Unique Group of Students Finds Common Ground Behind Barred Windows
By Gabrielle Antoniadis.
The 30 or so students taking The Art of Living Ethically stream into class and take their seats in a circle. There are the usual quick glances around the room, the usual books, pencils and papers – but this class is anything but typical.
What does it mean to live a good life? What forces affect how we view ourselves and others? These are the kinds of profound questions the students are debating – but not from a classroom in Hollenbeck Hall. Approximately 15 have filed in from their cells at the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center. The other half has driven from the Wittenberg University campus to join them in their makeshift classroom, the gym at the Detention Center.
It is the first day of class, and the atmosphere is strained, awkward – nobody is at ease. Certainly, no one knows what to expect. But fortunately, Nancy McHugh, professor of philosophy, is ready and knows just how to break the ice. At the end of her “wagon wheel” exercise, where Wittenberg students sit on the inside of a circle facing the detainees who sit on the outside, each student on the outside has rotated around the circle and spent one minute talking to a student on the inside. The result is surprising for many: the differences and similarities between each group’s responses are not what anyone was expecting. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
“By the end of this activity, you can hear laughing and talking in the group, and you can just feel the walls break down,” McHugh says. “Once that happens, we can progress and start to do the hard work.”
The inspiration for the class came via McHugh’s discussions with students and from her knowledge of the international Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Founded in 1997 at Temple University by Lori Pompa – at the suggestion of Paul, an inmate serving a life sentence – the Inside-Out Program brings college students together with incarcerated individuals to learn and study as peers. The guiding principle of the program is to transform how people understand crime, justice, freedom and other social issues by creating a partnership between the college/university and the correctional institution. The program went national in 2004 and since then, more than 150 instructors have taught a class at more than 100 different colleges or universities. Approximately 10,000 students have participated nationwide.
Taking a cue from her students, McHugh met with Beth Dixon at Project Jericho and immediately saw connections to the Inside-Out Program. Project Jericho is a collaboration between the Clark County Department of Job and Family Services and the Clark State Performing Arts Center that provides at-risk youth with a variety of arts programming. But she knew she had a long way to go before she could start such a program at Wittenberg.
The extraordinary support of Judge Joseph Monnin, the Juvenile Court judge, and Joe Hunter, the director of the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center, gave McHugh the motivation to undertake the 60-hour Inside-Out program training last summer at the University of Michigan at Dearborn.
The training, it turned out, was itself a model of the program’s core philosophy: half of her training took place in a prison and was taught primarily by incarcerated men or former “Inside-Out” participants.
With her training completed, McHugh obtained financial support from the Susan Hirt Hagen Center for Civic & Urban Engagement, Wittenberg’s Office of the Provost and Project Jericho to launch the pilot course in fall 2011 with 14 Wittenberg (“outside”) students and 15 detainee (“inside”) students. This spring, she had a waiting list for the course.
Not Community Service
The first step to understanding the Inside-Out program is realizing what it clearly is not. It is not Wittenberg students “studying” or “helping” juvenile detainee students. The Inside-Out experience is about engagement and education – for the benefit of both groups of students. It is a collaborative journey that assumes that each group has something to gain from the other. All students read the same texts, write the same papers, discuss the same questions and work on a final project together.
Philosophy major Lacey Davidson ’12 chose the course because she had enjoyed her past experiences with Project Jericho – but even she admits to being just the slightest bit skeptical about the lofty aspirations of the course. In the end, however, she was astounded by her experience.
“At first, it’s very awkward and everyone is wondering what everyone else is thinking about each other. You start out believing there are huge differences in the way each of you thinks,” she says. “But after a couple of weeks, I looked at everyone in that group as my classmate and that’s all – I had a hard time imagining any of them as anything other than that.”
Perhaps nothing illustrates this transformation more clearly than a look at one of the group’s final art projects (see pages 18-19). It is a series of photographs of “inside” and “outside” students dressed in the detention center orange jumpsuits. Each student is holding their own written statement of a regret or past mistake over their faces. Looking at the photos, there is no way to know who is a Wittenberg student and who is not – not by the picture and not by the statements.
For Wittenberg students at least, realizing that they shared the same fears or regrets with “inside” students was a profoundly moving and simultaneously “awesome” moment of discovery.
“What I realized was that those of us on the “outside” were protected by our privilege,” Adam Schuler ’13 remembers. “They weren’t bad kids; they had maybe had one thing not go their way, and here they were in a detention center. Given different circumstances, that might have been me.”
Psychology and art double major Kate Causbie ’14 echoes this sentiment: “We make assumptions about certain groups of people. But now I’m less prone to make generalizations or oversimplify. I have a better understanding of the human factors that influence situations.”
These kinds of discoveries, McHugh says, brought a new and deeper level of understanding to the texts the students read. And as perceptions and assumptions fell away, so too did the line between “inside” and “outside” student. Several Wittenberg students even believed that they had learned more from the “inside” kids.
“There was a 14 year-old there who had better observations on Plato than I did!” Schuler exclaims.
McHugh was also impressed by the level of preparation, engagement and thought by the “inside” students. They brought as much to the table, she says, as the Wittenberg students – one read the text five times before class. But she also remarked on how the class seemed to bring out the very best in the “outside” students as well. Each group inspired the other and both pushed themselves in new ways.
Bridging Communities
For the “inside” students, the chance to express themselves in a new way as equals with college students has to have given them the sense that even though they were in juvenile detention, the doors of opportunity have not closed on them. McHugh certainly saw the immense potential in many and was thrilled to hear reports from probation officers on how well several of the “inside” students were doing after their release. One boy in particular, was so focused and motivated that he had been transferred back to his county school where teachers remark that he is a changed student.
“I know they were proud to be keeping up with college students and to be a part of the Wittenberg community,” McHugh says. “And for my part, I feel great knowing that the people at the detention center are part of my community.”
For both groups of students, the connection between the Wittenberg and Springfield communities appears to be mutual and quite strong. In fact, “inside” and “outside” students from the fall semester were so committed to each other and interested in continuing the work of the course that they now meet regularly under the guidance of faculty to find solutions to the issue of youth crime.
For McHugh, this dedication to continuing what they started and to doing it together demonstrates how the course embodies Wittenberg’s mission and core values.
“Wittenberg’s mission is to provide a broad and deep education that encourages students to be critical thinkers,” she says. “And it also places a high value of citizenship – this course brought our two communities together in a profound and meaningful way.”
It has also prompted several Wittenberg students to consider social justice issues more prominently as they look to the future. Lacey Davidson changed the focus of her senior honors thesis to the juvenile justice system and says the class was one of many experiences at Wittenberg that solidified her commitment to empowering at-risk populations. And Kate Causbie had never considered expanding her interest in equine-assisted psychotherapy to include at-risk youth, until she took the class.
McHugh is so pleased with student reaction to the class that she has already designed the fall 2012 installment, which will focus on women only. She is committed to continuing to offer it, but says the greatest challenge is finding funding to pay for some of the course’s extra costs.
By the end of the semester, “inside” and “outside” students have spent countless hours together discussing academic texts. But they have also laughed together, played basketball together and shared personal stories with each other. It is hard to imagine how these two groups might ever have been given the opportunity to understand each other in such an intimate way – a fact that is clearly not lost on them:
“To be able to challenge the stigma on incarcerated people was one of the greatest parts about this course,” Schuler says. “I don’t think I would have ever been able to get that experience in my life without this course.”