Aidan Glynn ’17
Before coming to Siena, First Year Seminar (FYS) professor, Annie Rody-Wright, J.D., was the legal director of the non-profit, Center for Law & Justice, for 17 years. Today, she melds her love of law with her passion for teaching through her FYS course, "Incarceration." Rody-Wright’s background in the legal world provides her students a unique perspective of the topics that the course explores; the disproportionate impact of incarceration on racial minorities; juvenile justice; wrongful conviction; solitary confinement and reentry. They delve into these topics through prison poetry, non-fiction works, video documentaries, and most importantly an actual connection with individuals who are currently incarcerated.
Once a week Rody-Wright’s student demographic is a bit different. She packs up her teaching materials and travels to Greene Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Catskill, New York. At Greene Correctional, she teaches a group of twenty inmates the same curriculum she is working on with her Siena freshmen. When she began teaching at the Facility, her students’ passion for education was the first thing she noticed. She was taken aback by their unabridged effort, and in many cases they would go above and beyond, putting hours of research into their assignments, digging through the themes and importance of their readings.
Seeing the Greene Correctional Facility students’ desire to learn inspired Rody-Wright to take the curriculum to the next level, creating a connection between her two groups of students.
Many times, her two groups work on parallel assignments, which allowed for a peer review to develop. By preserving the anonymity of all students, both groups were able to step into the other’s world. This led to an impact that even Rody-Wright could not have expected.
While at the start, her Siena students felt they were living a world away from the members of the prison, reading their opinions on heritage and the importance of family made them realize they could relate to the prisoners in an astoundingly close manner. The experience for the members of Greene Correctional was equally as rewarding; Rody-Wright witnessed the inmates come to tears as they connected to the sentiments and outlooks of the Siena students who were living seemingly a world away from them.
The fusion of both classes has gone so well that next semester Rody-Wright will merge both classes at the Greene Correctional Facility where, with security and all of the proper precautions, her students will be able to learn together and further understand each other’s lives during a field trip which both groups of students likely will never forget.
