In 1983, Wendy Volz Daniels spent the entire summer living on the grounds of Lincoln Hills School, a juvenile correctional facility located in Irma, Wisconsin. For three months, the then-social work intern’s new home was a housing unit used for storage. As their case manager, she ate meals with the youth offenders, performed monthly evaluations, alternate care placements and assessments.
Volz Daniels very much lived alongside them with one notable difference: she could leave and they could not.
“It was such a meaningful time in my life — I knew afterwards that I wanted to get my master’s degree in social work,” Volz Daniels says.
Although she didn’t know it at the time, Volz Daniels admits that decades later her career was guided by Ignatian discernment, something she has carried with her to Marquette.
Internship discernment
Now a teaching associate professor and internship director in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Volz Daniels helps students find meaningful work experience. Her role requires getting to know students personally and helping them find fulfilling internships.
Volz Daniels makes sure every student gets a customized list of around 15 organizations that would provide relevant work experience. Students pick their top five interests in order of preference, and she sends their applications to their top two selections.
Alumna Brenna Skelton, Arts ’24, was one of Volz Daniels’ former students. Her five-month internship in spring 2024 at North Central HIDTA turned into a career opportunity. Skelton now works as a criminal intelligence analyst, assisting with investigations into drug and gang crimes.
“Wendy helped me find an internship after meeting with her for about an hour,” Skelton says. “I told her my interests, my career aspirations, my previous work experience and my workload. From there, she offered me suggestions, and we worked through what internships may be the best fit for me overall. Wendy was great to work with and did everything possible to get students into their dream internship. She also made sure that we were provided with all the necessary career readiness resources for graduating college and applying for jobs out in the real world.”
“I tell the students that midterm is my favorite time because I meet with each of the students and their supervisor individually,” Volz Daniels says. “I feel like I get to help launch them in the right direction. It’s very fulfilling for me.”
Caring for people who are incarcerated
Another asset Volz Daniels brings to Marquette is her ability to connect with the incarcerated. As a teenager, she remembers finding an advertisement in the back of a teen magazine asking people to correspond through mail with a death row inmate. She wrote to two. Even then, Volz Daniels had a keen sense of helping those whose lives had veered off course.
Volz Daniels now teaches a class called Invisible Sentence, Evidence-based Policy and Practice for Children Impacted by Parental Incarceration through the Educational Preparedness Program, a college bridge program that creates pathways to higher education for currently and formerly incarcerated individuals across the Milwaukee community.
The course co-enrolls Marquette degree seeking undergraduates and students who are incarcerated at Racine Correctional Institution. Students from Marquette travel to the prison to attend class.
“The students work in groups on a topic they are interested in, such as a policy or a program that Wisconsin doesn’t have or needs to advance more to positively impact children who have experienced parental incarceration,” Volz Daniels says. “Then at the end of the semester, we invite people from outside the classroom to come in and listen to the presentations. It’s so powerful.”
Kaleb Deiter-Kligora, a double major in social welfare and justice and criminology and law studies in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, took Volz Daniels’ class last fall.
“This course wasn’t just another class where students keep to themselves, avoid speaking up and count down the minutes until it’s over,” Deiter-Kligora says. “It was the opposite. Students genuinely wanted to be there. The learning was active, collaborative and deeply meaningful. I didn’t think a college course could be this way — especially not one held inside a correctional facility — but this class proved that it absolutely can.”
Dr. Theresa Tobin, director of the Education Preparedness Program, says Volz Daniels’ course is a great example of student impact.
“The most impactful project to date was when a group from her first class proposed to paint and update the children’s visiting room at the prison so children would have a more child-friendly space to visit with their fathers,” Tobin says. “It was painted with children’s murals; it also included small colorful tables and chairs and children’s bookshelves. The space before was bare, cold and sterile. Now kids have a warm and child appropriate place to connect with their parent. It is an incredible example of high-impact, transformational learning.”
Over the summer, Volz Daniels and Pam Wedig-Kirsch, school readiness and family resiliency educator with UW-Madison Extension Racine County, also provide a reading program where fathers record themselves reading children’s books that include a character who has a parent who is incarcerated. The recording and the book are then sent to the child’s caregiver so their child can experience their father reading to them.
“These experiences are very transformative and powerful,” Volz Daniels explains. “They allow the students who are incarcerated to realize that they can do more than they think they can or that society thinks that they can. It is an equally transformative experience for students from the Marquette campus in breaking down stereotypes about people who are incarcerated.”
