Documentary wins huge award!

Katie D.

May 5, 2010 - 10:17 PM

Fabulous news! The documentary about our Inside-Out class last spring just won the Mark of Excellence Award from The Society of Professional Journalists! This is an extremely prestigious award for undergraduate journalism from universities nationwide. If you haven't seen the documentary already, please take ten minutes to watch it! "Inside Looking Out"  was filmed during our Inside-Out class in 2009, and includes several interviews with me.

This is the email that Honors College Dean David Frank sent out to announce the award:

Dear All:

Illustrating the promise of collaboration between colleges, I am pleased to share with you good news. The Society of Professional Journalists just announced the national winners of the 2009 Mark of Excellence Awards, recognizing collegiate work published or broadcasted during 2009. There were than 3600 entries. The television video, titled "Inside Looking Out," featuring an integrated classroom with outside students (from the Clark Honors College) and inside students (who are incarcerated at Oregon State Penitentiary) is the 2009 national winner in the television feature category.
"Inside Looking Out" is a 10-minute documentary on the Inside-Out program produced in Prof. Dan Miller's Documentary Production class as part of the Oregon Documentary Project, which is hosted in the School of Journalism and Communication. The video was shot during the CHC's spring 2009 Inside-Out course. Tiffany Kimmel and Jessica Reedy, students from the UO's School of Journalism and Communication, produced and directed the piece. Professor Steve Shankman was the instructor in the class.

http://www.spj.org/news.asp?REF=974

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program (Inside-Out) is a national program based in Philadelphia at Temple University. Inside-Out was established by professor Lori Pompa in 1997 to bring college students and incarcerated men and women into the same classroom.

The Inside-Out program is an important curricular innovation in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, a small liberal arts college nested within the larger research university. http://honors.uoregon.edu/story/inside-out-prison-exchange-program

We should be very proud of Professor Miller, Tiffany Kimmel, and Jesscia Reedy. I am also thankful for the leadership of Dean Tim Gleason and Professor Steve Shankman. Dr. Shankman is truly the pioneer of this project at the University of Oregon. Our Clark Honors College students, as always, demonstrated they are truly among the best in the nation. Katie Dwyer and Madeline Bailey deserve special mention. Finally, Lori Pompa, who founded Inside-Out, and Melissa Crabbe, Assistant National Director of Inside-Out, developed the vision of higher education that is transforming our students.

Sincerely,
David A. Frank

It is such a wonderful thing to be involved in a project like this with the incredible work of my amazingly talented peers. I am so grateful to have been a part of this project, to see our class have this kind of wonderful publicity, and to see Tiffany and Jessica receive the recognition they so thoroughly deserve.