We are proud to share that EJP is offering our first-ever graduate-level course this Fall 2025 at Danville prison. Soo Ah Kwon, a professor of Asian American Studies, and long-time EJP instructor, is teaching EPOL 518: Youth, Culture and Society.
While pursuing her Ph.D. at Berkeley researching youth activism, Soo Ah first got involved with issues of mass incarceration through a campaign to stop the expansion of a juvenile justice center in Alameda, California.
“One of the things I tell my students,” says Soo Ah, “when we talk about social problems in the US, one of the biggest societal issues that we have to address is prisons.”
This experience sparked her interest, and when she later had a chance to teach for the Education Justice Project, she jumped at the opportunity.
“Youth, Culture and Society,” is the third class that Soo Ah has taught for EJP. “It’s really thinking intersectionally about youth as a social construction,” she says. “We go through the way that youth or adolescence is usually taught either through psychological lens or as an educational model. We look at youth more as a social construct.”
“Last week, we looked at ethnographies of youth. We did one on juvie hall, which is a pretty heavy topic,” she elaborated. Many EJP students have been through juvenile detention as youths.
The students have been taking turns with facilitating the graduate seminar, each leading the first 45 minutes of class to get the conversation started.
“The students have been enjoying that one of their peers is leading,” says Soo Ah. “They are more nervous about presenting to each other than what I think.”
The challenges of teaching in prison with no internet have informed how Soo Ah is now teaching classes at the Urbana campus with the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the classroom.
“I’ve already been shifting my approach, to do more in-class assignments. I’ve been doing more journaling, non-essay assignments, where they are not just spitting out papers. It has forced me to think pedagogically, what is the purpose?”
After more than 15 years of teaching higher education classes at the Danville prison, EJP director Rebecca Ginsburg says, there is a sizeable number of students who are now ready and eager to enroll in graduate level courses. “When we started, back in 2008, it would have made no sense to offer graduate courses, as none of our students had undergraduate degrees.”
In the last five years, Eastern Illinois University started a program at Danville that awards undergraduate degrees.
“So the pressure has been on to support our students in continuing their education,” says Ginsburg. “And we’re happy to do so.”