Award Date

12-15-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Teaching and Learning

First Committee Member

Christine Clark

Second Committee Member

Norma Marrun

Third Committee Member

Danielle Mireles

Fourth Committee Member

Stefani Relles

Number of Pages

412

Abstract

In the United States, there are 16 million students being educated in institutions of higher learning. In this same country, there are 5.5 million being incarcerated and/or held under the U.S. justice system’s control. As symbols of national identity, nostalgia, and historical memory, education and incarceration remain disparate facets of agathokakological Americana. Education shines like a bastion of cultural advancement, innovation, and progress, while incarceration conceals like a dungeon of cultural depravity, villainy, and descent. Both find themselves intertwined within oppressive structures of power, politics, and control, and yet only one recognizes how the explicit reach of this dominance confines the freedom, imagination, and agency of its citizenry. No American fully chooses their path within education, just as no American fully chooses the one leading to incarceration; however, we have been lead as a society to believe that a co-dependence between the two have the potential to transform individuals and (re)form them into complicit agents of cultural obedience and civility. If the greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves, and education serves as a vehicle for the political formation of citizens within a democratic society, how can liberation be realized for students who are incarcerated, and thus, very much etched out of opportunities to participate in a society that denies them democracy?

This study explores how critical pedagogy can be enacted and negotiated within higher education in prison (HEP) programs, also referred throughout this text as prison education programs (PEPs), by centering the experiences of the researcher as a white, non-incarcerated educator teaching English courses within state correctional institutions. Guided by the conceptual frameworks of critical pedagogy, Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), and abolitionist pedagogy, iv the study interrogates how race, power, and resistance intersect in the carceral classroom and shape the possibilities of transformative education.

Applying evocative autoethnography, the research draws on reflective journals, memory work, course artifacts, and creative materials to illuminate the emotional, relational, and political dynamics of teaching within carceral environments. Analysis was conducted through Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA) and informed by Milner’s framework of reflexivity, connecting personal narrative to broader social and institutional structures.

Findings communicate that enacting a critical pedagogy in prison education requires ongoing negotiation between care, control, and complicity. Despite the pervasive constraints of surveillance, censorship, and institutional regulation, instances of relational trust, dialogic learning, and collective vulnerability emerged as spaces of humanization and resistance. These tensions highlight how educators within PEPs must continually reckon with their own positionality and the structural conditions that both enable and limit liberatory praxis.

The research concludes with a five-attribute framework for critical pedagogy in higher education in prison, offering a conceptual and practical tool for future scholars and practitioners. At its core, this research asserts that education in carceral spaces should not be understood as rehabilitation, but as resistance, and as an act of abolition that reclaims learning, love, and liberation within institutions designed to suppress them.

Keywords

Autoethnography; Critical pedagogy; Prison education

Disciplines

Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education | Curriculum and Instruction | Education

File Format

PDF

File Size

2700 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Available for download on Wednesday, December 15, 2032


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