Mission & Values

Our Mission:

FEPPS provides a rigorous college program for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington and creates pathways to higher education after students are released from prison.

Our goals are to increase FEPPS students’ economic and personal empowerment, contribute to family stability and reduce recidivism through college education.

Our Pedagogical Principles:

We believe, a bell hooks writes, that education is a practice of freedom. FEPPS teachers commit to anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial teaching and learning as frameworks for that practice.

The core values of the FEPPS program emerge from a commitment to dismantling carceral systems and oppressive institutions that deny people’s humanity. The process of dismantling these systems includes immediate and sustained work. FEPPS strives in the short-term to increase the provision of degree-bearing higher education coursework for incarcerated individuals and to create a curriculum that provides access to degrees and rigorous academic courses. We also seek the immediate elimination of restrictions to higher education for restored citizens and more equitable access to higher education institutions.

Social justice pedagogies were and continue to be forged by radical Black women, feminist, and LGBTQ+ educators, activists, and theorists who understood the power of education as a catalyst for social change. Their movement building shows us how to organize and teach in ways that cultivate empowerment, leadership, and activism while building and sustaining community. We believe all classes should adhere to the goals of Black feminist and social justice pedagogy regardless of content or discipline. We suggest that no one-size-fits-all social justice pedagogy exists, but that we can center these principles and pedagogies as an integrated part of all the courses we design.

These include:

• Decolonized Curriculum:  Black feminism underscores the importance of valuing marginalized people’s lived experiences. Similarly, we strive to center the most marginalized in our curricula, classes, and governance.  Our courses therefore strive to decolonize students’ knowledge acquisition by challenging traditional, Eurocentric narratives that silence and malign the existence, experiences, knowledge production, and creativities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Decolonization means disrupting racist and imperialist legacies of structural violence by not only incorporating more diverse voices in our course content but also in recognizing the universality of those diverse experiences.

• Empowerment. Power is a crucial part of a creative learning community. Power is not domination, but “energy, capacity and potential.” Power is the glue that holds the community. Rather than limiting power (as in an understanding of power as domination), in a social justice classroom the goal is to increase the power of all actors.   A sense of power is crucial to students’ development and learning.

• Classroom as Collaborative Community. The classroom cultivates a sense of mutuality, connection and care.  Students share a sense of responsibility for the learning of others, not just their own. Our pedagogies center students’ participation in knowledge production via project based, problem-solving, and collaborative learning. Our curricula are structured to ensure that students are actively participating in their own development as intellectuals and engaged citizens.  Collaborative teaching and learning in classrooms can decenter authority, welcome and elevate marginalized standpoints, and counteract hierarchies of white supremacy, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy through collective knowledge production. 

• Leadership. Developing leadership is an important part of the liberatory goals of a social justice classroom. Students gain leadership skills through responsible participation in the class. The social justice teacher serves as role model and helps members of the class develop a community, a sense of shared purpose, a set of skills for accomplishing that purpose, and the leadership skills so that teacher and students may jointly proceed on those tasks.

• Classroom as Contested Space.  A contested space is a space open to conflict, open to the possibility of simultaneous truths, it must be able to incorporate personal experience and, at the same time, and understanding of (and resistance to) the ways that personal experience can be essentialized in order to close off analysis. Bell hooks argues that in a safe space classroom, we might strive for an environment that is free from domination or authority. In a contested space classroom, we know that no space is free from domination, so we examine the effects of power and privilege in our classroom environment.

• Challenging Structural Inequality.  We facilitate the examination and analysis of material in a way that transforms the traditional narrative of society and institutions while inspiring and equipping students to challenge injustice and structural inequality.  We believe courses should develop a systems-minded analysis for individual and interpersonal experiences by connecting “local knowledges” to interlocking dynamics of disparity, power, and privilege.  This includes: What questions do we ask and how do we ask them? How and where do we find the answers? What constitutes valid or “true” evidence? What are the stakes of our conclusions, and for whom?).

• Education as Healing-Engaged. We also reject the idea that those who are marginalized are depleted by trauma and oppression and are without hope or vibrancy. We learn from the Indigenous education scholar Eve Tuck (Unangax̂ ) who demands that we turn away from damage-centered trauma approaches and turn toward community-based, collaborative projects full of laughter, wholeness, and action to promote well-being and desire for change. This methodology disrupts white masculinist approaches to structures, policy, and knowledge production that govern higher education and evaluate people primarily from economistic and colonial standpoints and from deficit-based approaches.  We believe education can be part of a healing engaged process rather than focusing solely on individual trauma. 

• Cultivating Teacher Capacity.  Teachers inside have the power to create transformative educational experiences. With little to no access to technology, inadequate instructional materials, and lack of support for learner variability, prison educators must be incredibly resourceful to meet the needs of their students. For many individuals in incarcerated settings, prison higher education faculty often serve as models for positive communication, interpersonal interaction, and study habits.  We believe teachers are most effective when they demonstrate the skills of resourcefulness, knowledge of learner variability, modeling healthy interpersonal relationships, and ability to navigate prison culture. Instructors who are able to develop and apply these skills have greater capacity to meet the individual needs of their students.

A Note On Language:

• We know that the words we use to describe our work and community matter. We are committed to using person-first language when talking about people who are incarcerated and refrain from using derogatory labels such as inmate, offender, criminal, etc. Learn more about how to integrate person-first language into your vocabulary here.

• We affirm that not everyone incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) identifies as a woman. Therefore, we use gender inclusive and affirming language when talking to, with, and about the people in our community and student body.