Prison Education Collaboration

This community engaged collaboration is part of a longer-term project gathering teachers from across campuses and prisons to create a model for inside-outside collaboration. There are three main higher education in prison programs in the Puget Sound region: University Beyond Bars (UBB); Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS), and Black Prisoners Caucus-Taking Education and Creating History (BPC-TEACH). These programs offer college credit courses alongside non-credit courses developed by campus faculty, community members, and leaders inside.

This project gathers four University of Washington faculty from Geography, Political Science, History and English to work with currently incarcerated teachers across these programs to co-create best practices for equitable collaboration across institutional walls. The main outcome will be a co-created archive or syllabus teachable across multiple environments. Additional outcomes include deepened relationship among teachers on campus and in prison, clarification of how future archive and syllabus development might work, and co-teaching practices to be modeled through this archive or syllabus.