After incarceration, how can people heal from trauma, shame and the feeling that society no longer wants them? Kevin Bott, a Rutgers alumnus who oversees the online division of Mason Gross School of the Arts, has spent 16 years answering that question.
He is the creator of a project that works with people coming home after incarceration to develop a healing and transformative ritual through theatrical storytelling that helps them move on from their experiences.
Bott founded the initiative called Ritual4Return while completing his doctorate in educational theater at New York University (NYU). He recently introduced the project at Mason Gross in collaboration with the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prison Consortium (NJ-STEP), which offers for-credit courses inside New Jersey state prisons and then after re-entry at several universities within the state, including Rutgers. Ritual4Return is now offered at Rutgers as a two-class series, with one course open to all undergraduates and both available to those who have been incarcerated.
Offered through Mason Gross, courses related to Ritual4Return are held at Rutgers-Newark. A seven-week, two-credit course, “Workshop Topics Theater: Reentry as a Rite of Passage,” is open to any Rutgers undergraduate, regardless of campus affiliation, and focuses on literature from across criminology and sociology that demonstrates the power of rites of passage to restore civic identity after incarceration. The course may soon be available online.
Read more about Kevin Bott and Ritual4Return at Rutgers Today.
Story by Beth Fand Incollingo. Image Credit: Nick Romanenko