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Interactive Workshop

Teaching Methods and Learning Styles

Anti-carceral Pedagogies: (In)Visible Disabilities and Fostering Mutual Aid for Adult Students Behind Bars

Some incarcerated students navigate intellectual disabilities. All experience and live within a socially disabling environment whose consequences follow individuals for the rest of their life (interpersonally, institutionally, psychologically). To mitigate these imposed limitations and enduring consequences, incarcerated students require disability-justice informed pedagogy that fosters caring relationships, mutual aid and interdependence.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this session, attendees should be able to:
  1. 1. Participants will understand and explain the importance of best practices of teaching incarcerated students, how to facilitate critical, disability-informed, and reflexive pedagogy within a correctional facility.
  2. 2. Participants will understand the importance of countering tendencies toward instructional coercion (to identify privileges and their positive/negative use, and tropes like White Saviorism) with demonstrations of radical care/student empowerment/respecting student agency or choice and mutual aid.
  3. 3. Participants will understand the complexity of teaching in prisons compared to non-correctional classrooms–administrative rules, variety of student ages/backgrounds/needs, interpersonal relationships, learning objectives and instructional materials.