Humanities as Transformative Programming (Mellon Foundation)
The Humanities as Transformative Program Initiative advances TREC’s goal of improving equity and outcomes for justice-impacted students throughout the state of Minnesota. It is allowing us to foster meaningful artistic and humanistic opportunities for our students, both inside and beyondthe classroom.
Research Clusters: A new initiative in 2024-2025, research clusters have allowed groups of current students and TREC graduates to collaborate on a project with a TREC faculty member. This initiative is rooted in the AAC&U’s findings that student-directed research, student collaboration on faculty research, and community-engaged research are “high impact practices” that help to define a student’s time in college. Research clusters are powerful spaces where students and alumni can deepen an interest in a particular field of study and cocreate new academic knowledge.
Curriculum Redesign: The Humanities as Transformative Programming initiative is also supporting a comprehensive curricular redesign of TREC’s bachelor’s degree. This includes new academic concentrations: Law and Justice Studies; Science, Technology, and Health Studies; Markets and Communities; and Interdisciplinary Studies. We have recently redesigned cornerstone and capstone courses for BA students. The intention behind this work is to allow the TREC program to be more responsive to student interests with more rigorous coursework.
Justice-Impacted Community Builder Advisory: TREC convened our Justice Impacted Community Builder Advisory, which is composed of justice impacted people in the Twin Cities Metro area invested in advancing opportunities in the humanities for TREC students, alumni, and incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated folks more broadly. Through a Mellon Grant, we have been able to provide seed money for project ideas that build more robust networks for our students, helping to expand the horizon of possibilities through the strength of the humanities.
Academic and Cultural Worker Advisory: TREC convened an advisory group composed of scholars and culture workers in the critical humanities and humanistic social sciences. The charge of this group has been to build out more opportunities for incarcerated and reentering TREC students and alumni.
Visiting Scholar: A TREC Visiting Scholar & Community Engagement Fellow will join us in building toward the shared TREC and College of Individualized Studies commitment to reenvisioning a place-based, community-engaged urban education. This Fellow will help us continue to develop our interdisciplinary Markets and Communities curriculum, serve as CIS Fellow at Metro’s Institute for Community Engagement and Scholarship and facilitate a research cluster at one facility.
Fortifying TREC (Ascendium Foundation)
This five-million-dollar four-year initiative is housed at MCTC and shared across both Metro and MCTC TREC programs. It is providing us the much needed resources to 1) expand our reentry programs with a dedicated reentry navigator on each campus, 2) establish a regional teaching incubator around higher ed in prison pedagogy, 3) enhance programming at Metro and MCTC’s TREC Centers, 5) establish a student equity fund, and 6) found The Minnesota State Consortium for Higher Education in Prison (MSCHEP). MSCHEP will facilitate collaboration across Minnesota State System 2- and 4-Year colleges and universities to increase access to higher education for justice-impacted students during and after incarceration. MSCHEP addresses shared system-wide challenges for incarcerated Minnesota State students while leading state-wide reentry support for students and alumni to restore families and communities for a healthier Minnesota.
Unrestricted Movement (Minnesota State System Tackling Transfer Grant)
This research project is designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our student transfer experience between Minneapolis College and Metro State University. The scope of this project is to facilitate the ease of access across two higher education institutions for timely degree completion for (a) currently incarcerated students, (b) recently released students, and (c) justice-impacted people looking to “return” to higher education to advance their academic and career goals. Our goals for this project are to (a) create an MCTC-Metro co-enrollment process for currently incarcerated TREC students, (b) identify and build a more sustainable process to share financial aid and academic records between Minneapolis College and Metro State University, and (c) conduct a mixed methods study to identify and understand what makes a successful student transfer experience for justice-involved students on both our prison campuses and main campuses.
Shavlik Family Foundation
Through the Shavlik Family Foundation, TREC has been able to provide laptop computers and digital literacy training to our reentrying students, allowing them to continue their education journey after incarceration.
