campus news Banner season for Laurier athletics
Curling gold, stellar season for women’s hockey The Wilfrid Laurier women’s curling team represented Canada at the Kariuzawa International Curling Championship in Japan, and took home the gold medal after a come-from-behind 9-8 victory in extra ends over Team Switzerland. Playing against some of the best players in the world, Laurier earned victories over Korea, Japan, China, Denmark and a select team from Nagano, Japan during the competition. Back in Canada, the team defended their Ontario University Athletics (OUA) championship, winning the university’s sixth OUA banner in women’s curling. At press time they were preparing to defend their Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) championship. The women’s varsity hockey team also had a strong season, closing out regular play ranked No. 1 in the country for the first time since 2006. The Hawks were the only team in the country undefeated in regulation competition. The wins continued in the OUA finals, where Laurier beat the
Western Mustangs to take home the gold medal for the eighth time in nine seasons. With the win, the Hawks advanced to the CIS Championship where they finished fourth.
Sport itself can teach a number of skills, such as leadership, hard work and cooperation, but it’s not the whole picture. The degree is central. Peter Baxter, director of Athletics & Recreation Transcending boundaries
Inside-Out Prison Exchange program brings inmates and students together to learn At first glance there was nothing unusual about the Diversity, Marginalization and Oppression course that Social Work Professor Shoshana Pollack taught last fall. Each week 17 students sat in a circle, sharing ideas, taking notes and preparing for papers. The difference? Their classroom was inside Kitchener’s Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVI) and only 10 of the students were working toward their Master of Social Work degree. The other seven students were incarcerated in the prison. The course was part of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, a partnership between institutions of higher learning and correctional systems. Students and prisoners come together to further their education. Founded in 1997, the program has grown to more than 300 classes and 9,000 participants across the United States. Pollack’s class at GVI was one of the first in Canada (the other, which also took place last fall, was at a federal men’s prison in British Columbia).
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LAURIER CAMPUS Spring 2012
Being involved in this program far exceeded any expectations Pollack had at the outset. Much of her career as a social worker and an academic has focused on women in the criminal justice system, so when she was approached by Inside-Out about expanding the program into Canada she didn’t hesitate. The planning process took more than a year and included support from both Laurier and GVI. All Inside-Out instructors participate in a seven-day, 60-hour intensive training program that teaches the program’s transformative educational method. For two of the days the instructors are prisoners inside Graterford Prison, a maximum security facility for men near Philadelphia. “A really remarkable thing happens when you bring people together in this collective space and everyone is responsible for what’s happening,” said Pollack. “The result is that you have a really authentic communication in which everyone learns from everyone else. We learn that we can transcend the walls that
separate us.” While Pollack structured the class and framed the discussion topics, students engaged with each other’s ideas, personal experiences and the assigned readings. Inside and outside students shared their experiences and learned together through dialogue. First-year MSW student Kayla Follet says it is difficult to articulate what it was like to be part of the Inside-Out program. “I love talking about it, but explaining the experience is really difficult because it was so powerful,” she said. “It was so much more than a course.” As the course wrapped up at the end of November 2011, students participated in a graduation ceremony — a first for some of the inside students. This isn’t the end of the program, however. Laurier Social Work Professor Deena Mandell is instructing a second Inside-Out course at GVI for winter term, and there are hopes the program will continue in the future.