Skip to content
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Menu
  • Happy Health
  • Happy Mindset
  • Animal Wonders
  • About Us
    • Team
  • Subscribe
Happy News

Going From Inmate To Master’s Degree

Geophysicist Philip Heron is on a mission to share the benefits of critical thinking through his program Think Like a Scientist, which he pioneered in the U.K. and has now brought to Canada, teaching the seven-week course not just in schools but surprisingly in prisons where it has been truly life-changing for participants. Dalton Harrison, who attended the first prison session, is now completing a master’s degree in criminology and says the program changed his life when Heron contacted him after release to give a talk at Durham University, standing in front of that lecture hall in a life he never dreamed was possible and making him want to continue in academia. Heron, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus as his day job and runs the program during summers at Canadian prisons, designed Think Like a Scientist to teach the scientific method to people who don’t necessarily see themselves as students of science, focusing particularly on those who have been incarcerated. One of his key aims is helping people understand that failure in life, as in science, can be a pathway to success, teaching that scientists fail so often it’s commonplace and that we don’t just fail and stop but fail and move forward.

Heron deliberately avoids structuring his program like a traditional classroom because many people in prison have had negative experiences with traditional education methods due to learning differences, race, gender, class, or neurodiversity, instead encouraging conversation about topics like climate change, earthquakes, robotics, space missions, and the science of sleep. In his curriculum about space exploration, Heron shares a quote from Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques about managing mental health in space when conflict arises and there’s nowhere to go and you’re far from people you love, which makes the entire room respond that it’s just like prison and joke that they could be astronauts. Former student Phoenix Griffin, now out of prison and in her third year of university, says the biggest thing she took away was confidence to try new things and a new way of thinking where you learn from mistakes so getting it wrong is fine. The program proves that when you teach people to think like scientists and embrace failure as part of the process, you open new possibilities that can literally transform lives from incarceration to academic careers.

PrevPreviousThe MIT Researcher Saving Agriculture From Itself
NextWhat This Team Did On Penguin Awareness Day Will Save The SpeciesNext

Recent Articles

Happy News

What This Great-Grandmother Did At 90 Proves It’s Never Too Late

October 23, 2025

Maryette McFarland from Londonderry became the oldest of more than 300 graduates at the Open University’s ceremony in Belfast on Tuesday, finally earning her English Literature degree at age 90 after a 70-year journey that began in Dublin back in the 1960s. The great-grandmother had originally started her studies at

Read More
Happy News

This MUSHROOM-Powered Toilet Changes Everything

October 23, 2025

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have created a mushroom-powered waterless toilet that turns human waste into compost using mycelia, the root network of mushrooms, in what users are calling a beautiful experience comparable to a Scandinavian sauna. The MycoToilet, housed in a small cedar-sided building dropped among the

Read More
Happy News

The Wedding Photographer Turned Landmine Remover

October 23, 2025

Mofida Majzoub was a freelance wedding photographer in Lebanon when she saw an advertisement for female de-miners and made a career change that everyone in her life thought was absolutely crazy, joining the Mines Advisory Group that has now received the prestigious Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize worth $3 million.

Read More
« Previous Next »
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Notice
  • Accessibility Notice
  • Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
  • Unsubscribe
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
Copyright © 2025 HappyNews.