Jailbreak: Multiracial Resistance, Resilient Praxis, and Community Power Disrupting the School-Prison Nexus

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

Abstract

This presentation documents a three-year, multiracial struggle against the school-prison nexus (SPN) in a rapidly resegregating Title I high school in Chicago’s south suburbs. Co-authored by six student activists and two teacher-sponsors, our research pairs critical race theory with Freirean popular education to interrogate how carceral logics saturate daily schooling and to illuminate the liberatory possibilities that emerge when youth, families, and educators organize together.

Anchored in testimonio methodology (Pérez Huber & Aguilar-Tinajero, 2024) and conducted through a series of Black feminist “kitchen table talks” (Kohl & McCutcheon, 2015), the study repositions BIPOC students and parents as co-researchers who define the questions, gather evidence, and interpret meaning. Several semi-structured conversations—hosted “posada style” in rotating homes—generated a collective archive of narratives, field notes, and artifacts from the Student Equity & Leadership (SEL) club: petitions, QR-code surveys, board-meeting speeches, and media coverage. These data were inductively coded by the full author team, foregrounding students’ analytic authority.

Three interlocking themes surfaced. First, multiracial resistance: despite historical tensions between Black and Brown communities, the SEL steering committee (four Black and two Latina/o/x students) and their families forged what Sra. Lopez calls “una familia en la lucha,” leveraging shared experiences of surveillance, dress-code policing, locked bathrooms, K-9 sweeps, and curricular erasure to demand change. Second, resilience as praxis: students translated Freire’s reading of “word and world” into action—reinstating COVID support days, renaming a racially disparaging mascot, and compelling the removal of a hostile administrators—while simultaneously confronting racial battle fatigue, spirit-murdering curricula, and retaliatory punishments. Critical reflection during kitchen table talks reframed these harms as lessons that expanded activists’ “toolboxes” for future organizing. Third, community-rooted relationships: ongoing cook-outs, fundraisers, and intergenerational study groups cultivated affective ties strong enough to withstand district ghosting, gaslighting, and efforts to tarnish reputations. When administrators decided to suspend the club, over a hundred community members packed the next board meeting, chanting “Let her speak!” until a student was allowed to testify.

Framed against scholarship that moves from the School-to-Prison Pipeline to the more immediate SPN (Annamma, 2017; Meiners, 2010; Stovall, 2018), the presentation argues that liberatory “jailbreaks” are possible when youth are equipped with critical consciousness and intergenerational solidarity. It extends existing literature by:
- Demonstrating how student-led clubs can serve as sites of fugitive pedagogy inside punitive schools;
- Illustrating the methodological power of cross-role testimonios for co-constructing knowledge and sustaining activism; and
- Highlighting the strategic value of cultivating multiracial, multigenerational coalitions in majority-Black and Brown school districts.

Implications include a call for researchers to treat parents and students as epistemic partners; for practitioners to anticipate district retaliation and proactively build off-site organizing infrastructures; and for policy makers to recognize the psychic and material costs of carceral schooling on youth civic engagement. Ultimately, our research offers a praxis-oriented model of resistance that transforms the SPN from an inescapable structure into a catalyst for collective freedom-dreaming.

Authors

• Guadalupe Ramirez

• Steven R. Flores, Chicago Public Schools

• Kyndall Jackson, Youth Teams in Education Research

• Breanna Lopez, Youth Teams in Education Research

• Dulce Gonzalez, Youth Teams in Education Research

• Aayla Holiday, Thornton Fractional South