“What Does It Feel Like to Look Up at the Stars?”: Curriculum Deliberation Within Confinement

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Work in Hard Times: Challenging Carcerality in Schools

Abstract

Reginald—a Black man, son, father, a grandfather, a scholar, and a friend—has spent almost 35 years of his life incarcerated in a maximum-security prison in the state of Illinois. As a self-defined Afrofuturist and educator, Reginald has spent many of those years theorizing, dreaming, and envisioning a world beyond that of confinement; imagining, as he says, “what it feels like to look up at the stars” (personal communication). His simple, yet profound, statement provides a window into what could be possible within the field of education–if we were to simply follow the voices, stories, and imaginations of those who have been so deeply affected by mass incarceration and the school-prison nexus. Because, in order to fully imagine (and then create) a world without the school-prison nexus, prisons, or policing, we must first listen to the voices of those who are most affected by these factors (Meiners & Winn, 2010; Stovall, 2018).

Therefore, anchored in the realities of the American carceral crisis, this paper aims to center the voices that are often left in the margins of educational scholarship and curriculum studies: those who are incarcerated. While there is increasing scholarship on the structural and physical violence inflicted upon those who are directly impacted by incarceration, there continues to be a severe lack of scholarship on the imaginations and visionary stories which arise from carceral sites. Additionally, there is scant research driven by system-impacted people (particularly by those incarcerated) on educator practices, educational policy, and/or curriculum development.

Through the conceptual frameworks of abolition and the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition (Wilson et al., 2020) and the methodology of curriculum deliberation (the process through which educators, students, families, and community members decide what is most worth knowing in schooling and education), the following research questions guide this inquiry: What can teachers, educational policymakers, and curriculum scholars learn from the voices of those who are incarcerated? And, how can the voices and knowledges of incarcerated people inform educator practices, educational policy work, and curriculum development?

In pursuit of these research questions, this paper shares the story of a 3-year curriculum deliberation project led by a system-impacted university scholar and 7 scholars who are currently serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in the state of Illinois. Additionally, this paper shares excerpts from the PreK-12 community-based curriculum that was developed as a result. Centering everyone’s varied stories and experiences of incarceration, the curriculum traces the lineage of American enslavement, the effects of prison on children and families, and school/prison abolition. Through shared artifacts, activity ideas and calls to action for children/youth in and beyond the classroom, the curriculum developed not only reveals the connectedness of people across socially constructed anti-Black/carceral boundaries and borders but aims to inspire students and educators to collectively visualize and then create a world in which said borders do not exist. Perhaps most significantly, however, this curriculum aims to have us all—both the non-incarcerated and incarcerated—experience what it feels like to look up at the stars.

Author

• Rachel McMillian, Indiana University - Indianapolis