Key features of our BA program are:
- Two Year BA Completion Roadmap: Our Bachelor completion degrees are designed to graduate students in two years. This timeline is particularly significant for incarcerated women students, who report concerns of completing their degrees after being released from prison due to childcare responsibilities, as well as other life circumstances. Our time to graduation is amongst the fastest in the nation, ensuring that our students have the best chance of completing their degrees while incarcerated and re-entering society equipped to succeed in their lives after prison.
- Faculty Training Program in Transformative Prison Pedagogies: In partnership with our nationally recognized Center for Effective Teaching and Learning (CETL), we train all our faculty in transformative and inclusive pedagogies and high impact practices, specific to the prison context. Our faculty design course syllabi and create signature assignments that are inclusive, academically rigorous and create significant, rich learning experiences that empower students to reflect upon their transformation as individuals and equip them to be agents of change in their communities. We are currently developing a national prison education training certification in collaboration with CETL. This training program will allow us to build faculty capacity for prison education, while ensuring the highest pedagogical standards are achieved in prison education: a significant step forward in ensuring future sustainability and quality of prison higher education programs.
- In Person Student Support Services: We offer in-person, academic and career advising, as well as individual in-person tutoring in writing, research, quantitative reasoning, computer skills, job applications, resume building and professional development. Working with CETL, our campus career center, and our liberal studies department, we have created a new career engaged curriculum for our BA at CIW, as well as a center for academic and career skills. Together these two initiatives offer in-person, professional academic and career advising, as well as individual in-person tutoring in writing, research, quantitative reasoning, computer skills, job applications, resume building and professional development. These support services are critical for providing the academic support that students need to graduate in two years, as well as provi
- Career Engaged Curriculum: All our faculty and tutors for the Prison Graduation Initiative have completed CETL’s yearlong faculty learning community that takes an equity-minded, critical look at the professional abilities that the workplace will demand from graduates. The resulting curriculums explicitly connect student learning in the classroom to future careers. Throughout this process, students also receive frequent individual career counseling with a career counselor, and leave our program equipped with a LinkedIn profile and career portfolio (CV, cover letter, graduate school applications etc.) that prepares them to pursue their individual desired careers upon leaving prison.