New Record for Number of OPEEP Courses Offered in One Semester!
Although undergraduate enrollment windows have only just begun to open up, the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project staff and faculty have already been hard at work making preparations for the upcoming Spring 2023 semester. This Spring semester is especially exciting as the project will facilitate seven courses at two different prison facilities (four at the Ohio Reformatory for Women and three at the Southeastern Correctional Institution), amounting to the greatest number of OPEEP courses offered in one semester yet! These course offerings will cover a wide breadth of topics, such as Literatures of Addiction, Society and Natural Resources, and Queer Studies (to name but a few). Spring 2023 courses will also feature instructors from three different OSU campuses, including Columbus, Newark, and Lima, reflecting the project's goals towards expansion in terms of numbers, geography, and accessibility for both students and instructors. You can learn a bit more about each course in the brief descriptions below, or head over to our Courses page for full course descriptions and further details.
Interested OSU students: Head over to the new Student Resources page for lots of helpful details and resources to guide you through the application and enrollment process. Please keep in mind that your first step is to complete OPEEP's online application, and following that, you will meet briefly with the course instructor to obtain Instructor Permission (required to enroll in any OPEEP course). If you have any questions or concerns regarding OPEEP courses or the application/enrollment process, please reach out to one of OPEEP's Program Coordinators, Babette Cieskowski or Nicole Edgerton.
Upcoming Spring 2023 OPEEP Course Offerings
Courses at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) in Marysville:
- English 2268: Introductory Creative Nonfiction Writing
- Instructor: David Adams (OSU Lima Professor)
- Description: Creative writing workshop with readings and discussions focusing on student work as well as published models of creative nonfiction. Key considerations include literary elements of nonfiction, including voice, point of view, characterization, narrative structure, detail, and figurative language. Students will build creative nonfiction portfolios and discuss the importance of writing communities and audiences. Experience, expertise, and experiment—three words with a common origin—will remain central. Students will be recognized as the foremost experts on their own experience, and learn that finding the most effective ways to communicate this expertise, like experience itself, involves experimentation.
- Sociology 2211S: Corrections: An Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project Course [FULLY ENROLLED]
- Instructor: Terrance Hinton (OSU Columbus Professor)
- Description: This course will engage students in critical readings and discussions focused on the origins and development of the American criminal justice system, the historical and contemporary use of punishment and rehabilitation, the re-emergence of restorative justice, and the broader relationship between criminal and social justice. Specifically, the course will focus on better understanding mass incarceration, considering its causes and consequences, as well as exploring the impact of crime, imprisonment and related policies on victims and communities. Utilizing a variety of active learning techniques, the course will culminate in production of one or more class projects.
- English 2275: Literatures of Addiction
- Instructor: David Ruderman (OSU Newark Professor)
- Description: Addresses the issue of addiction from a personal, socio-cultural, and political perspective. To understand addiction at a deeper level, this class will read novels, poems, and memoirs, look at movies, and listen to songs that deal with addiction. Core questions include: what does it mean to be addicted? What is the relation between creativity and addiction? What role does systemic and intergenerational poverty play? What are the lasting effects of addiction on the community?
- Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies 2822: Introduction to Queer Studies
- Instructor: Shannon Winnubst (OSU Columbus Professor)
- Description: Introduces and problematizes foundational concepts of the interdisciplinary field of queer studies, highlighting the intersections of sexuality with race, class, and nationality. Students will learn the historical and theoretical emergence of “queer” and “queer of color” critique and will use queer theory as a lens for the analysis of identity, politics and social norms.
Courses at Southeastern Correctional Institution (SCI) in Lancaster:
- Environmental and Natural Resources 2300: Society and Natural Resources
- Instructor: Alia Dietsch (OSU Columbus Professor)
- Description: This course seeks to examine, discuss, and apply learning about how society interacts with the environment and natural resources in complex social-ecological systems. Main organizing features are habitats (land, water), resources (air, wildlife and fisheries, vegetation/trees, soil), and processes (e.g., restoration, protected areas) and the course is organized by 3 social levels (individuals, communities, and polities) repeated across each organizing feature. Fundamental goals include exploration of why humans do what they do (and why they don't do what they 'should') and how people decide (and enforce) what that 'should' is in the context of our planet. Key focuses also include justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.
- Philosophy 2194: The Philosophy of Happiness
- Instructor: Amy Shuster (OSU Columbus Professor)
- Description: Centers around the philosophical exploration of what "happiness" is. Key questions include: Is happiness a state of mind, or something more? Can we be mistaken about our happiness? How does happiness relate to a flourishing and meaningful life, and a good political community? This course will provide a survey of philosophical responses to questions about what happiness is, how we can best pursue it, and whether (and if so, why) we should try to be happy.
- Geography 3600: Space, Power, and Political Geography
- Instructor: Kenneth Madsen (OSU Newark Professor)
- Description: Introduction to political geography, control of space, and the ways in which places reflect and serve as a basis for power. The course will draw on case studies from the local to international scales. Knowledge will be applied from the group's study of political geography to better understand personal space, graffiti, political protest, electoral geography, colonization, borders, inequality, states and statecraft, governance, popular culture, classrooms, prisons, and other issues of student interest. The course will involve discussions of the politics of nations, regions and localities - but political geography is about more than just "politics"!
