Academics

After nearly a year of suspended programming, we are thrilled to resume Associate of Arts degree courses to help sustain students’ academic development during this extended period of disruption.

For an eight-week spring term, we are offering 13 one-unit credit correspondence courses that address one of the following learning outcomes: quantitative competency, written communication, critical thinking, or civic and community engagement. A full list of course offerings is available below.

We are also mailing math and writing practice curricula to college preparatory students, and offering a few other non-credit extracurricular opportunities to all students. There are 13 returning faculty facilitating the credit courses and 14 supporting college preparatory work; each course will have a maximum of 30 students.

Though we hope to be back in the classroom in person soon, we are excited to continue providing high-quality education to students at San Quentin in the interim.

The following one-credit correspondence courses will be offered this term:

Landmark U.S. Court Cases

This course is an in-depth study of three landmark court cases, each chosen because it illustrates something central to the U.S. legal system: McFall v. Shimp, a 1978 case wherein the court had to decide whether to force one person to donate bone marrow against their will in order to save the life of another person, Brown v. Board of Ed, a 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case wherein the court decided that racially segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and Riggs v. Palmer, an 1889 case about whether a grandson who murdered his grandfather could inherit his money. 

Popular Music & Social Criticism in Modern America

This course explores popular music as social commentary in modern America. Students will look at the role of music in protest and response in recent decades beginning with the civil rights and peace movements of the mid-twentieth century, through the response of Chicano rock, funk, and hip-hop to the issues of the day, and continuing into the twenty-first century and recent developments related to politics and social issues. 

Strategies for Activism in U.S. History

What strategies have activists employed throughout the history of the United States to fight for social justice and civic change? This course considers the U.S.’s history of activism from Reconstruction to 2020 with a focus on the approaches adopted by civil rights leaders to not only communicate but also garner support for their causes within a range of movements.

Presidential Inaugural Addresses

On January 20, President Joe Biden delivered his inaugural address at an especially charged moment in the nation’s history. This course asks students to read, reflect on, and write about the civic signals Biden sought to send to his fellow citizens, and how they compare with the signals sent by six previous presidents in their noteworthy inaugural addresses.

Statistics of Vaccinations and Herd Immunity

This course explores how viruses such as COVID-19 spread, how vaccinations help us slow the spread to achieve herd immunity, and how statistics help us understand it all.

Future Vision: Science Fiction Utopias

Drawing upon science fiction and other speculative writings, students will explore and critically examine problems and possibilities of how social systems might be constructed, and imagine parameters towards a future society. Readings include work by authors such as Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Jose Saramego, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luis Borges, Pamela Sargent, Mary Doria Russell.

Fire, Forests, and Forest Fires

This is an exploratory survey of the literature of forest wildfires, firefighting experiences, fire management, and policy, past, present, and future. Readings tell the stories of smoke jumpers, heroic and tragic, Indigenous legends and native land practices, as well as a discussion of California forest and fire ecology.

Climate Change

This course introduces the basic science of climate change. Students will discuss how carbon dioxide affects the climate and humanity’s role in the production of carbon dioxide.

The Legacies of “Redlining” and “White Flight”

Redlining is the illegal practice of refusing to provide financial services to consumers based on the area where they live. This course will introduce students to a mix of historiographical writings, some fiction and poetry, and recent studies to offer a brief overview over redlining then and now, including maps illustrating the practice. These maps hold the key to understanding why American cities today look the way they do—from the distribution of poverty and environmental pollutants to gentrification, COVID-deaths, and police killings. 

Thinking about Thinking: Introspective Psychology

Introspective Psychology is a method of studying conscious experience by examining our own thoughts, images, and feelings. Through assignments and readings, students will practice this method and learn about its place in the history of psychological science. 

Principles of Rhetoric

In this course, students will study the fundamental principles of rhetoric, analyzing how authors and speakers convey a message to an intended audience. Using these techniques, students will write a persuasive essay on a topic of their choice.

Poetry in Times of Crisis

Students will explore various poets who in different historical moments address moments of political and cultural crisis, from war and revolution to civil rights and environmental struggles, combining both literary analysis as well as their own creative writing.

The Personal Essay

In this course, students will read, contemplate, and reread one personal essay a week. The capstone project will be to write a personal essay of their own.

Dear friends,

I hope you are all safe and as well as can be in these strange and hard times. We are still unable to run our college inside the prison, and we miss our students and regular activities tremendously. However, in the meantime we are working on a number of projects to serve our current and former students and to build our college for the future. Updates on our students and some of our projects are below.

Student News

As you’re likely aware, San Quentin was the site of a COVID-19 outbreak that infected approximately two-thirds of the prison. Twenty-six incarcerated people and one officer died in that outbreak. Two of our students were in that number.

In better news, almost 100 of our students have been released from San Quentin since March.

We’re hopeful that there won’t be a second wave of COVID-19 at the prison, but we nevertheless anticipate not being able to resume programs in the prison for some time.

Academic and Educational Programming

In the absence of normal programming, our goal is to continue to offer opportunities for students to learn, think, and engage and to build our college for the future when we can return to campus. This fall, we will be offering the option to students in three Spring 2020 courses to complete these courses remotely: US History, Ethics, and Comparative Religion. The criteria we used to determine courses that students might complete remotely were that students must be able to obtain the remaining course skills, learning, and content without feedback from instructors, by reading and writing alone, and without scaffolding, repeated lessons, or regular assessments, so it was only the three more advanced courses, in which students need less feedback and in-person attention, that qualified. Huge thanks to Ian Sethre, Bill Smoot, Benjamin Perez, and Oliver Organista for your willingness to take on this further teaching!

We are also putting together a reader to send to all students and former students inside the prison, with contributions from many of our faculty. This will be going out in early October, and includes a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, brain teasers, and other intellectually challenging and engaging texts, as well as discussion prompts for further analysis. Our goal is to provide all students with material to help them continue their intellectual growth and discovery, even in the absence of regular coursework. Thank you to everyone who contributed! We will also be sending an activity packet to students who were enrolled in the 99s in the spring.

To continue such opportunities as the pandemic extends into 2021, we’re currently exploring the feasibility of non-credit distance learning modules for Spring 2021. Like the non-credit workshops we’ve conducted in person the past, in topics such as financial accounting, public policy, and environmental justice, these units would introduce students to a discrete topic and allow them the chance to maintain their studies. While it is clear that such projects in no way replace face-to-face learning, we hope to continue to offer students projects to engage their minds and intellects.

We are mindful that our students only make up a portion of those incarcerated at the prison, and that the past six months have run the gamut of extreme stress to illness to trauma for all inside, so we’re happy to have been able to provide some resources available to all those incarcerated at San Quentin as well as to San Quentin staff. Thanks to support from colleagues at iTVS, we’ve been able to supply dozens of documentaries for everyone incarcerated at San Quentin to view on SQTV, the closed-circuit television inside the prison. We sent two sets of packets to all at San Quentin, in April and again in July, with reading material, soap, beef jerky, packets of fish, envelopes and stamps, and other essential goods. We also provided hot food and on-site showers to San Quentin staff. (For more on these efforts, see “Our COVID-19 Response Initiative for the Incarcerated Community in California”.)

An especially exciting development is the work we’ve been doing to expand student access to technology. We’re doing intensive research into options for bringing laptops into the prison for students to use for research, learning, and writing. It’s unclear yet whether there we will be able to use this initiative to develop short-term remote learning opportunities, or if we will have to wait until we can run our physical program again to make laptops available to students, but we are exploring all options, with the help of a consultant, Ethan Annis, with whom we’ve developed a comprehensive plan for our college’s technological advances. As faculty and students well know, this will mark an enormous advance, from the days of our “technology” consisting of whiteboards, DVD players, and overhead projectors, and will allow students access to a panoply of learning opportunities and advances, not to mention befitting our status as an independent college.

Finally, with the partnership and guidance of David Cowan, our Director of Operations, who is also the co-founder of the re-entry organization, Bonafide, we’re working to build out our Alumni Affairs division, to better communicate with and serve our former students. This work involves networking with and offering opportunities and resources for paroled former students, including workshops in computer literacy, workforce development, and financial literacy. Our Director of Student Affairs, David Durand, is leading this work, and we look forward to expanding it back inside the prison to students preparing for parole.

Accreditation

We are moving forward with preparatory work for our independent accreditation application, which is required to move us from Candidacy to Independent Accreditation. This work consists largely of building our capacity to assess student learning and institutional effectiveness. Huge thanks go to Theresa Roeder and Josie Innamorato, who have been leading some key math program review pieces, including a review and analysis of students’ math autobiographies, and generating a report from external reviewers on our math program, which will guide our path to improving it in the future. Last, we have contracted with and started implementing our new student information system, the software that will help us track and report on student data. Because we aren’t currently able to run classes, some data collection on current student learning is impossible, but we’re doing our best to prepare for learning assessment and for reporting on student achievement when we return to the prison, all of which will support the final goal of independent accreditation.

In a time of immense loss and change, when we miss our students and regular program tremendously, we are all working hard to maintain our contact with and support of students and to build towards an improved college. Without wanting to proclaim any positive aspect of a pandemic or wildfires, or any of the other challenges our nation and world currently face, our work gives me hope and determination to continue to move forward.

My very best wishes,
Amy