Teaching Things Unseen: Social Justice Education and Recidivism in Juvenile Justice

• In Event: Roundtable Session 45
  In Roundtable Session: Embodied Curriculum: Racialized, Gendered, and Confined Corporealities

Abstract

In this paper, the author examines how teaching social justice in a juvenile detention facility conjured narratives that linked freedom and justice to violence, death or haunting--particularly, narratives sociologically and culturally linked to the lives of the juveniles. The author uses Michalinos Zembylas’ notion of pedagogies of hauntology, that is “welcome ghosts” into the classroom, as a point of entry to understand the complexities and contradictions in pedagogical choices in teaching justice. The author explores how haunting is linked to many of the narratives of freedom and justice used in teaching social justice, and strives to connect these narratives to political and social understandings in order to critically identify how they might empower and dispirit learners in juvenile facilities.

Author

• Ezekiel Joubert, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities