Growing Roses in Concrete: Exploring the School-to-Prison Nexus in a Community College Classroom

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Hierarchies of Racism and Violence: Higher Education, School, and Community (Table 7)

Abstract

Emergent scholarship has articulated the ways in which K-12 schools function as prisons. This paper extends this scholarship, conceptualizing how the school-prison nexus is produced and maintained in colleges and universities. Grounded in collaborative autoethnographic methodologies, and using Tupac Shakur’s Roses in the Concrete poem, we present a collective conceptualization of a rose garden—educational conditions rooted in love, co-creation, collaborative learning, and collective action. We hope that this empirical study can create the foundation for more study of the carceral logics present in colleges and universities while also arming school practitioners with the tools necessary to fracture and dismantle the school-prison nexus within their own minds, their classrooms, and their schools.

Authors

• Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Joby Gardner, DePaul University

• Nina Owolabi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Shanita Bigelow, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Deonte Tanner, DePaul University

• Corey Gillom

• Mary Elizabeth Randall, Harold Washington College