ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the claims in critical pedagogy. Higher education in prison is rife with celebrations of its transformative power, how it deepens, expands, and liberates prisoners’ views of themselves and the world. Critical pedagogy was conceived as a method of addressing oppression, and the fundamental oppression of incarceration makes critical pedagogy a natural framework for higher education in prison. Leading higher education in prison practitioners endorse critical pedagogy in the prison classroom, but have not articulated critical pedagogy strategies specific to students in prison. The challenge for higher education in prison is to counter the construction to show that students are more than prisoners as constructed in the United States, to move them out of the category “prisoner.” A tension in prison education exists between seeing incarcerated and non-incarcerated students as fundamentally different and insisting on their equivalence. Transformation discourses assume that pedagogues have the authority to determine who prisoners are, but that authority is baseless and illusory.
