Education under Confinement: Interrogating Communities of Practice and Learning in Juvenile Detention

Juvenile court schools serve a number of incarcerated students who are profoundly impacted by the interplay of community violence, poverty, and the retributive practices of schools and juvenile justice systems. This qualitative study intends to deepen the understanding of researchers, practitioners and policymakers as to how youth are being served by the Los Angeles county and to discern what is being done by county offices of education to support student success. Using ethnographic data and in-depth interviews, this research offers preliminary findings on the perspectives of incarcerated students about the impact or efficacy of their educational experiences while detained.

This presentation is part of a larger longitudinal study on literacy education in prison. This particular study focuses on the concept of situated communities of practice (CoP) and interrogates whether such communicates can indeed be possible in a carceral setting. There is some keen significance to the establishment and maintenance of this CoP in a prison. The CoP disrupts some of the structure of incarceration, including hierarchy, surveillance and authority. Some of the more advanced incarcerated writers also transitioned from being tutors to teachers, which has had a profound effect on the identities, behavior and self-narratives of the writers.

Using a critical ethnographic approach, my dissertation examines a Midwest county juvenile detention center as a site of learning. Bringing together cultural historical activity theory and institutional theory frameworks (CHAT-IT), this study foregrounds learning in context, more notably how learning is conceptualized, organized, and experienced by the various social actors within the juvenile detention center (Ogawa, Crain, Loomis, & Ball, 2008). In addition to investigating the varied forms of learning accessible to incarcerated youth, this study examines how different institutional actors, particularly the administrators, teachers, security staff, and community members organize and conceptualize education under confinement.