Negotiating Carcerality: Two Social Studies Teachers’ Experiences Attempting to Center Justice.

• In Event: Centering Justice and Black Education

Abstract

Drawing on metaphors likening teachers to caged birds and critical counterstory methodologies
we analyzed the praxes of two justice-centered teachers as they navigated the contours of
carcerality in their K-12 schools. Both counterstories shared illustrate the particular challenges
teachers face in resisting carceral logics that force them to choose against their students (and
themselves) or against their livelihoods. At times the teachers in this study, even against their
hopes, reproduced logics of carcerality in their pedagogical and curricular praxes, and in others
their systemic analyses of oppression and liberatory movements gave them more justice-centered
accountability to move against the limits of carcerality present in their lives.

Authors

• Asif Wilson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Whitney Jean Alim, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Guadalupe Elena Ramirez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign