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CRJ 198 Experiential & Service Learning: Prison Education

Reflection on Designing a Mutually-Beneficial Community-Engaged Learning Syllabus

Find my syllabus here.

This service-learning course addresses broader issues of educational inequality, mass incarceration, and the lack of access to enriching educational opportunities for those in the carceral system. Justice impacted people often face significant barriers to meaningful programs, literacy development and access to education while incarceration. Criminal justice students on the other hand, often don’t interact with those who are incarcerated. By designing and facilitating materials for a prison book club, and having the option to co-facilitate a book club meeting, students will contribute to addressing these inequities while also reflecting on the social, racial, and economic factors that shape incarceration and access to education.

The course also seeks to address issues of community reintegration and social stigma, recognizing that education in correctional settings plays an important role in personal growth, rehabilitation, and reducing recidivism. This course intends to be an active partnership with the California State Prisons, meaning that the librarians I work with will review course syllabi and provide feedback on the course design.

In this FLC, I learned how important soft skills such as leadership, flexibility and critical thinking are to the current workplace, and how service-learning courses are the places that students learn these skills. According to a global LinkedIn survey of more than 5,000 talent professionals, 92% of employers identify soft skills as their top hiring priority. These interpersonal and communication abilities are viewed as essential building blocks for all other professional competencies. This also includes self-awareness and compassion, something that students have noted in this internship so far, but that I am building on with future assignments.

Table of changes made
My course has been approved as a CSU- CSLI - Service Learning course!	Our website is one of the activities that students can work on for their final project.	This course inspired me in new ways on how to include my community partner (our prison librarians). They reviewed the course syllabus and provided critical input about the service-learning internship.

Moving Forward

I submitted my syllabus for review and I am thrilled to report that my course was evaluated and deemed certified as a CSLI - Service Learning course. It was found to use the distinct pedagogy of community-engaged learning found in the CSU-CEL Taxonomy and is now in the course catalog for Spring 2026! I am excited to integrate the suggestions of the reviewers and include a pre/mid/post evaluation.

For the course I created a series of assignments. The course assignments include a comprehensive final project, where students choose between creating a literature review, grant proposal, fundraising campaign, website contribution, research paper, or academic poster that aligns with their personal or professional goals. Additionally, students must design three curriculum packets for books read by prison book club members, each including a reading schedule, comprehension and discussion questions, and a PowerPoint lecture. Midway through the semester, students will complete a discussion post and research project summarizing best practices for prison education and book clubs. Throughout the term, they will also submit three reflective essays (pre-, mid-, and post-semester) that explore their learning and service experiences. Finally, students have the option to attend and facilitate a prison book club meeting in person, offering a firsthand understanding of the program’s impact. I am looking forward to Spring 2026!

Faculty Biography

Nicole Fox, Ph.D., analyzes how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, including how remembrances of adversity shape social change, collective memory and present-day social movements. She is an Associate Professor of criminal justice at California State University Sacramento where she teaches about atrocity crimes, mass incarceration, global criminology, and law. Her 2021 book, After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda, focuses on how memorials to past atrocity shape healing, community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her most recent project examines bystander intervention, with an emphasis on individuals who conducted acts of rescue during times of social unrest and political violence. Her scholarship has been published in Social Problems, Signs, Social Forces, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Genocide Studies, among others. Her work has generously been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Grant, the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Sociological Society’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and others. She also serves on the United Nations Economic and Social Council and contributes to the UN Commission for the Status of Women held annually at the UN headquarters. She volunteers in California State Prisons, running books clubs and facilitating letter writing programs.

Faculty bio photo

Community Engagement Center
This work was supported by the Community Engagement Center.