One decision can change the rest of your life.
Good or bad, right or wrong, making one decision can act as the catalyst that alters the way you view the world around you forever. Inside-Out, and the closely affiliated Serbu Book Club, is a program and project, respectively, offered at the University that allows people to experience just this kind of change — a change experienced both by students and the men, women and children involved in the criminal justice system.
The Program
Inside-Out@@http://insideoutcenter.org/home.html@@ is an international program that was formed in 1997 and aims to bring “outside” college students into the same classroom as “inside” incarcerated men and women to learn and enter into discussion together.
The courses are offered in a number of different subjects, ranging from English literature to film studies to conflict resolution. Each course is taught by a University professor who generally does not spend class time lecturing at the front of the class but instead leads discussion of material with the inside and outside students.
“The main thing was just kind of recognition of shared humanity, and that was very profound,” said University senior Ted Sweeney@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=+Sweeney@@ of his Inside-Out experience. Sweeney, a planning and public policy major, was one of the first involved with the program at the University, enrolling in a literature class in which they read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”
University senior  and English major Alex Plattner,@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Plattner@@ who now interns for Inside-Out, agrees.
“You realize that really the world is a lot bigger and more mysterious than you thought,” he said. “We all have complicated lives and complicated stories, and it’s a really profound experience to recognize that not just in theory, or from reading a book, but by meeting someone who has been convicted of usually a pretty serious crime.”
Currently, Inside-Out at the University is operated through the Clark Honors College, but all students are able to enroll in certain courses. Courses are available in the fall, winter and spring terms and take place at the Oregon State Penitentiary.@@http://www.oregon.gov/DOC/OPS/PRISON/osp.shtml@@
Before each student is accepted into the program, the professor and graduate teaching fellow who will be teaching the class interview them. The same can be said for the inside students, all of whom are also screened by the professor as well as prison officials.
Although Plattner signed up for the course without knowing what to expect, he encourages other students to enroll in a course if not for the experience, but for an engaging class. “It sent me in a direction of being interested and really involved in social justice, and it changed my life. It’s hard to expect more than that out of a class.”
The Project
In the summer of 2010, four Inside-Out alumni proposed the idea of starting a book club that would be based on the Inside-Out model but would instead work with adolescents. The project founders Sweeney, Katie Dwyer, Madeline Bailey and Alison Kavanagh@@how to find these@@ worked the model into a curriculum that has now been incorporated into one school day a week for the youth at the Serbu Juvenile Justice Center@@http://www.lanecounty.org/Departments/YS/Pages/default.aspx@@ in Eugene.
Every Wednesday this winter, the book club — which is for Inside-Out alumni and has grown to 11 members in the past year and a half — visits the classroom in the center, interacting with nine students of varying ages.
“In an Inside-Out class, we were students learning with students, but with this we’re sort of students and teachers at the same time,” said Plattner, who is a co-coordinator for the club this year and who works with Sweeney — also a co-coordinator — on the curriculum for the class.
“Ultimate Spider-Man” comic books, the play version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” articles on politics and what makes an ideal community are a few examples of what the club has included.
The club focuses on drawing out the experiences of the youth involved and is based on what they are reading to not only see those experiences from a new perspective but to also stimulate meaningful discussion that might affect perceptions of future experiences.
“I believe it’s good for kids to be exposed to a lot of different influences and cultural experiences … and so I love having the U of O book club come in. It kind of shows that ‘Hey, you can do this too,’” said Joe Renaud, a teacher with the 4J school district who teaches the youth in the Phoenix program.
“If they can have a conversation with us and give and take from us, that might make the difference in terms of how they feel about their potential to maybe go to U of O someday or to some other college,” Sweeney said. “It might change what their interpretation is of what’s possible.”