OBB’s first course for incarcerated women welcomed 12 students at Taycheedah Correctional Institution as new Badgers. The students, who ranged in age from 25 to 55, quickly identified something they all had in common: a passion for lifelong learning. Many shared they had spent years on waitlists for educational programming before being accepted to OBB. “I’m proud to be a student once again,” Holly shared in her commencement speech for the program–a sentiment that had only grown since new student orientation. “I came to this class as a seed, a potential waiting to be planted. Now, at the end of the semester, I am leaving with a piece of me that I have brought to life, something that I have awakened inside of me that will continue to grow.“
The success of this first cohort allowed OBB to continue offering coursework at Taycheedah this spring. Students in English 100 are reading works by Annie Dillard, Amy Tan, Plato, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and many others while honing their own writing skills. Plans are also being developed for future programming at Taycheedah–including noncredit classes that will allow prospective students and OBB alumni to continue writing in community throughout the summer.
For the past few years, Instructor and OBB associate director Jennifer “Jen” Fandel has spent hours in her car each week driving from Madison to Columbia and Oakhill Correctional Institutions to teach incarcerated men. Adding Taycheedah to her list brings her full circle, as she began her prison teaching at a women’s correctional facility in Missouri (https://racstl.org/poetry-in-prisons/). Jen notes, “Since that experience, I always wanted to get back to teaching in a women’s prison.” She says that watching the women in her Missouri class change in front of her eyes was like viewing a time-lapse film: “each week I could see dramatic growth in the women—in their healing, in their confidence, in their belief that their voice had power, and their trust in themselves and their class community.”
Jen finds the same transformation occurring in her English 100 courses at Taycheedah. As students discuss course readings and share their own essays, they uncover obstacles they have overcome and are still overcoming. “The stories of our lives shape who we are, and it’s always inspiring to watch students realize that they have the ability to revise these stories. They are the heroes of their stories, conquering the pain of addiction, abuse, homelessness, neglect, and other battles.”
Bringing face-to-face courses from Madison into a Fond du Lac prison is no small administrative feat. OBB’s expansion into four Wisconsin prisons (Oakhill, Racine, Columbia, Taycheedah) with plans for further growth wouldn’t be possible without the support of donors and organizations that have generously funded Odyssey Beyond Bars because they believe in its mission of changing lives. As Holly observed at the end of her OBB class, “This graduation sheds my old nature and is the beginning of my academic journey.”