EJP Evaluation
Capturing Events as They Happen
This page is for internal use only.
Presentations and Publications
This page lists presentations and publications by EJP students and by those involved with EJP about EJP . If you have an entry to add, contact Andrea at olinger3 at illinois dot edu.
Program Development and Evaluation
Higher Education in Prison
Arts, Humanities, and Writing in Prison
English as a Second Language in Prison
Sustainable Prison Landscapes
Incarcerated Student Activism
Other Topics
Program Development and Evaluation
Tillman, Ayesha, Nora Gannon-Slater, & Jennifer Greene. (2013, April). Evaluating prison education with and for justice. Seminar sponsored by the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, Urbana, IL.
Panel, “Evaluation with and For Justice,” American Evaluation Association, Minneapolis, MN, October 2012:
- Greene, Jennifer. The Education Justice Project and its evaluation.
- Tillman, Ayesha. Evaluator and participant relationships within an evaluation of prison education.
- Gannon-Slater, Nora. An evaluation of outcomes in prison education like no other.
Kurisu, Sheri-Lynn. (2012, October). Families of the incarcerated. Forum presented as part of Beyond Lines: Limited Expressions from the Men within Danville Prison Art Exhibit at the University YMCA, Urbana, IL.
- It can sometimes be a relief to family members when a loved one engaged in criminal activities lands in prison, but the families and communities of incarcerated men and women also endure hardships associated with such incarceration. The costs they pay include the pain of separation, the expense of visits and phone calls—even while they do without their loved one’s contribution to the household income, and bearing the stigma of having a family member in prison. At this forum we’ll view some clips to better understand the situation of family members, hear from people with personal experience, and learn about efforts to mitigate the impacts of incarceration. This forum will be chaired by Sheri-Lynn Kurisu, coordinator of the Education Justice Project’s FACE (Family and Community Engagement) program.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2012, March). Creating and sustaining a prison education program. Paper presented at a workshop on “Opening Prison Gates: Creating, Sustaining, Researching, and Extending Literacy Programs behind Bars” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, St. Louis, MO.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2011, November). The University of Illinois’ Education Justice Project’s evaluation program. Paper presented at a panel on Assessment Tools at the National Conference on Prison Higher Education, Seattle, Washington.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2010, October). Education Justice Project: Family and Community Engagement. Paper presented at the Symposium on Higher Education in Prison: Strategies for Action, Urbana, IL.
Ruggles, D. Fairchild, with Hugh Bishop, Rebecca Ginsburg, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, and Agniezska Tuszynska. (forthcoming in 2014). The humanity of teaching: Reflections from the Education Justice Project. In A. Burton & M.-A-. Winkelmes (Eds.), An Illinois Sampler: Talking about Teaching on the Prairie. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (forthcoming). “Knowing that we are making a difference”: A case for critical prison programming. In D. Larson (Ed.), The beautiful prison (special edition of Studies in Law, Politics, & Society).
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2013, March). Paper presented at the Conference on Race, Place, and Nature, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
Cabrales, Jose, Joseph Mapp, Orlando Mayorga, Erick Nava, Elfego Nunez, & Augie Torres. (2013, February). Language partners. Panel on incarceration and violence for the Community Conversation on Crime, Diversity, and Equality at the Sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Urbana, IL.
Cappas-Toro, Pamela, John Lang, Carol Symes, & James Kilgore. (2013, February). What I’ve learned from teaching in a prison. Panel presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Castro, Erin L., Rob Scott, Michael Brawn, Johnny Page, Orlando Mayorga, & Andre Slater. (2012, November). Higher education under constraint: Highlighting the scholarship of college students who are incarcerated. Symposium presentation at the American Educational Studies Association conference in Seattle, WA.
Scott, Rob. (2012, November). Presentation given for a roundtable at the Critical Prison Studies caucus at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Ginsburg, Rebecca, James Kilgore, Rob Scott, Russell von Shelby, & Darrell Wright. (2012, September). Higher education in prison. Panel at the University YMCA, Urbana, IL.
- Research demonstrates that no prison-based intervention does more to reduce recidivism than prison education. Evidence also suggests that the benefits of prison education extend well beyond recidivism, for example creating safer environments within the prison and impacting family members on the outside. This symposium addresses the history of prison education programming in the US, its current state, and challenges and opportunities for innovative and critical prison education. Panel participants include instructors and formerly incarcerated students from a range of different prison program types who will speak to their experiences in prison ed programs as well as addressing larger education policy questions.
Tuszynska, Agnieszka. (2012, January). What I learned from teaching in a prison. IPRH blog. Retrieved from http://iprh.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/what-ive-learned-from-teaching-in-a-prison-agnieszka-tuszynska/
Bishop, Hugh, Audrey Petty, Agnieszka Tuszynska, & William Sullivan. (2011, November). What I’ve learned from teaching in a prison: Education Justice Project. Panel presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2011, May). Prison education and the Reasonable Person Model. Paper presented at the Environmental Design Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2010, November). Locked up and locked out? Higher education and searching for the American Dream in prison. Paper presented at the University Y Friday Forum, Urbana, IL.
Ginsburg, Rebecca, & Anna Kurhajec. (2010, November). Participants in the roundtable on the value of higher education in prisons, American Studies Association, San Antonio, TX.
Micale, Mark, Dannie Otto, Anke Pinkert, & James Kilgore. (2010, November). What I’ve learned from teaching in a prison: Education Justice Project. Panel presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Dace, Tracy, Rebecca Ginsburg, & Anna Kurhajec. (2010, April). The challenge and promise of prison higher education programs. Papers presented at the Diversity and Democracy, Conference of the Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Urbana, IL.
Kurhajec, Anna, & Rushika Patel, with Earl M. Walker, Johnny Page, Mr. Robert Matthew Reed, Daniel Graves, Leroy Brown, Robert Garite, Larry Brent, Jr., Tyrone F. Muhammad, Otilio E. Rosas, William Wells, Michael Brawn, David Staples, Carlton Gray. (2010, April). Social justice and higher education from the prison industrial complex. Panel at the 2nd Annual Undergraduate and Graduate Social Justice Conference, Roosevelt University, Chicago, IL.
▪ Description: This is a special panel highlighting thirteen incarcerated University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign students from Danville Correctional Facility who are participating in the Education Justice Project. In a competitive process open to all students they submitted essays describing what social justice means to them in the context of education and incarceration. The panel organizers, who are also involved in the project, will be presenting a video in which the students present their own work.
Lieberman, Jenni, D. Fairchild Ruggles, & Rob Scott. (2010, February). Reflections on prison teaching: Education Justice Project. Panel presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Colson, Dan, Anna Kurhajec, Rachel Rasmussen, William Sullivan, & Katie Walkiewicz. (2009, October). What I’ve learned from teaching in a prison: Humanities at Danville Correctional Center. Panel presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Arts, Humanities, and Writing in Prison
Pinkert, Anke. (forthcoming). Rethinking the Humanities through teaching the Holocaust in prison. In D. Larson (Ed.), The beautiful prison (special issue for Studies in Law, Politics, and Society).
Symes, Carol. (forthcoming in 2013). The Shakespeare teacher: Shakespeare’s Globe and the prisoner’s world. In A. Burton (Ed.), The feedback loop: Historians talk about the links between research and teaching. Washington, DC: American Historical Association.
Pinkert, Anke. (2013, March). Transforming the humanities through higher education in prison. Paper presented at the 2013-14 Fellows Seminar, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Urbana, IL.
Berry, Patrick. (2013, March). Prison stories and ethics in conducting research. Paper presented at a workshop on Making Lives Behind Bars Visible: Literacy Programs and Activism at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Las Vegas, NV.
Colson, Dan. (2012). Geographies of prejudice: Self-narration and radical teaching in the prison. Radical Teacher, 95, 51-55.
Pinkert, Anke, with Michael Brawn, Jose Cabrales, & Gregory Donatelli. (2012). The transformative power of Holocaust education in prison: A teacher and student account. Radical Teacher, 95, 60-65.
Pinkert, Anke. (2012, November). Restorative pedagogy: Teaching about the German past in a US prison. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Philadelphia, PA.
Berry, Patrick. (2012, November). This I believe: Literacy, prison, and possibility. Invited paper at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, Vancouver, British Columbia.
Pinkert, Anke, with Michael Brawn, Jose Cabrales, & Gregory Donatelli. (2012, October). Rejecting victimhood, reclaiming agency: Education behind bars–a teacher and student account. Paper presented at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Symposium, Resentment’s Conflicts, Urbana, IL.
- With more than two million people in prison, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Although the media and politicians portray the high rate of imprisonment as a measure of public security, scholars and activists have shown that mass incarceration is a profitable class and race-based system of control. In this debate, prison abolitionists formulate the most radical position, aiming to mobilize people’s indignation with and resentment of the prison industrial complex with the purpose of forming a social movement. From the perspective of prison abolition, higher education in prison builds complicity with a system that is structurally defunct and victimizes the socially oppressed. In this paper, we show that Holocaust education in prison can provide a particularly viable model for a progressive education that attends to issues of social and individual responsibility. Rather than claiming a status of victimhood, the incarcerated students used the methods of critical dialogue and self-reflection (essential to post-Holocaust education) to contemplate their own empowerment and possibly the transformation of the system from within.
Berry, Patrick. (2012, October). The literacy payoff: Promises from Prison. Paper presented at the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, Louisville, KY.
Symes, Carol. (2012, October). King Richard from the Block: How prison actors transformed Shakespeare and vice versa. Presentation given as part of Beyond Lines: Limited Expressions from the Men within Danville Prison Art Exhibit at the University YMCA, Urbana, IL.
- In January 2012 a group of incarcerated men at Danville Correctional Center, students of the Education Justice Project, performed Shakespeare for a public audience. It was the first time in many years that such an event had been hosted at the prison. This video includes portions of their performance, a question-and-answer session with the players, and interviews with a few of the men whose perspectives have been altered by the experience of performing Shakespeare. The event will be moderated by Carol Symes, UIUC faculty member in History and Theatre and the director of Our Play.
Symes, Carol. (2012). The EJP experience. In M. Micale & C. Koslofsky (Eds.), History @ Illinois (p. 10). Urbana, IL: UIUC Department of History.
Berry, Patrick. (2012, May). Why I teach in prison. Paper presented at a Syracuse University conference on Activism, Rhetoric, and Research, Syracuse, NY.
Panel, “Outreaching Identities: Publishing and Performance from the Prison-industrial Complex,” Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Philadelphia, PA, May 2012:
- Berry, Patrick. Prison IDs: Contradictory Visions of Literacy, Schooling, and Identity.
- Olinger, Andrea, with Otilio E. Rosas. Behind the Collective “We”: The Politics of Coauthoring in Prison.
Rouillon, Vanessa, and Martha Webber. (2012, March). Representing the writing center: Activism in and beyond center locations. Round Robin session presented at the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) Collaborative @ CCCC, St. Louis, MO.
Berry, Patrick. (2012, March). Ethnography of a prison. Paper presented at a workshop on “Opening Prison Gates: Creating, Sustaining, Researching, and Extending Literacy Programs behind Bars” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, St. Louis, MO.
Holding, Cory. (2012, March). Rhetoric and performance in prison. Paper presented at a workshop on “Opening Prison Gates: Creating, Sustaining, Researching, and Extending Literacy Programs behind Bars” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, St. Louis, MO.
Pinkert, Anke, with Michael Brawn, Jose Cabrales, & Gregory Donatelli. (2012, March). Mending communities through Holocaust education in prison. Paper presented at a panel on Trauma, Recovery, and Community at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Providence, RI.
Webber, Martha, Audrey Petty, Baron Haber, Amy Sayre-Roberts, & Cory Holding. (2012, February-March). Writing from the inside: Pedagogical concerns for teaching creative writing in prisons. Panel presented at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference, Chicago, IL.
Pinkert, Anke. (2011, April). Rethinking the humanities though higher education in prison. Paper presented at the Midwest Symposium of German Studies, Urbana, IL.
Panel, “Literacy, Incarceration, and the Making of Teachers,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, GA, April 2011:
- Berry, Patrick. Literacy narratives and prison relations.
- Colson, Dan. From the cellblock to the quad: Geographies of prejudice.
- Holding, Cory. Configuring conviction, performing in prison.
Berry, Patrick. (2011, April). Time and doing time with literacy narratives. Paper presented for a panel on Prison Writing: Pedagogy, Representation, Research and Action at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, GA.
Berry, Patrick. (2011, January). Time and doing time with literacy narratives. Paper presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Los Angeles, CA.
Berry, Patrick. (2010, October). More than words: Prison matters and materials. Paper presented at the annual convention of the National Council for Teachers of English, Orlando, FL.
Berry, Patrick. (2010, May). Virtual-less home: Online compositions from prison. Paper presented at the Computers and Writing conference, West Lafayette, IN.
Berry, Patrick. (2010, May). Reading, writing and recidivism: Rhetorics of literacy in the prison classroom. Paper presented at the biennial conference of the Rhetoric Society of America, Minneapolis, MN.
Berry, Patrick. (2010, March). Prison business: A contextual approach to teaching professional writing. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Louisville, KY.
Berry, Patrick. (2010, March). Literacy promises: Teachers, composition, and the prison. Paper presented at the Qualitative Research Network of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Louisville, KY.
Colson, Dan. (2009, November). Teaching in the panopticon: Prison literature and pedagogy. Paper presented at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention, Atlanta, GA.
English as a Second Language in Prison
Cabrales, Jose. (2012, December). A letter to adult ESL educators. The Illinois TESOL-BE Link, 40(4), 9-13. Retrieved at http://www.itbe.org/docs/The%20Link%20Winter%20Issue%202012%20Dec.pdf
: A Newsletter of the Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages/Bilingual Education.(4(4),
Olinger, Andrea, Hugh Bishop, Jose R. Cabrales, Rebecca Ginsburg, Joseph L. Mapp, Orlando Mayorga, Erick Nava, Elfego Nunez, Otilio Rosas, Andre D. Slater, LuAnn Sorenson, Jim Sosnowski, & Agustin Torres. (2012). Prisoners teaching ESL: A learning community among “Language Partners.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, 40(1), 68-83.
Sustainable Prison Landscapes
Moen, Bridgette, and William Sullivan. (2012, March). Landscape laboratory at Danville prison. Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, Champaign, IL.
Sullivan, William. (2011, May). RPM and the sustainable prison landscape. Paper presented at the Environmental Design Research Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Incarcerated Student Activism
Ginsburg, Rebecca. (2011, August). The Education Justice Project’s Chicago youth violence initiative. Paper presented at the Association of Black Sociologists’ Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV.
Swami, R. B. (2013, March). TranscenDance [poem]. The Public i. Retrieved from the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center Website, http://publici.ucimc.org/?p=49537
Sanders, Emmett K. (2013, March). Untitled [poem]. The Public i. Retrieved from the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center Website,http://publici.ucimc.org/?p=49537
Garite, Robert, Chris Garner, Daniel Graves, Tyrone F. Muhammad, Kemuyah Ben Rakemeyahu, Otilio Rosas, E. K. Sanders, Andra Slater, David Todd, Agustin Torres, & Otis Williams. (2012, October). Harvest wire: A literary event. (organized by Audrey Petty and Laura Adamczyk). Presented as part of Beyond Lines: Limited Expressions from the Men within Danville Prison Art Exhibit at the University YMCA, Urbana, IL.
- Winter Harvest is an edited anthology of powerful and moving nonfiction. Its contributors are EJP students who participated in a memoir writing workshop facilitated by U of I English professor Audrey Petty. Please join us for authors’ readings, captured on videotape at the Danville Correctional Center.
Nava, Erick, Chris Garner, & Augie Torres. (2012, September 20). Reflections on participating in an art exhibit in the outside world. Kritik. Retrieved from http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2012/09/reflections-on-participating-in-art.html
Garite, Robert, Chris Garner, daniel e. graves, Tony Hillard, Tyrone F. Muhammad, Kemuyah Ben Rakemeyahu, Otilio Rosas, E. K. Sanders, Andra D. Slater, David Todd, Agustin Torres, Earl Walker, & Otis Williams. (2012, Summer). Winter Harvest: A collection of personal essays of the Education Justice Project (edited by Audrey Petty). Urbana, IL.
Pinkert, Anke. (2012, September). Prisons in the media. Presentation given as part of Beyond Lines: Limited Expressions from the Men within Danville Prison Art Exhibit at the University YMCA, Urbana, IL.
- Join us at a discussion about the depiction of prisons and incarcerated men and women in the media. We’ll screen clips from television shows, commercials, movies, and more and explore what these representations suggest about dominant attitudes towards incarcerated people, how this differs from the reality, and what can be done to combat the stereotypes that exist.
Scott, Rob, Willie Fullilove, Tyrone F. Muhammad, Erick Nava, Luis Saucedo, Earl Walker, & William Wells. (2011, April). Analysis of trends in New York Times reporting on education in 2010. Paper presented at the 2nd Annual College of Education Graduate Student Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL.
