Supporting the Prison Education Project
WashU Libraries are collaborating with teaching faculty to ensure that research and informational support are available to students in the Washington University Prison Education Project (PEP). Launched in 2014, WashU PEP offers a college education to incarcerated students at the Missouri Correctional Center (MECC) in Pacific, Missouri, and the Women’s Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center (WERDCC) in Vandalia, Missouri. WashU PEP grants the associate in arts and the bachelor of science in integrated studies degrees and students undertake coursework, attend lectures by professors, and work on projects and assignments.
Since fall 2022, the Libraries have aimed to offer students additional support for writing research papers and access to reference materials that can help advance their projects. The task is both crucial and challenging because prison inmates have no access to the internet and therefore to the library catalog and databases for their research.
“In my capacity as faculty for PEP, library support has been indispensable in taking student research to the next level. This access to a wealth of information is really unique in the prison learning environment and enables students to follow their own interests by reading and exploring beyond the works assigned in a given class. For my courses in sociology, this has meant that students can dive deeper into various elements of the social world that interest them. Students have explored a range of topics from gun control policy to reproductive justice to the school-to-prison pipeline, facilitated by the library support that connects PEP students to the knowledge available from WashU Libraries,” said Ella Segrist, program manager of the WashU Prison Education Project.
Christie Peters, head of area studies, humanities, and social sciences librarians, is the Prison Education Project librarian and assists PEP students, faculty, and staff with library research and writing resources. She has offered instruction on information resources to students in classes on data visualization, media literacy, women, gender, and sexuality studies, and capstone research methods. In addition to classroom instruction, Peters responds to questions and requests from students about assignments via UnlockED, the online course management system used by PEP instructors to share course materials and deliver feedback to students. Much of her work involves downloading large numbers of primary and secondary sources, including articles, book chapters, datasets, and multimedia files, to facilitate student learning and exploration of research topics. Due to the challenges of pick-up, delivery, and oversight of print books at the PEP facilities, it remains difficult to make more than a few library books available to students, yet one more constraint of learning within prisons.
In her classroom workshops, Peters teaches students valuable skills in narrowing research topics, which will help them quickly identify appropriate reference materials for projects.
“Where traditional students have the advantage of serendipitous discovery, incarcerated students must be intentional about the kind of information they seek from the outset. This is a significant additional step that incarcerated students must take to use information effectively in their research assignments. It requires more heavily mediated research and reference support from the library, both in terms of instruction about how to evaluate information needs, and how to articulate their research needs concisely so that the librarian can efficiently help them find the resources they are requesting,” explained Peters. She is working towards establishing reference-ready collections at both facilities related to required and regularly offered classes to help students get started on preliminary research and determine the most effective reference materials to request from the library.
To extend library support to as many students as possible, Peters is working on building out scalable services for PEP students and staff, including regular instruction in key classes like Critical & Researched Writing, the college writing equivalent for incarcerated students, workshops for students that are not bound to specific courses, classroom instructional support as needed, including embedded student support through UnlockEd, and support for PEP instructors as they plan the library research component of their classes.
“The collaboration with PEP is new, and there is a learning curve to understand what can be done and the exciting possibilities that come with it,” said Peters.