Bio:
Cyndi Rickards is a Teaching Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies at Drexel University and considers herself a community-engaged scholar. She regularly leads courses within the Philadelphia and Bucks County correctional systems, facilitating Inside-Out classes that bring together Drexel students and incarcerated individuals to learn as colleagues. Through community-engaged courses, she provides students with the opportunity to explore the humanity behind social science statistics, theories, and policies, encouraging a deeper understanding of justice and its real-world implications.
As a developer of the Side-by-Side course format, an expansion of the Inside-Out pedagogy, Dr. Rickards has helped extend this dialogic, community-engaged model beyond carceral settings, bringing community members and students together to learn as classmates and co-investigators. Her community engagement work and scholarship examine the 21st-century skills that emerge from this pedagogy, and she has published and presented on the Side-by-Side format at conferences and partner institutions around the world, contributing to a growing international community of educators committed to participatory, place-based learning.
Dr. Rickards teaches intentionally with community partners including Broad Street Love and the Drexel University Police Department, bringing students together with community organizations and institutional structures to collectively examine the work of agents of justice. These partnerships position the classroom as a shared space in which the people, organizations, and institutions that shape justice in Philadelphia engage one another as co-investigators of how justice is practiced, contested, and lived.
Additionally, Dr. Rickards works closely with Dutch colleagues to explore justice in our respective cities through global classrooms and travel courses, examining policies and learning from one another. Together, Dutch and Philadelphia students gain a deeper understanding of how our communities are connected across the globe and learn what it means to be engaged global citizens.