Teaching to Eradicate Carceral-Educational Entanglements: Introducing Dispositions of Womanist Anti-Carceral Praxis in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Aliveness, Abolition, and Affirmation: Actualizing Audre Lorde’s Commitment to a “Livable Future” in Early Education

Abstract

Introduction and Objectives

How do womanist and anti-carceral approaches recast early education toward a livable future for Black and intersectionally diverse students? In preK-12 education, Black, Latinx, American Indian/Native Alaskan, disabled, LGBTQ+, and English-learner students are disproportionately punished compared to their counterparts (e.g., U.S. Department of Education, 2014, 2021, 2023; Samimi et al., 2024). While ongoing disproportionalities must be acknowledged, this paper deepens analysis of the problem: schools are carceral institutions in their own right, with investments, personnel, technologies, practices, and structures devoted to surveillance, punishment, and exclusion of Black and intersectionally diverse students (e.g., Kupchik, 2010; Meiners, 2011; Rodríguez, 2010). Reframing carceral and educational institutions as entangled, this paper addresses how teachers in early childhood education (ECE; preK-3) settings may eradicate carceral-educational entanglements through womanist anti-carceral praxis.

Theoretical Perspective

Crenshaw’s (1989) theory of intersectionality explains how the carceral-educational system interacts with structures of power and oppression (e.g., white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism) to create unique experiences of punishment and exclusion for students who hold multiple marginalized identities. Thus, eradicating the carceral nature of schooling requires a paradigm that attends to interlocking systems of oppression and carcerality simultaneously.

Modes of Inquiry

This paper explores how ECE teachers and teacher educators may implement a justice-oriented framework that responds to the carceral-educational system. The author synthesized the philosophies, characteristics, and actions of anti-carceral feminism and womanism to (1) introduce womanist anti-carceral praxis as a teaching methodology in ECE, and (2) describe distinct dispositions of womanist anti-carceral praxis in ECE.

Evidence

First, anti-carceral feminism is a movement that responds to carceral feminism, a term that explains how feminist responses to gender-based violence transitioned from the welfare state to the carceral state (Bernstein, 2007). Anti-carceral feminist values and practices recognize that gender violence is rooted in systems of oppression, that the carceral state perpetuates gender violence, and that community is the heart of liberation (Kim, 2019). Second, womanism centers Black women’s knowledge and activism, and expands from a feminist orientation to gender justice through an orientation to justice across all axes of being. In education, womanist pedagogy interrogates and reframes ideas about normativity, power relations, and knowledge systems. In isolation, neither anti-carceral feminist nor womanist approaches can sufficiently dismantle carceral-educational entanglements and associated adverse effects of punishment on racialized, disabled, and other marginalized groups of students, yet as a unified framework, womanist anti-carceral praxis reconceptualizes perceptions, ideas, and actions from a lens of intersectional justice.

Results

The synthesis distilled nine dispositions of womanist anti-carceral praxis, which ECE teachers may adopt: relationality, race-consciousness, political consciousness, anti-oppression, community-centeredness, individuals as experts of their own experiences, accessibility, non-ideology, and reflection. Each of these dispositions are described and include praxis relevant discussion for ECE teachers and teacher educators.

Significance

This paper attends to a pressing issue in education with strong theoretical foundation and practice-relevant discussion. Adopting dispositions of womanist anti-carceral praxis should confront anti-Black carceral logics in schooling and denaturalize the idea that policing and punishment are equivalent to safety.

Author

• Brita A. Bookser, Santa Clara University