Walls to Bridges

Walls-to-Bridges (or W2B) brings incarcerated students and campus-enrolled students together as classmates in semester-long university courses. Classes are held in correctional facilities, and are taught using a circle pedagogy prioritizing collaborative dialogue and fostering egalitarian and collective learning. Not only are students learning specific course material, but they are learning about themselves, each other, and systemic impact to learning. 

The course associated with W2B fluctuates over time. Historical SDS codes have included SDS 240R (Art & Society) and SDS 311R (Indigenous Peoples and Canadian Public Policy). All instructors have gone through additional training to facilitate the program within the topic of their course.

SDS 435R: Restorative Approaches to Education, taught at the Grand Valley Institution for Women by Dr. Crystena Parker-Shandal, whose research addresses restorative justice in education, antiracist and decolonizing pedagogy, and the school-to-prison pipeline in Canadian K–12 schools.

SDS 435R builds both the theory and the practice of restorative approaches to education. Students work through the questions restorative justice puts to schools, who has been harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to make things right, and then take up the practice themselves: co-facilitating peacemaking circles, working through dialogue and suspended judgment, and examining how race, gender, power, and status shape whose voices are heard in a classroom. Assessment is built around circle facilitation, reflective writing, and a final case study rather than examinations. Inside and outside students take the same course for the same credit.

Open to students at level 3A or above, with priority given to SDS majors.

Questions? Please contact the course instructor, Dr. Crystena Parker-Shandal (crystena.parker-shandal@uwaterloo.ca).

• Enrolment is by application and interview rather than open registration. The class is small and the host institution sets its own requirements.
• Students are responsible for their own transportation to the site. Access to a vehicle or a shared ride is necessary.
• The class meets once weekly at Grand Valley Institution for Women, on Thursdays at 6 pm. Plan for 60 minutes of travel and entry procedures on either side of the class itself.
• W2B runs roughly once every two to three years at Renison, as the offering rotates among partner institutions.