Higher Education for the Justice-Involved

Higher Education for the Justice-Involved (HEJI) 

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Program Overview 

I. Background  

Â鶹´«Ã½ Higher Education for the Justice-Involved (HEJI; formerly Prison Education Outreach Program) has operated in close partnership with the Michigan Department of Corrections since 2017, offering coursework and mentoring sessions to incarcerated individuals at the Lakeland Correctional Facility Coldwater, MI. With readings and assignments based on upper-level philosophy courses, the program administered the following sessions at the Lakeland facility during its successful pilot phase: Critical Thinking (Fall 2018); Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2019); Education and Human Flourishing (Fall 2019); and Ethical and Social Theory: Mass Incarceration in the U.S. (Spring 2020; Covid-impacted). 

 

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 II. Launch of Credit- and Credential-Bearing Programming 

Starting in August of 2023, HEJI will offer face-to-face instruction to Â鶹´«Ã½s at the Lakeland Correctional Facility. For the first cohort, 25-30 Â鶹´«Ã½s will be offered admission into the Student Planned Major, a Bachelor of Arts degree in the College of Arts and Sciences at WMU. To successfully complete this rigorous degree program, Â鶹´«Ã½s must complete a minimum of 122 college credits over approximately five years. HEJI will provide humanities-rich, dialogical, relational, and textual instruction and college credit towards stackable credentials in the liberal arts. 

 

III. Â鶹´«Ã½ the Proposed Liberal Arts Coursework 

The Liberal Arts coursework in which the HEJI program is rooted will provide Â鶹´«Ã½s with the opportunity to engage with fundamental concerns of the human experience via the study of important texts in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond. The coursework will (1) cultivate the critical thinking, analytic, and creative skills which enable Â鶹´«Ã½s to more clearly think, read, write, and speak—skills which enable Â鶹´«Ã½s to succeed as citizens, regardless of vocation; (2) prepare Â鶹´«Ã½s to analyze evidence, synthesize conflicting points of view, evaluate assumptions and biases to attain a balanced perspective, and develop critical interpretations of their significance; and (3) provide Â鶹´«Ã½s with a shared intellectual experience so often absent from institutions of higher education.  

Through the study of important works in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond, Student Planned Major coursework will provide Â鶹´«Ã½s with the opportunity to engage with many of life’s key questions (What does it mean to be human? What is freedom? Who am I? What is love?) and themes (justice, truth, resilience, identity). In our search for understanding, we ask questions of things, of books, of people, and so on. But things, books, and people also ask questions of us; they question us right back. This type of education is not an alternative to professional or technical modes of education—it is the very foundation on which they stand.