this newsletter issue, we’re also excited to announce a new initiative underway, an OPEEP literary and arts magazine! Please see the Call for Submissions below and consider submitting something of your own that OPEEP has inspired. If you have taught a course in the past at any facility, feel free to share the Call with campus student alumni of OPEEP. Faculty, we are looking for a few volunteers who would be willing to serve as an editorial board member over the early summer. We hope to have the magazine selection process done by the end of June, so that we can spend July on design work and ODRC approvals. Just email Mary if you’re willing and able to review submissions between April and June. We hope to receive a range of materials, from short academic writing samples, learning community contributions, editorials, pedagogy reflections, prompts for the Freedom Dreaming wheels, poetry, creative writing, zines, drawings, and more! Keep an eye on the listserv and next month’s newsletter for more detailed information on the submission process for campus constituents.
This semester’s classes at ORW have been wonderful (and challenging!), and the students are enjoying the new topics. Last week in their History of Life on Earth course with Dr. Jill Leonard-Pingle, students entered the classroom set up for a lab to consider Jurassic dinosaur tracks. The exercise asks, when all the evidence you have are fossilized footprints in situ, how can you extrapolate information from them to understand species behavior, velocity of movement, size, and the like? What differences exist between front and rear prints and what data can be gathered from them? Last week, students also started a one-credit Arts and Sciences class with Newark campus French professor Lucile Toth called Performing Body Language. The second session 7-week course will get them up and moving in the classroom, a welcome break from all the sitting. They are already raving about it after just one week.
We are traveling to Tacoma, Washington, this week to meet with faculty at the University of Puget Sound. They are interested to learn more about offering combined enrollment courses, how we facilitate our faculty training program, staff/faculty collaboration, and most importantly, how we ground our work at OPEEP in Black feminist principles and pedagogies. We’re looking forward to bragging about our dedicated faculty, students, and staff.
Hope you all have a restful spring break! Enrollment starts the following week, so please announce the autumn semester courses that are open for campus students at ORW, Southeaster Correctional Institution in Lancaster, and London Correctional Institution. You can see the course descriptions and instructions to enroll on our Enroll website tab. We need your help to spread the word – thank you!
Dr. Mary Thomas and Dr. Tiyi Morris, OPEEP Directors