Author: elinoreggers

This summer working with the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative (BEJI) allowed me to learn and grow in ways I never could have imagined. The opportunity to get undergraduate work experience within a social justice field was quite an impactful experience and one that will certainly shape my future professional path. I learned not only a great deal about the world of educational justice and carceral reform, but I also got to see how I personally fit into this framework. Through challenging and fulfilling assignments, I was pushed this summer to be a better educator, researcher, team member, and collaborator. My internship allowed me to be both a student and a practitioner of the work we were conducting. Because of this, my confidence in professional settings grew, and I was able to practice advocacy and demonstrate initiative.

In my time with the BEJI, I feel I accomplished quite a lot. As the undergraduate intern, I was directly responsible for expanding opportunities available to undergrads and making sure our voices were heard. I effectively pitched the idea of paid research working groups for undergraduates, which will launch as a pilot program this fall. Additionally, I communicated with Brandeis CMS, and am now co-creating the BEJI website. Finally, I was able to help restructure the content offered in our education workshops and better tailor the content to meet the needs of our students. These are all accomplishments that I worked quite hard to achieve, and I take great pride in.

Having completed all of these things, I feel I was an impactful contributor to the BEJI, and look forward to how my role will continue to flourish with the initiative in the fall. The volume of work I was assigned or took on also afforded me wonderful insight into the world of work that I did not know before. For folks considering interning with the BEJI or an initiative like it, I now feel privileged to offer advice on what you can do to make the work all the more meaningful. 

The first piece of advice I would give to someone interested in an internship like this is to honor the experience they bring to the table. As an undergraduate, it can seem daunting to enter a workplace staffed by adult professionals. Through my love for this work, the training and support from Hiatt, and the kindness of those I worked with, my age never felt like a deficit. Instead, I was honest when I needed help and advocated for what I believed was right. As a result, those I worked with trusted me. I honored both the areas I had room to grow in, as well as my strengths. A new set of eyes on a project is often a welcome presence! Lean into this opportunity and allow who you are and the unique skill set you bring to the table to guide you.

The final piece of advice I would offer is a note on intention. The world of summer internships can be a daunting one. It is easy to get lost in what sounds most sophisticated, or which job is likely to propel you the farthest. From my experience with WOW, I learned that the personal pride and care  you can attach to whatever it is you do is the greatest marker of success. If you are intentional about finding a job that is meaningful to you, it will be clear to those hiring you, those who you work with, and those with whom you spend time. 

Working with the BEJI was an intentional and incredible experience. Being able to reflect on it through these blog posts has made it that much more special. And I hope, through the culmination of these posts, it is evident just how hard I have tried to follow the advice I have laid out and how wonderful the outcomes have been as a result.

Community is not something that can simply be taught; it must be practiced. At Brandeis, we see community take real form through the actions of professors and students alike in cultivating spaces for sharing, growth, and togetherness. In a year of online classes and social distancing during the pandemic, Brandeis was able to maintain and foster a warm community for its students both in and outside of the classroom. Whether it was professors sharing family recipes with our class to enjoy over break, or pairing students up as check-in buddies amid early days of quarantine, our classrooms shifted and evolved to find new ways to be together. This community nourished and sustained me in ways that were of great significance. As I began to look for summer work, I knew it would be important to find an organization that held the same views on community as I hold personally.

Community-building at Brandeis begins before students even arrive on campus through the help of orientation leaders. And the community-building done at Brandeis has long-lasting impacts as can be seen through its expansive alumni networks, and the effort folks put in to remain involved with campus culture after graduation. We see communities built in the classroom that take on legs to lead groups out far beyond those academic settings. Challenging Brandeis and holding the university accountable have been major results of community-organized efforts for campus-based changes. Community looks different everywhere. But through intentional planning and self-reflection, community has the capacity to be generative in ways individualist and fixed mindsets never could.

Working with the BEJI this summer has meant merging the needs of several communities in order to conduct successful programming for our students and community partners. Bridging the ideas and needs of undergraduate students, graduate students, professors, and faculty into one comprehensive curriculum is no small task. Beyond this, our thirteen-week long workshop is a course taught by Brandeis students and offered to previously incarcerated adults. The diversity of thought and lived experience present in these classrooms demand a level of community-building that my time at Brandeis has well prepared me for cultivating. Taking what I have learned about community from Brandeis has both informed my thinking about my organization and has altered my approach to this internship.

I was at first apprehensive about the services offered by the BEJI. There are real considerations to be made about the efficacy and ethics behind bringing those privileged with access to higher education into learning spaces with those for whom education has been temporarily denied to them due to incarceration. What would this mean for how we would facilitate courses? How would we best be able to know and respond to the needs of our students? As I pondered these questions, I felt encouraged by the virtues of community as demonstrated to me by Brandeis. Community has a large and rather abstract definition. There is strength to this vagueness in that it allows wide-open space for creativity and construction. As I dove into this work, I informed my decisions through the lens of what I thought would best bring about community. 

The act of building community within the BEJI has taken on many forms. Sometimes it’s as small as the ice breaker we lead every session with or the question we discuss in breakout rooms. Though subtle, this act of interpersonal communication is the very work of community-building that initially grew my confidence to participate in college classrooms. In practicing openness and vulnerability with our students, we have created a brave space in which productive and difficult learning can progress effectively.

More explicit examples of the community include the weekly pedagogy conversations I introduced to our team meetings. Attended by our entire team, I saw these meetings as a crucial place to introduce mindful community action. Each week, a member of the team shares out resources ahead of time on a certain topic of pedagogy that relates to identity and incarceration. We then all engage these materials and come prepared to celebrate our facilitator and converse on the topic. These conversations redefine our commitment to our work and solidify the community investment we have in making change. 

I like to think about community as a network of overlapping lines and arcs. There are no hard edges or dead ends in the paths the communities grow on. In the development of the BEJI this summer, my own community has grown massively. It is my intention to continue this work of community growth and reflection throughout my time with the BEJI, and I believe that doing so will result in an overgrowth of compassion and connection amongst the wonderful folks that make our BEJI community what it is.

This summer, I am interning for the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. The BEJI is a new initiative dedicated to engaging in liberatory practices, fostering educational access for those who have been exposed to or interacted with incarceration. Centered in a collegiate setting, this unique initiative joins the facilitation and methodological skills of Brandeis professors with the innovative and interdisciplinary minds of undergraduate and graduate students. The program currently offers a series of workshops directed at adults and adolescents who have been impacted by the justice system and incarceration.

Through a series of courses and workshops taught by graduate and undergraduate students, the BEJI creates new pathways to education for those for whom the right to education has been denied or delayed. In the coming months, new pilot programs will seek to increase campus awareness of the need for justice reform, and expand services to youth involved in incarceration. 

My work this summer is directly related to the facilitation of our Partakers Empowerment Program and internal research on educational praxis and initiative advancement. The Partakers Empowerment Program is a thirteen-week course offered to adults who were previously incarcerated. Covering six learning modules, the class engages material spanning from financial literacy and professionalism to health and wellness, education, technology, and civic engagement. My unique participation in this program is to serve as the teaching assistant to the educational workshops. Together with my team, we have created a curriculum that addresses the specific needs of those previously incarcerated who are interested in education.

Part of what has been so rewarding about this program is continuously adapting our curriculum to better reflect the needs of our students from cohort to cohort. Now in our second iteration, my role has expanded from gathering educational resources and preparing them to facilitating lesson plans and prompting internal conversations about best practices for meaningful learning with our students.

In addition to this work, I am actively conducting research on how to make our program as successful and accessible as possible. Some of this work includes literature reviews on programs similar to ours and the construction of a new orientation program to be offered to onboarded volunteers this fall. These are small steps that will have a large impact on how our program is run and ensuring we do so in an accountable manner.

In order to expand the equitable and accessible goals of our program, I am also part of the teams at the BEJI who are building a website and newsletter for the initiative. Again, these are crucial steps towards making our programs and resources available to a wider audience. The images I have included in this blog are from our most recent newsletter. The logo featured in this post is brand new and is one I was responsible for creating. I am so excited to see the effect this newsletter will have in drawing students, faculty, and Boston community members alike to the BEJI.

The BEJI offers a dynamic and robust series of programs. What I have loved most about interning here is how these programs make my day-to-day responsibilities just as nuanced and engaging. As an education major, I recognize the inequities that exist in our education system. It is my belief that while making a change in this field, we must center and work from those who have been most marginalized by the world of education. For people who have experienced incarceration, access to education has been challenged. The carceral continuum, as it stands, actively interrupts and prematurely ends people’s access to education. The BEJI recognizes the power of education and is deeply invested in providing pathways to education for reentering citizens. It is because of the alignment between the BEJI’s mission statement and my own ethos on education that interning with the BEJI has been so fulfilling academically and personally.