Program Spotlight: College Bridge Writing
After a twenty-six year ban, Pell Grants will be accessible to incarcerated learners who want to pursue higher education beginning in July, 2023. The restoration of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people has the potential to dramatically increase their access to college programs. However, research shows that many incarcerated students lack some of the crucial literacy and numeracy skills that are necessary to succeed in college. The Petey Greene Program (PGP) is dedicated to partnering with incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated learners to bridge that gap by offering college readiness programs.
Writing, critical thinking and meta-cognitive skills are especially important for success in higher education programs. During the 2020-2021 academic year, the PGP piloted a College Bridge writing course in partnership with the Washington D.C. Department of Corrections at the D.C. Jail. At the end of the pilot course, a student described being challenged by the course materials: “Each week the material surprisingly became more interesting. I enjoyed the diversity of the assignments. It was as if we were at an amusement park and each assignment was a different roller coaster of genres. For example: we journeyed from Emerson, Malcom X, O'Brien, Baldwin, Tolentino, and finally Akhmatova.”
“Wow! I get excited from recounting the experiences. Weekly, I was encouraged to open my mind, think conceptually, and challenge myself to be my best.”
The success of the pilot program led the PGP to expand our College Bridge course offerings. We continue to offer the college writing course in Washington, D.C. and have piloted courses in at the Boston Pre-Release Center in Massachusetts and FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey. These writing courses are taught by faculty and graduate students who were recruited from the PGP’s higher education partners, including the University of Maryland, Dartmouth College, and Rutgers University. Students in the course also receive one-on-one support from PGP tutors who are trained in writing pedagogy. The College Bridge program was designed by the PGP’s Academic and Grants Manager, who manages it in collaboration with regional staff. In January 2021, the PGP was selected for the second year in a row to host an ACLS Leading Edge Postdoctoral Fellow, who supports the implementation and evaluation of the program in Washington, D.C. PGP College Bridge program was designed by PGP Academic and Grants Manager Chiara Benetollo, who coordinates it in collaboration with regional staff. In January 2021, PGP was selected for the second year in a row to host an ACLS Leading Edge Postdoctoral Fellow, who supports the implementation and evaluation of the program in Washington, D.C.
The College Bridge writing program is designed to prepare students for college coursework, but the PGP is also mindful that the students we serve may have a variety of educational goals. At FCI Fort Dix, instructors Amanda Harris and Jennie Snow surveyed students and found that while some wanted to pursue higher education, other students had different goals related to improving their writing skills. Some wished to write creatively, while others used writing to advocate for themselves and wanted to write more effective letters of appeal. The realization that students came to the course with a range of goals led the instructors to modify course assignments so that they better serve students’ needs. Amanda and Jennie included an argument-based, op-ed assignment to help serve students working on their argumentative and advocacy-focused writing skills. The course culminates in a traditional final writing assignment, but as the instructors explain, they structured it to allow students to hone different skills: “a literary analysis capstone assessment based on [Ursula] Le Guin’s Sci-Fi novella, The Word for World is Forest [...]will have two tracks that allow students the space to focus on examining the creative elements of the text or presenting an argument based on the text.”
In addition to adapting content, the delivery of PGP’s College Bridge program has also been flexible, in order to meet the needs of our students and program partners. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the pilot program was designed to be delivered to students via tablets, an educational technology that is now widely available in many carceral facilities. The program was developed so that it could adapt according to public health restrictions and could be offered fully virtually, or using a blended learning model, where students access course content virtually and receive in-person tutoring support. The PGP’s Spring 2022 lineup of writing courses demonstrate that the College Bridge writing program can be modified to equitably serve students in a variety of settings and public health conditions: in Boston, course instruction took place in-person with virtual tutoring support; in New Jersey, both instruction and tutoring take place in person; in D.C. course delivery and tutoring have remained virtual.
Tutors play an essential role in ensuring that the course meets the students’ individualized needs, fostering their self-confidence and creating meaningful pedagogical connections.
“My experience has been nothing short of fantastic. [My tutor] showed genuine interest in me as a human being. [She] infused a confidence in me and my writing that made me want to ameliorate my writing while striving to make myself and her proud.”