Skip to Main Content

Publications

Issue Brief
April 18, 2024

Serving Library Patrons Behind Bars

Challenges and Collaborations

Introduction The past several years have seen major shifts in both policy and perception regarding criminal justice in the United States. The distinctly American phenomenon of mass incarceration and its racial and economic underpinnings have made criminal justice reform a major focus of advocacy efforts and a rare example of bipartisan agreement. As a growing quantity of research has begun to illuminate the negative societal impacts of the carceral system, especially on communities of color, focus has slowly shifted to…
Research Report
April 3, 2024

Between Two Systems

Navigating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Higher Education in Prisons

Building on our previous research on the ways that media review directives and censorship policies may limit or protect student access to intellectual and education material, as well as on the technology students on the inside can access for educational purposes, this report explores how educators in higher education in prison programs navigate censorship and self-censorship and how the relationship between educational programs and departments of corrections may have an impact on the educational experience and learning outcomes of students.
Research Report
April 20, 2023

Security and Censorship

A Comparative Analysis of State Department of Corrections Media Review Policies

Despite resurgent public interest in censorship issues, research and reporting on prison censorship policies remain largely localized, with few wide-scale studies of the issue. The highly decentralized nature of the carceral system in the United States complicate such an undertaking. In an effort to make available policy information more accessible and to develop a sense of how censorship policies might impact higher education in prisons, Ithaka S+R examined media review directives across all 50 states and Washington DC.
Research Report
March 1, 2022

Teaching with Cultural Heritage Materials During the Pandemic

Cultural heritage materials can offer rewarding learning opportunities and impactful experiences for students across a variety of disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences. These learning opportunities create important historical and/or cultural context within a discipline, allowing students to deepen their engagement with a discipline, or see themselves, perhaps for the first time, as a scholar. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the attendant move to online instruction at many colleges and universities, disrupted pedagogical practices and the ways that…
Research Report
March 23, 2021

Teaching with Primary Sources

Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors

Encounters with primary sources—historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event—are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities’ commitments to experiential and inquiry-based learning and library initiatives focused on media and information literacy. Reflecting the importance of the topic within higher education, “Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources” attracted the largest cohort of any Ithaka S+R program to date.
Research Report
May 7, 2020

Advancing Technological Equity for Incarcerated College Students

Examining the Opportunities and Risks

Higher education programs that teach in prisons take on a near impossible task: to provide their students with a high-quality education, equal to anything beyond the prison walls, while working under strict constraints. Incarcerated students rarely have access to learning resources typically taken for granted on the outside—computers, books, and internet access are all heavily restricted by various state Departments of Corrections (DOC)—and instructors must work with and around DOC security protocols while planning and teaching their classes. While innovative…
Research Report
December 12, 2019

Teaching Business

Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors

Business represents the most popular undergraduate major at American colleges and universities and was seen as the ideal discipline to begin with, especially as the potential number of students to be positively impacted is correspondingly large. The goal of this report, therefore, is to provide actionable findings for organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the teaching practices of business educators. This report describes the teaching practices of business instructors, both those that are common to all college level instruction as…