This seminar explores critical traditions in education from both theoretical and practical perspectives. We investigate a number of nontraditional educational projects, with a focus on the Center for Prison Education’s (CPE) college in prison initiative. All students will participate in a CPE practicum that will be central to our work, requiring ethnographic research and reflection on teaching, learning, and curriculum development.
Course readings will address the challenges of work with “underprepared” students and the complex problem posed by teachers who bring identities and positions to their work with particular students or groups of students who possess their own, quite different identities and positions. The institutional, intellectual, and political workings of public school in the contemporary U.S. are the template against which we raise questions and imagine possibilities for education in alternative settings.
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