Tufts On-Campus Students
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Apply to become a Teaching Assistant at MCI-Concord for Fall 2023:
The application is now closed for the Fall 2023 semester.
TAing Inside: As a teaching assistant (TA), your support is essential to the degree program at MCI-Concord, a medium-security men’s prison about a 30-40 minute drive from Tufts’ Medford Campus. Your job is to provide support to your faculty members and help facilitate learning inside through two-hour recitation sections each week. The recitation sections will take place on a different day than your faculty member’s class. You will be partnered with 1-3 other Tufts students who have a similar experience with and interest in the course material.
This is very intentionally not volunteer labor. TAs earn a 4 credits for this work. Attending an additional class meeting on Fridays is required to earn this credit. Once accepted as a TA by your instructor, the TUPIT Director, and the MA DOC, you will be granted permission to register for CVS 0099: Internship for Social Change: Prison Justice Studies. There is also a graduate level section available for this course for graduate students.
Fall 2023 Courses at MCI-Concord:
- Introduction to Genetics with Kirby Johnson
- Graphic Art: Book Design with Chantal Zakari
- Alien Worlds with Andrew West
- Civic Studies Capstone
Apply to enroll in the MyTERN Program courses offered Fall 2023.
The application is now closed for the Fall 2023 semester.
We will be offering two courses in Fall 2023 (course descriptions can be found here):
- Literatures of Justice
- Finance and Technology for Civic Impact
MyTERN PROGRAM: The Tufts Education Reentry Network (TERN) program, MyTERN, includes people impacted by incarceration and students from Tufts Medford campus learning together in an environment organized by the principles and community-based values of transformative justice. MyTERN was co-created by TUPIT students from MCI-Concord, the TUPIT Director, a small group of Tufts undergraduates, and dedicated community members with deep knowledge of incarceration. MyTERN combines Civic Studies courses in higher learning with community involvement supported by our broad network of partner organizations. This 4-course certificate program is accredited by both Tufts University, which awards the certificate, and Bunker Hill Community College, allowing for easy transfer of credits.
The Inside-Out Course is only offered in the Spring. Please check back here for updates for the Spring 2024 semester application in Fall 2023.
INSIDE-OUT PROGRAM: Tufts University has offered a credit-bearing course for incarcerated people and non-incarcerated Tufts students at MCI-Shirley, Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, and MCI-Concord. Inside-Out™ courses are taught by faculty members trained through the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to lead “courses that allow participants to encounter each other as equals, often across profound social barriers.” The practice of bringing inside and outside students together for “engaged and informed dialogue allows for transformative learning experiences that invite participants to take leadership in addressing crime, justice, and other issues of social concern.” This course is open to Tufts undergraduate and graduate students and requires faculty permission after a written application and faculty interview.
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The Literature of Confinement (Civic Studies 150). Instructor: Hilary Binda, Director TUPIT and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; Senior Lecturer in Civic Studies
4 credit course from 11 am – 5 pm on Wednesdays (including travel) at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. Transportation is provided from Tufts University.
This interdisciplinary literature, history, and sociology course asks how writers from different historical periods, regions, cultures, and genders have understood experiences of confinement and freedom. What are some of the effects on our understanding of “humanity” & the “human” of different kinds of confinement – economic, educational, legal, physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and social? The Literature of Confinement runs as an Inside-Out class composed of Tufts (“outside”) students and incarcerated (“inside”) students in equal numbers. Through small and large group discussions and weekly written work on literary texts, students will analyze a variety of works that engage discourses of identity and difference, including race, culture, economic class, gender, and sexuality. A weekly focus on experiential learning across cultural, social, and literal barriers in addition to the regular practice of close reading, critical analysis, and self-reflection enables all students to increase their qualitative knowledge about power in the face of social injustice and civic responsibility. This course aims to facilitate not only expanded literacy, widely defined but also learning about differences while enabling new modes of identification and fostering new forms of understanding through shared acts of interpretation and imagination. Toward the end of the term, inside and outside students work together to complete interdisciplinary project-based work of the group’s invention and design.
Tutor with the Petey Greene Program
“The Petey Greene Program supports the academic goals of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people through high-quality volunteer tutoring programs, while educating volunteers on the injustice manifest in our carceral system.”
Join the Student Prison Education and Activism Coalition
Email TUPIT@tufts.edu for more info!