Turning the classroom inside-out

When most UD students picture their classrooms, they think of rows of desks in Miriam Hall, standing at high tables in the Science Center or a lecture in the Humanities building. But a small group of students in UD’s Inside-Out prison exchange course think of the classroom a little differently —  inside the walls of prison.

The Inside-Out program, founded in 1997 at Temple University by Lori Pompa, now brings UD students (outside students) and students who are incarcerated (inside students) together in a shared classroom. Throughout the semester, they work through readings, projects and discussions as part of a UD-facilitated course. Subject matter varies; this spring, religious studies professor Kelly Johnson facilitates a religious studies and faith traditions course.

At first, the divide between the groups can feel wide. 

Criminal justice senior Abbeygale Adams participated in the program last spring. “I went into it a little intimidated, if I’m going to be honest, because I’ve never taken a class like this, and you kind of don’t know what to expect,” she said. 

As the weeks pass, students learn to look past assumptions and work together. Walls come down. Both outside and inside students begin to see one another beyond labels like “incarcerated” or “college kids.” As people, they all have common ground. 

Johnson said, “What people do in the class is practice recognizing each other's humanity.”

“It's something that you can consciously learn one way or another,” she said, “to become more fearful and more closed, or more curious and able to actually encounter the other person as they are, as somebody who is different. Maybe you’ll like them, maybe you won’t, but to be genuinely curious, open, and interested to find out who this person is.”

Through open dialogue and collaboration, students build trust. By the end of the course, many describe a sense of community.

Celia Koch, a senior psychology major who participated in 2024, said, “By the end, we were all so excited to see each other every week, just interacting and working on our projects together.”

Inside-Out asks students to move through hard conversations rather than around them. Agreement isn’t the goal; engagement is. Students learn to treat differences as sources of perspective, not barriers. In the process, they develop empathy and the ability to work across experiences.

This form of experiential learning is central to the course’s impact. The environment at Warren Correctional can’t be replicated on campus, and the insights students gain come from direct interaction, rather than abstraction or theory.

Criminal justice and security studies professor and Inside-Out facilitator Susybel Kallsen said, “I can tell you all the stories I've had at Monday, but it’s my story, and I know how it felt, I know how it smelled, I know what it was like. I’m connected to all of my senses as I experience my lived experience, and it's hard to convey that to students in the same way. Each develops their own personalized lived experience through participation in the program, rather than simply receiving it secondhand.”

The semester ends with a final project and ceremony, celebrating their accomplishments throughout the course and the connections they have forged with one another. After that, they say goodbye. Personal information remains confidential, and no contact continues after the program. For both groups, it’s a bittersweet close to a transformative experience.

“That's painful at that moment when you have to walk away from people,” said Johnson, “We walk away from the class with a wound of knowing we belong to people that we can't be connected to in that way.”