Introductions, Welcome, and History

Workshop Leaders: Max Kenner, Jessica Neptune, Delia Mellis

To begin, we will introduce ourselves and take a look at what we’ll be doing in the weeks ahead. We will share a brief history of the field of college-in-prison and the specific story of BPI, and how BPI fits — and doesn’t fit —into the world of higher ed. Together, we will reflect on our hopes and plans for this work: a look at where we’ve each been and where we’re all going.

Paradoxes of College-in-Prison

Workshop Leader: Megan Callaghan

This workshop engages the rich, necessary contradictions inherent to the endeavor of college-in-prison and how we think about those contradictions in practice.

Bookends of a Student’s Encounter with the College: New Student Orientation and Commencement Planning

Workshop Leaders: Max Kenner, Jessica Neptune

How we build on the admissions experience to inspire, challenge, and situate students to succeed in the college: by being forthright and welcoming, and by inviting students into a long term relationship with the college. Max will conduct an orientation just as we do inside, with participants in the student role.

We will then switch gears and jump to the other bookend of students’ formal time with the college and discuss commencement planning, strategies, and principles.

This focuses on thinking about families and guests, coordinating with the college and how to reproduce the ceremony in ways that bring the college into the prison and underscore the momentousness of the occasion. Commencement planning stands with student orientation as two core moments in which the program messages the centrality, power, and salience of the college as the relevant institution in student’s lives.

Language and Thinking: Bard’s Introduction to College

Workshop Leader: Delia Mellis and Robert Tynes

In this session we encounter Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking methodology and Bard’s Language and Thinking (L&T) first-year experience. All Bard students begin their first year with this intensive introduction to reading, writing, and thinking for college. It aims to disrupt their expectations and reorient their thinking about what it’s like to do rigorous, collaborative intellectual work. We will learn by doing, going through a quick but intense version of a day in L&T so that participants can get a sense of what the workshop makes possible.

Academic Overview and Writing Curriculum

Workshop Leaders: Amy Cox Hall and Delia Mellis

This session will detail the specifics of the BPI AA and BA curriculum, its goals and reasoning — including its relationship to main campus requirements and approach, with an eye toward applying some core principles to curricular development at your own college, reflecting your own institutions’ degree requirements and hallmarks of the undergraduate experience. In doing so we will elaborate upon the L&T experience and how it leads into Bard’s writing-based experience.

Math Curriculum and Pedagogy

Workshop Leader: Amy Shapiro

We will get down into the specifics of the BPI math curriculum and pedagogy — what they are, how they parallel and diverge from main campus; why and how they obviate/address remediation; particular benefits and challenges of this approach.

Faculty Recruitment and Hiring

Workshop Leaders: Megan Callaghan and Amy Cox Hall

Sharing strategies for identifying good candidates, spotting dangers, and bringing faculty into the work.

Faculty Orientation and Disorientation

Workshop Leaders: Megan Callaghan and Amy Cox Hall

We will discuss how to introduce new faculty to college-in-prison and answer the challenges raised by official orientations.

Academic Resources: Advising, Research Support and Libraries

Workshop Leaders: Andres Pletch, James Kim, Demetrius James, Jeffrey Jurgens, Delia Mellis

• Academic Resources support students outside the classroom in responding to the myriad challenges of college work — conceptual, logistical, personal, and professional.
  Academic advising involves helping students navigate their trajectory through the college, from course selection to complicated conversations with faculty; strategizing with them around academic challenges, both intellectual and logistical; and staying focused through the conflicts that can arise between student life and everything else.
• BPI students rely on research support directed by a professor on staff who manages a team of work-study students who find and print out materials for them in response to requests that may be as specific as an article citation derived from the JSTOR index, or as broad as a general request for information on the Cultural Revolution in China.*
• At every BPI site there is a college library, which may be comprised of several bookcases inside the college classroom or could be an entire room full of shelves, with study tables and a whiteboard on wheels. How do we build, organize, and protect the library? Who is responsible for it?

Getting to the BA

Workshop Leader: Jessica Neptune

We will discuss strategies for building stackable credentials between AA and BA degrees, choose majors to offer, and how to think through the problem of replicating main campus degree requirements and the depth and breadth of main campus course offerings at a very different scale in prison.

Tutors and Undergrads

Workshop Leaders: Claire Lindsay,  Hannah Henry, Demetrius James, Delia Mellis

Peer tutoring is central to the BPI experience. Like their counterparts on the main campus, students inside may take a for-credit course to learn basic principles and practices of effective, student-centered pedagogy. Those who go on to become writing and math tutors are a crucial force in the collaborative learning ethos and practice that define the college community inside. This community extends to include undergraduates from the main campus, similarly trained through the college’s Learning Commons, who come in weekly to the prisons. This session situates the hows and whys of tutoring within the big picture of the college inside. In addition to hearing from those who train and manage both categories of tutors (those inside and those coming in from outside), we will talk with alum who have worked as tutors about the ways in which tutoring figured in their own educational trajectory.

Thinking about Fundraising

Workshop Leaders: Sayra Havranek and Kate Cox

The first in a series of conversations with BPI’s development team, this workshop lays the groundwork for shaping your program’s philosophical approach to fundraising. We will discuss how to get comfortable asking for money and explore our assumptions and challenges related to fundraising.

Grant Writing and Fundraising Development Strategies and Planning 

Workshop Leaders: Sayra Havranek and Kate Cox

Conversations with BPI’s development team continue in this session as we explore strategies for how to plan fundraising that includes grant writing, cultivating small donors, and development communications strategieson an annual basis. The team will share insights and guidance related to the nuts and bolts for building out the vision, capacity, and infrastructure to seek out, obtain, and retain support from donors and foundations.

Data and Filemaker

Workshop Leaders: Megan Callaghan and Hannah Henry

Building and working with a database. What to track and why and how.

Introduction to BPI Admissions and Essay Reading

Workshop Leaders: Madeleine George, Natalia Guzmán Solano, James Kim, Demetrius James

Admissions is the first encounter with the college; we engage with prospective students exactly as we do those who are enrolled —- with respect, rigor, and deep interest. The admissions process crystallizes the BPI model; in this session we will explore both process and philosophy.

We will spend time reading and scoring admissions essays so that participants gain a hands on experience with the BPI method. What are we looking at, what are we looking for, and how do we decide who gets an interview?

Admissions Interviews: Philosophy and Practice

Workshop Leaders: Madeleine George, Natalia Guzmán Solano, James Kim, Demetrius James

In this workshop we will explore the art of the admissions interview, watching and then practicing together how to engage with prospective students so that they show us what kind of student they could be, and how we show them something about what it would be like to be a student at Bard.

Making Space for the College: A Conversation with Site Directors

Workshop Leaders: Amy Shapiro, Robert Tynes, Pamela Wallace, Amanda Vladick, Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

The daily work of sustaining the college inside: supporting students, communicating with prison staff, and managing faculty. Site directors share stories and strategies for creating possibilities and responding to the challenges that arise every day.

Cultivating College Community Inside: A Conversation with Alumni

Workshop Leaders: Tammar Cancer, LePerry Fore, John Henson, Shawn Young

While site directors, faculty, and other college representatives work to find, hold, and extend space for the college within the prison, we know that it is students who create and sustain the world of the college inside. We will talk with alum about what students do to build community and protect the college under challenging circumstances, and how we can best support them in doing so.

Practitioner Wellness: Sustainability, Compassion Fatigue & Secondary Trauma

Workshop Leaders: Delia Mellis

This workshop explores some strategies for acknowledging, coping with, and building resilience in the face of our students’ historical and ongoing traumatic experiences. How do we support their well-being and our own?

Working with Corrections

Workshop Leaders: Megan Callaghan, Robert Tynes

This conversation will cover tips and strategies for negotiation with the DOC. What does the college need from the DOC? What to consider in an MOU? How to navigate central office and facility level leadership. Taking up space in the prison. Classification and movement. Recruitment of future students. Defining what’s “college business.”

Reentry: Getting Started

Workshop Leaders: Shawn Young and Jed Tucker

We will experience BPI’s introduction to reentry and learn about the history of reentry at BPI and the reentry workshops inside: what do students need most as they prepare to leave prison and what can we provide? How do we guide them toward resources? We will build connections between BPI’s reentry work on the inside and the BPI ConnectED Workshop.

Transition Home: The BPI ConnectED Workshop

Workshop Leaders: LePerry Fore, Nikko Vaughn

Alumni staff leaders of BPI’s ConnectED Workshop lead us through a session and then describe the content and experience of the six-week workshop for recently released alumni/ae, which covers housing, continuing education, engaging with technology, wellness, career development, and navigating social services.

Alumni Advocacy and Government Affairs Dinner

Workshop Leader: Dyjuan Tatro

Join in a conversation with BPI’s Senior Government Affairs Officer to learn about alumni-led efforts to build government support and new funding streams for college-in-prison and develop relationships and familiarity between elected officials and your program. Dyjuan Tatro will go over how and why he created a government affairs role at BPI, what he has accomplished in this role over the years, and tips and strategies for engaging elected officials in college-in-prison work including possibilities for direct funding and political support. We will also explore potential pitfalls and what to watch out for.

JSTOR Offline

Workshop Leader: Stacy Burnett ’20

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

Career Specializations and Post-Degree Coursework

Workshop Leader: Gabriel Mendes

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

This workshop will detail public health and education both as curricular specializations in prison, and as career paths for students post-release; it will also outline the ways in which these areas match widespread student interest in making positive contributions to their communities with viable, rewarding, and ambitious career paths. The workshop will be led by program directors and alumni active in the fields.

BPI’s Public Health Program is a direct intervention in a problem widely identified but rarely confronted head on: the underrepresentation of justice-system involved professionals in crafting life-determining public health policy and programs. Public health at BPI prepares students and alumni — uniquely positioned through experience, education and expertise — to deliver services, innovate practices, and advocate for equitable policies in public health, health care, and the human services.

The Education Program at BPI offers coursework and experience in the field of education, writ large. Education coursework and post-release fellowships enable students to deepen their understanding of the complex issues surrounding education and schooling in the US, as well as to expand their sense of possibilities for professional pursuits in the field. The program introduces BPI students and alum to an array of education fields to further support and articulate potential pathways for their careers and/or further study; it also provides attention to varieties and aspects of educational praxis, including peer tutoring and participatory action research projects.

Getting Ready for Pell and Public Funding

Workshop Leaders: Megan Callaghan and Rupali Rifenburg

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

Communications, Digital Marketing, and Social Media

Workshop Leader: Anita Merk

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

Building College Computer Labs in Prisons

Workshop Leader: Jeff Gregory

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

Alumni Advocacy and Government Affairs

Workshop Leader: Dyjuan Tatro

This virtual workshop takes place as a webinar follow up to the two week in person sequence and is open to BPI’s broader community of practice including residents across cohorts, and the Consortium.

Join in a conversation with BPI’s Senior Government Affairs Officer to learn about alumni-led efforts to build government support and new funding streams for college-in-prison and develop relationships and familiarity between elected officials and your program. Dyjuan Tatro will go over how and why he created a government affairs role at BPI, what he has accomplished in this role over the years, and tips and strategies for engaging elected officials in college-in-prison work including possibilities for direct funding and political support. We will also explore potential pitfalls and what to watch out for.