Preparing Teachers to Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration

• In Event: School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Push-Out and Mass Incarceration

Abstract

Methods for teaching for equity and justice frequently address strategies for helping historically underserved youth and schools succeed, though they rarely focus explicitly on understanding the school to prison pipeline or ways of teaching incarcerated youth. This presenter, a teacher educator and a researcher, describes approaches for helping novice teachers broaden their understanding of the systems that conversely support and detain youth by structuring opportunities for them to study the school inside an urban juvenile detention center. By participating in instructional rounds to the English classes in the center, novices have opportunities to consider strategies for serving students who struggle on the fringe of our schools and society as well as the pedagogical affordances and pitfalls of these settings.

This work is grounded in sociocultural views of learning, which hold that individuals learn practices through participation in activity; learning is understood as how participation and practices develop over time (e.g., Cole, 1996; Engestrom, 1996). As novices participate in instructional rounds in the educational programs of a juvenile detention center, they are gradually learning the tools, culture, and social organization of those settings. This work explores the use of clinical instructional rounds as a tool to help novice teachers see more deeply into classroom practice in alternative educational settings.

This presentation draws upon seven years of data gathered through a co-teaching partnership between a teacher educator, the presenter, and the instructors in a juvenile detention center (also presenters in this session). In addition to working with the youth in the center, the teaching team conducts instructional rounds with novice teachers so that they have opportunities to experience practice in these settings.

The presentation will focus on what the novices were able to “see” (Warren-Little, 2003) through participation in instructional rounds about teaching strategies, about systems and institutions, and about the detained youth themselves. The data indicate that the novices developed new understandings of strategies for engaging students in culturally relevant learning activities that challenged traditional ideas about authority and identity in the classroom. They also developed broader understandings of the experiences of incarcerated youth, particularly relating to the tensions they face in general education settings.

As with all elements of the session, this presentation is relevant for teachers both inside and outside the penal system. With the participants, we hope to broaden teachers’ understandings of strategies and systems that can help them conceptualize and actualize their roles in interrupting the school to prison pipeline.

Author

• Peter W. Williamson, Stanford University