Maisha T. Winn

The Right to Be Literate: Literacy, Education, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

In 1988, the Modern Language Association hosted “The Right to Literacy” conference at the Ohio State University. Arguing that literacy was a “right” as opposed to a “privilege,” participants in this conference grappled with the relationship between literacy, freedom, democracy, and citizenry (Lunsford, Moglen, & Slevin, 1990, p. 2). Twenty years later, scholars contributed to an edited volume titled Literacy as a Civil Right: Reclaiming Social Justice in Literacy Teaching and Learning (S. Greene, 2008). In this volume, S. Greene and his colleagues, who initially presented their work at the 2006 National Council of Teachers of English Assembly for Research, challenge and reclaim “the notions of civil rights and social justice,” which they posit “have been appropriated by conservatives to explain the goal of increased accountability and testing” (p. 3). Scholars in Greene’s edited volume confront the culture of accountability and testing as well as practices that put African American and Latino youth in American public schools under the watchful and critical gaze of the rest of the country. While Greene builds on Nieto’s components of social justice, and more specifically her assertion that “social justice is about understanding education and access to literacy as civil rights” (Nieto cited in S. Greene, 2008, p. 4), Greene and others question and critique power and privilege through the lens of critical race theory making race and class central to the relationship between schooling, literacy, citizenship, and civil rights. Classroom practitioners and education nonprofits have joined this growing body of research. In The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools: Creating a Culture of Thinking, Plaut (2009) and her colleagues seek to show what schools that adhere to teaching literacy as a “right” may look like in order “to spark a social movement to ensure our education system empowers every student to become fully literate” (p. 1). As scholarship increasingly explores literacy

‘Our side of the story’: moving incarcerated youth voices from margins to center

This study examines the ways in which playwriting and performance provide tools for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated girls to prepare for their lives beyond detention centers and probation. In a three‐year multi‐sited ethnography journeying through regional youth detention centers (RYDCs), a multi‐service center serving formerly incarcerated youth, and a public theatre housing a women‐focused theatre company in the urban southeast, this study raises questions about the gendering of the school/prison nexus and interrogates the role of programs. Ultimately this study urges scholars, activists, and youth advocates to combine efforts in coalition building to meet the needs of girls in under‐served and under‐resourced communities and schools.

Resisting the school to prison pipeline: the practice to build abolition democracies

In possession of the largest prison population in the world, the United States currently locks up over 2.3 million people (Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project 2008). Dispropo...

Toward a performance of possibilities: resisting gendered (in)justice

In the twenty-first century the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country. While the numbers of incarcerated males far outnumber incarcerated women, there are still great concerns about the growing female prison population. This fixation with incarceration and building prisons has trickled down to America’s children as well. Among those who have been strategically extracted from childhood and adolescence and catapulted into the category of “adults” are teen girls and more specifically girls of color. This postcard from the resistance seeks to examine the ways in which playwriting and performance serve as mediating tools for formerly incarcerated black girls seeking reentry to their schools, communities, and families. More specifically this postcard extends the notion of performance ethnography and formerly incarcerated girls’ “performance of possibilities” that serve as a bridge between incarcerated and liberated lives.

Exploring the Literate Trajectories of Youth Across Time and Space

Here, I offer a retrospective research narrative of four of my works, Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms (published under Maisha T. Fisher, 2007b); Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (published under Maisha T. Fisher, 2009); Writing Instruction in the Culturally Relevant Classroom (with Latrise P. Johnson; Winn & Johnson, 2011); and Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Winn, 2011). I revisit these texts in order to contribute to a larger discussion of how activity systems and youth participation in these activity systems provide support for youth to build and sustain literate identities in both schools and in out-of-school contexts.

The Politics of Desire and Possibility in Urban Playwriting: (Re)reading and (Re)writing the Script.

In this article, the author analyses scripts written by incarcerated girls in playwriting and performance workshops conducted in regional youth detention centres and performed by formerly incarcerated girls in a programme called “Girl Time” in an urban American southeastern city. Through a close reading and analysis of characters, plots and settings, the author argues that this catalogue of plays collected over a 5-year period (2006–2011) embodies the ways in which incarcerated girls – primarily African American and ages 14–17 – used playwriting as a tool to navigate “betwixt and between” lives that are a result of being entangled in the juvenile justice system. The author ultimately argues that these “urban playwrights” articulate a desire that focuses on possible lives beyond detainment and incarceration.

Still Writing in Rhythm Youth Poets at Work

In this article, the author uses a “humanizing research” framework to analyze longitudinal data collected over the course of 10 years during a multi-sited ethnography of youth poets in a poetry collective called Power Writing. Using qualitative interviews to understand the role that literacy continues to play in the lives of Power Writing alumni, the author demonstrates how Power Writing continues to influence youth poets’ views on education as they continue their lives as college students, workers, parents, and partners.

Building a “Lifetime Circle”: English Education in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter:

This article argues that, to prepare teachers in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, there must be a radical reframing of teacher education in which teachers learn to disentangle their teaching from the culture of Mass Incarceration and the criminalization of Black and Brown people in the context of the United States in their practice. Using a restorative justice paradigm, I seek to understand in what ways, if any, teacher training, specifically of English teachers, can address issues of Mass Incarceration and how teacher preparation can support preservice teachers to resist colonizing pedagogies and practices that privilege particular ways of knowing and being that isolate particular youth.

“There’s Nothing for Us Here”: Black Families Navigating the School/Prison Nexus 60 Years After Brown

In this study, the authors examine the narratives of two African American mothers and grandmothers and two youth who migrated from under-resourced neighborhoods in a large urban city to a smaller Midwestern college town in hopes of gaining access to safe neighborhoods, employment opportunities, and better educational experiences. Using phenomenological case study methodology, the authors were participant observers in two community groups that included a coalition of African American working class mothers and grandmothers and a network for Black male youth ages 14–18. The findings in this study ultimately demonstrate how these youth and their families discovered even more racial disparities in their new residence. This was especially true in the areas of education and juvenile justice. Ultimately, the authors argue that the “new migration” has yet to yield the opportunities these families hoped to gain.