TOPICS: DEMOCRACY LAB: PRISON EDUCATION in Spring 2026 (FR3910A)

This innovative class, a collaboration between the university and the prison, brings eight AUP students and a similar number of people detained at the La Santé prison together to share an educative and creative space for one semester. The questions framing the class will be: How do we learn? What are the obstacles to learning? What does it mean to learn one from the other?

At each weekly workshop, AUP participants (“outside students”) and La Santé participants (“inside students”) will read together short texts concerning the theme; share ideas and elaborate and answer questions emerging from the readings. In small groups, they will participate in activities in responses to prompts, with the goal of moving forward together to consider fundamental questions about education and learning.

The challenge of the class for the participants is the creation of the final collaborative project defined by the inside and outside participants working together. This project will be presented at a festive event on the final day of the class, for an audience including invited guests from AUP and from the prison. Certificates of completion will be presented.

This course is the sixth in a series of classes bringing AUP and La Santé into collaboration. Our approach is inspired by Walls to Bridges, a program that has proven successful in creating learning communities in correctional settings in Canada, and by the American Inside-Out Prison Exchange program. Over 130 such mixed courses are offered worldwide, including more than 100 in the United States, notably at Yale University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 24 in Canada, notably at York University and Wilfrid Laurier University, and five in Europe, in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom.