Gellman Wins Grant to Support EPI Resources

Ascendium Education Group and the American Institutes for Research (AIR) awarded Mneesha Gellman, an associate professor in the Marlboro Institute and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI), and Ascendium Education Group a $324,200 grant to support EPI in refining and packaging a suite of resources aimed at program implementation and optimization.

Higher education in prison programs such as EPI can play a vital role in giving incarcerated individuals a pathway to personal and professional advancement opportunities, according to AIR.

Since 2017, EPI has developed a portfolio of instruments to support smooth program implementation inside prison. Some of the instruments that EPI regularly uses with success include: student and faculty handbooks; faculty and teaching assistant orientation programs; semesterly schedules, including hour requirements for accreditation; curricular pathways; student admissions documents; qualitative review guides for faculty; research request forms for students to obtain articles from the main campus library; and JSTOR access guides.

The landscape of Higher Education in Prison programs has grown rapidly in the last six years, with data indicating that the field has increased from approximately 100 programs in 2018 to more than 600 programs in 2024.

With this expansion comes a need to define markers for resource quality and ensure student success by establishing both a validated set of high-impact programmatic resources and a single repository to house these resources for dissemination across the higher education in prison field.

Ascendium is partnering with the American Institutes for Research to support this initiative to identify and scale programmatic technical assistance in higher education in prison programs. Ascendium is providing the funding support for this initiative and will serve as the administrator for the grant awards and as a collaborative partner to AIR.

Story contributed by the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship (ORCS).