The 2021 Award for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching was awarded to Dr Vicky Nagy, Dr Alana Piper, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing, Katherine Ibbott, and Dr Georgina Rychner for outstanding and innovative teaching in Australian and New Zealand criminology.
We were very honoured to receive the Award for Excellence and Innovation in Teaching for our work with criminology students at the University of Tasmania. It was an interdisciplinary (criminology and history) and cross-university team (Dr Vicky Nagy – University of Tasmania, Dr Alana Piper- University of Technology Sydney and Associate Professor Nancy Cushing- University of Newcastle) that initially came together in late 2019 to discuss how we might be able to get students understanding prisoner lives in their introductory criminology units underpinned by a Citizen Social Science approach and using historical sources.
In 2020 students studying the unit “Crime and Criminal Justice” at the University of Tasmania with Vicky, Katherine Ibbott and Dr Georgina Rychner were set an assessment task that asked them to transcribe the prisoner records of people imprisoned in Victoria between 1860 and 1920. The digitised records from the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV) were being transcribed as part of the Criminal Characters Project- the transcribed data will be eventually open access. The transcription of these records is vital for two main reasons: public access to archival records is made easier when electronically transcribed and no longer hidden in an archive, and from an academic perspective it can allow for a better understanding not only of the history of incarceration but also linkage with present knowledge about imprisonment and the continued growth in prison numbers in Australia. Students were then asked to research the people whose records they had transcribed using the National Library of Australia’s Trove site or other digital or archival sources to gather more information and undertake some data-linkage. From this research as well as their studies about contemporary imprisonment, students were asked to reflect upon their experience of engaging with the sources, triangulating data, as well as how definitions of crime and punishments for offending have changed over time.
Feedback from the students indicated that not only had they enjoyed this assessment task (something we don’t get to say often!) but they found it valuable because it humanised prisoners for them, while also making students feel that they were “giving back” to the discipline of criminology, the PROV, and the Australian public.
We are delighted that this innovative, interdisciplinary, and cross-institutional project has been recognised as a valuable contribution to criminology education by ANZSOC.