Collaborating Across Prison Walls and Borders: Co-creating an All-Island Curriculum that Builds Empathy and Mutual Understanding between Diverse Communities of North and South of Ireland Prison-University Partnerships

Academics from University College Cork and Queens University Belfast have over the past two years established university-prison education partnerships with Cork Prison and HMP Hydebank Wood. Borrowing from similar US and UK based models, the Cork ‘Inside Out’ and Belfast ‘Learning Together’ projects are the first such courses on the island of Ireland, with university students and incarcerated persons studying side-by-side as equals in the prison classroom. Students and educators report that participation in the prison-university classroom raises empathy and provides skills for entering into dialogue across social differences. The North/South HEA-funded ‘TOGETHER’ collaboration between these two projects will now research the learning from these innovative approaches to university-prison education with incarcerated and university students in and across both sites. TOGETHER will facilitate incarcerated and university students to act as researchers, who will document and analyse
how their different backgrounds shape their experiences of justice, stigma, labelling and harm.
Through creative, visual and participatory methods, incarcerated and university students will record moments of learning in the prison-university classroom. Importantly, this will also provide insights into how prison-university classrooms facilitate students in building empathy towards their peers from diverse backgrounds. Both Belfast and Cork classrooms will also collaborate to further improve each other’s work. As a result of this process, TOGETHER will then produce the first all-island Curriculum for prison-university partnerships. This Curriculum will be the first of its kind on the island of Ireland, adapted specifically to an all-island context, and moving beyond the imported ideas from the US and the UK.