Teaching Inside the Fence: Adam Kuehnel Visits Carleton

5 April 2018

On Thursday, February 22, the Broom Fellow co-sponsored an event with the Educational Studies department which invited Adam Kuehnel, a corrections educator with Minnesota’s Department of Corrections (DOC), to speak about his experiences of “teaching inside the fence.”

The event was held in the athenaeum, and gathered a diverse crowd of faculty and students to listen to Kuehnel’s lively presentation. Kuehnel touched on several themes, discussing his own observations and personal experiences with students, the various factors — such as adverse childhood experiences — which are common among incarcerated individuals, the necessity for collaboration across all fields and levels of education, and, perhaps most importantly, the role of quality education in reducing recidivism.

According to Kuehnel, many of his students have never had a positive educational experience, and in fact, their most productive classroom is often the one they find once incarcerated. Minnesota has made significant strides towards increasing the efficacy and breadth of education in correctional facilities, and has required that all incarcerated people who do not currently have a high school diploma or GED are able to receive one while in prison. Because of this focus, as Kuehnel emphasized, the state of Minnesota currently has a 95% rate of offenders passing the GED. In order to continue these strides, the DOC has recently been making an effort to reach out to colleges in order to encourage students thinking about teaching to consider becoming corrections educators.