NYU Metro Center is proud to announce the latest edition of Voices in Urban Education (VUE). The Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools’ open-access journal, VUE, is published semi-annually. Voices in Urban Education endeavors to serve as a “roundtable-in-print” by bringing together diverse education stakeholders with a wide range of viewpoints, including leading education writers and thinkers, as well as essential but frequently overlooked voices in educational scholarship, such as students, parents, teachers, activists, and community members.
Each issue of Voices in Urban Education is organized around a theme, representing an innovative analysis of a vital issue in urban education. Over the last several years VUE has tackled critical topics ranging from the power of STEM and Computing Education to the resilience of Queer and Trans communities, as well as the academic disparities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the on-going struggle for justice in NYC Schools.
Voices in Urban Education has been renowned for its bold examinations of educational scholarship. This new issue of the journal is no different. VUE, Volume 53, Issue 1, explores the complex and often contradictory terrain of abolitionist practice within and beyond college-in-prison programs. This latest edition of Voices in Urban Education, titled Abolitionist Praxis and Education Across Prison Walls, implores the public to examine and witness how teaching and learning across prison walls has historically been and continues to be a site of contradictory political struggle, solidarity, and collective transformation.
The school-to-prison pipeline continues to push students, primarily Black and Latinx youth and children with disabilities, out of public schools and into the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. The "pipeline" exacerbates overcrowded classrooms, insufficient special education services, and other inadequate school resources to exploit students of color and those with disabilities through the disproportionate implementation of barbarous school discipline policies that criminalize student behavior.
Zero-tolerance and other overly harsh school discipline policies impose grave and indiscriminate punishment upon students, especially for Black and Brown students. Once school attendance is now substituted for suspensions and expulsions, students fall behind in school or frequently drop-out all together, leaving them quite vulnerable and/or likely to encounter America’s justice system.
The number of youth in prison has increased and with it, so has the number of educational institutions operating in the space to support not only individuals currently incarcerated, but also to support students’ continued education post-release. The scope of prison education is broad and encompasses vocational training, literacy and adult education programs, HESC/GED certificates, as well as successive college-level courses, with some offering corresponding associates and bachelor’s degrees.
As the volume of education institutions expand their presence within prisons, this special edition of Voices in Urban Education poses a fundamental question; can education behind bars support liberatory aims, or does it risk reinforcing the prison-industrial complex? And if so, how do we make the liberatory function (of prison education) intentional and hold ourselves as educators accountable to the unintended, negative consequences that may arise from our well meaning endeavors?
This issue of VUE, Volume 53, Issue 1, presents reflections, case studies, and dialogues, contributors to this issue grapple with these tensions, highlighting both the possibilities and limits of working toward abolition from within carceral systems.
For this special edition of Voices in Urban Education, NYU Metro Center has partnered with NYU’s Prison Education Program (NYU PEP). Over the last decade NYU PEP, a college-in-prison program, has expanded access to higher education within communities impacted by the criminal justice system. NYU PEP also aims to model how a research university can advance solutions to real world problems. VUE’s Abolitionist Praxis and Education Across Prison Walls issue would not be possible without the expertise of NYU PEP’s team, including PEP Associate and issue guest editor Director Dylan Brown, PEP Executive Director and issue guest editor Kaitlin Noss, and Faculty Director and VUE guest editor, Shabnam Javdani, NYU Steinhardt Associate Professor of Applied Psychology. Professor Javdani successfully joined with other VUE editors, Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn, Associate Clinical Professor at NYU’s Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, and Dr. Fabienne Doucet, NYU Metro Center Executive Director, and Professor of Education at NYU’s Department of Department of Student and Learning, and a host of VUE authors to publish a compelling journal, which both promotes greater awareness of and challenges the injustices faced by communities impacted by the criminal justice system.
Check out the latest edition of NYU Metro Center's VUE- Volume 53, Issue 1