Program and K-16 Collaborative Committee: Troubling Schools+Prisons: A Troublemakers Teach-in

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Workshop Format

Abstract

This is a Program Committee and K-16 Collaborative Committee teach-in that puts scholar-activists, Chicago-area youth activists, and educator-activists, in conversation to trouble the historical, structural, political intersections of education and incarceration. Our “lead teachers/troublemakers” will share perspectives and facilitate conversations that trouble scholarly and policy frameworks that have perpetuated reductive models of schools and prisons that, as Sojoyner (2016) argues, “funnels students into some other structure.” In engaging in this collective troubling of schools and prisons, participants will work toward articulating generative themes, and sharing organizing and pedagogical strategies, that will expand our individual and collective ways to recast our understandings of, and refuse/disrupt/resist/abolish, the punitive and death dealing effects of schools and prisons locally and globally.

Depending on the number of participants we will begin with comments from the “lead teachers/troublemakers” and then break up into small groups that will each be co-lead by a scholar-activist and local activist. The co-leaders will have a few minutes to lead the group in getting to know one another, and then facilitate/discuss one of the themes, questions, or topic generated from the opening comments. The goal will be to create a collective list of goals, projects, questions, resources, and strategies, that the public will have access to following the session.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Edwin Mayorga, Swarthmore College

Comments

• Damien Sojoyner, University of California, Irvine

• Aja Reynolds, University of Illinois at Chicago

• L. Boyd Bellinger, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Jitu Brown, Journey for Justice Alliance

• Janae E Bonsu, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Jennifer Johnson, Chicago Teachers Union