Welcome to the October OPEEP newsletter. As usual, OPEEP is busy, busy, busy!
Last week, OPEEP faculty Dr. Amy Shuster (Philosophy) hosted Elizabeth Shatswell, the Correctional Education Manager at JSTOR Labs. Elizabeth works on the Access in Prison project. Dr. Shuster is teaching the General Education Connections course at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) and invited Elizabeth to OSU to contribute to class discussions about information literacy and academic integrity (both existing themes in the GenEd Launch and Connections courses).
We’d like to thank the Ohio State Office of Undergraduate Education and JSTOR for funding this visit! Dr. Shuster was able to take Elizabeth to ORW to meet the cohort students and members of the Philosophy 4 Humans learning community at Southeastern Correctional Institution (SCI). They also met with the facilities’ librarians, and Elizabeth hosted an information session for OPEEP faculty to learn about JSTOR’s Access in Prison project and to run a demo on using the database in prison-based classes. We are lucky that the Superintendent of Education at the Ohio Department of Education, Jennifer Sanders, has been a strong supporter of the Access in Prison project - Ohio offers full access to the database, with 15 million articles and book chapters available to incarcerated people! You can read more about JSTOR’s project at their Blog, and Dr. Shuster will also share the video of Elizabeth’s demonstration with OPEEP faculty soon.
Thank you, Amy, for your tremendous effort to find funding and then to host Elizabeth Shatswell’s visit! You remain an extraordinary and generous member of the OPEEP team, with your passion for student learning, your hard work expanding and improving OPEEP’s student support efforts, and your generous good spirit of collaboration.
We are busy ramping up for Spring Semester class enrollments. Students, you can apply now! One course, Dr. Terrance Hinton’s Sociology 4615: Control and Prevention of Crime and Delinquency, is already full, but the remaining classes still have seats. This semester, there are two classes that are available to graduate students, Geography 5401: Economies, Space and Society with Dr. Theresa Hice-Fromille at ORW, and Dance 5505S: Citizen Artists with Dr. Irvin Gonzalez at London Correctional Institution (LoCI). Check out the profile of Dr. Hice-Fromille in this newsletter! If you’re considering the Dance course, read about last year’s offering at Ohio State News.
Faculty, you can also help us recruit more campus students for our spring courses. OPEEP staff have been busy enrolling incarcerated students, but our classes can only run at the facilities for men if we have robust campus enrollment to match. Let us know if you’d one of OPEEP’s staff to visit a campus class this semester – just email opeep@osu.edu to make your request. Also, add our website to your Carmen course pages, remind students that they can follow us on Instagram @opeep_osu, and show our Enroll tab in class to encourage students to be involved. Our News tab also has many news stories to share with your current students about our classes and programming to help them see what a class is like, the impact we have, and how taking a class can deeply impact their perspectives on the prison system. OPEEP remains a truly unique undergraduate experience, but too many students still have not heard about the opportunity to enroll in a course. Thank you for getting the word out!
We’re happy to announce a new OPEEP Learning Community at LoCI led by Dr. V. N. Trinh in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAAS). The new community is joined by new OPEEP faculty Dr. Elea Proctor (AAAS) and Dr. Alexander Burry (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures), and 22 incarcerated alumni of OPEEP courses at LoCI. The year’s theme is “Utopias and Dystopias,” and its first book selection is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Good luck getting started! And read more about our other two learning communities in our monthly newsletters, including an update on new members in LAM Collective at ORW in this issue.
We hope everyone had a restful Autumn Break.
Drs. Tiyi Morris and Mary Thomas
