Teaching incarcerated students: expanding access to education in prisons

The Education Justice Project (EJP) is an education program for incarcerated people in Illinois, hosted in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The program offers for-credit courses, tutoring, extracurricular activities, and re-entry into society services for incarcerated people at Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security men's state prison about 45 minutes from the University campus. In this talk, we will describe our experiences tutoring in the prison environment through the Writing and Math Partners program and participating in math-focused summer programs, including a pre-calculus preparation course and a tiered math learning program where more mathematically advanced incarcerated students teach basic math to less mathematically advanced incarcerated students. The challenges and rewards of teaching in a prison environment will be discussed and future plans for quantitative assessment of programing outcomes will be outlined.