In what ways can a community music education project based on historical re-enactment be a vehicle for transformational learning, empowerment and reconnection with community? In 2018, Serenading Adela was performed to celebrate and remember the 100th anniversary of a moment in history when women sang under the prison cell window of Adela…

Youth with and at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) served in alternative education settings often experience challenges with writing due to various deficits across academic, behavioral, and social-emotional domains, especially in the area of writing. These youth also are less likely to engage in self-determination skills such as…

Shakespeare's elite cultural status bolsters the sense of achievement and empowerment experienced by participants in prison performance programmes; and yet, such engagements paradoxically risk further marginalising participants by reinforcing a colonial mentality in which Shakespeare represents an offering from a morally superior white culture.…

Our research explored the experiences of educators who teach in a gender-responsive program for women in a jail. We interrogated how educators fostered empowerment in their classes, what their motivations were for teaching in the program, and the tensions that existed for them when using emancipatory teaching practices in jail. Findings indicate…

Regarding the research questions of how the contemplative learning process is appropriate for Thai female prison inmates and how it can transform the learners, the objectives of the project were to study the learning process facilitation appropriate for the inner stability development of female prison inmates, and to explicate their inner…

This article is based on our Memoir Pedagogy Reading Circles research. Using an interpretative sociological case study methodology, we facilitated two groups that read and discussed women's memoirs as living texts of society, culture, and history; we read the self and the social through the personal narratives of violence, survival, and…

Lisa Jean Moore describes a class assignment for her Social and Cultural Change course in which she was required to accommodate the material limitations of teaching within a highly regulated and restricted environment. This assignment, carried out in a women's prison, could be adapted for traditional college settings and travel abroad programs,…

The school-to-prison pipeline is a national concern, from the federal to local governments, and a leading topic in conversations in the field of urban education and juvenile justice. "From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline" is a ground-breaking book that exposes the school system's direct relationship…

In this essay, I offer a response to Stemhagen, Reich, and Muth's (see EJ1089246) delineation of disciplined judgment. I draw from my latest obsession with epistemologies of ignorance to complicate their focus on disciplinarity with questions over how non-knowledge gets framed and created. I use Suniti Sharma's seven-year study to highlight the…

This chapter looks at the power of theater and literature programs to affect correctional facilities; it delves into how such programs can deepen connections to oneself, to others, to community, and to the larger world.

Despite the powerful, pervasive institutional imperatives of the prison to control, discipline and house inmates, teachers seem to care deeply for their students. They also intuitively know that caring is very much a part of a successful teaching practice behind bars. This descriptive study contributes to a framework of teacher caring in prison…