All-star soon-to-be-seniors Haley Perkins ’13 and Paul Silverman ’13 write in to let you know about a forum, Prison Education and Pre-College Pedagogy, that they will be offering in Fall 2012. The forum will provide a theoretical and practical look at issues in American education systems, and incorporate a significant service learning component at 3 different prisons near Wesleyan. As they’ll need to coordinate with these three different facilities over the summer, applications for the forum will be due next Sunday, May 27th.

So after you crush those finals, make sure you apply! More info from the lovely Haley Perkins ’13 below:

This service-learning seminar will consist of a 3 hour seminar course at Wesleyan, in addition to the facilitation of a 3-hour college-prep workshop in a Connecticut State prison. The seminar will use the institutional, intellectual, and political workings of public school in the contemporary U.S. as a template against which we raise questions and imagine possibilities for education in alternative settings.

The course will require sustained comparison of teaching, learning, and curriculum development in prison with similar activities in non-incarcerated school settings, and will use ethnographic methods to reflect on prison and school as “cultures.” Course readings will address the challenges of work with “underprepared” students and will ask students to question, frame, and articulate issues of prison education during class time, while planning and facilitating pre-college workshops at Cheshire, York, and CJTS men’s, women’s and juvenile prisons respectively.