Faculty of Arts expands Walls to Bridges program

The Walls to Bridges (W2B) program continues to grow in the Faculty of Arts, with the Department of Sociology launching its first W2B course (SOC 705-701E Law, Justice, and Abolition) this semester, taught by Dr. Rai Reece, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Coordinator of W2B@TMU.

W2B (external link)  is an accredited education program that brings together incarcerated learners (inside students), formerly incarcerated learners (community students), and non-incarcerated students and professors (outside students) to study post-secondary courses for credit within jails, prisons, or community settings across Canada. 

The program integrates Indigenous pedagogies, emphasizing relational learning, self-reflection, and community connection along with anti-racist and anti-oppression pedagogy and practice. As equal learners in the program, participants engage in experiential and self-reflective learning that provides an intersectional lens to understand the dynamics of criminalization and punishment. Associate Professor Kym Maclaren from the Department of Philosophy was the first professor to teach a W2B course at TMU in 2012.

For the new W2B sociology course, Dr. Reece partnered with the Toronto Salvation Army (TSA), teaching at their downtown location only minutes away from the TMU campus. The class was comprised of nine TMU students from various programs and nine formerly incarcerated community students. 

Topics covered in the course included abolition in the context of the legal system and society as a whole, and various social issues such as mass incarceration, domestic homicide and intimate partner violence, and transformative justice. The course concluded on April 6 with a graduation ceremony at the TSA, where students presented their final group projects and received certificates of completion.

This community partnership was made possible by the work of Dr. Reena Tandon, Coordinator at TMU’s Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and the commitment from Pastor Jeremy Thompson at the TSA. We would also like to acknowledge the generous funding support for this course provided by the Provost's Office, Faculty of Arts Dean's Office, and the Department of Sociology.

Any Arts faculty interested in completing the W2B facilitator training can contact Rai Reece at rreece@torontomu.ca, or Reena Tandon at reena.tandon@torontou.ca.