Imprisoned Selves: An Inquiry into Prisons and Academe

Imprisoned Selves calls for a new kind of vitality through re-education and alternative viewpoints of teacher education and research. It uses prison sites and various rehabilitative, schooling contexts as a place of inquiry into teacher and learned development. Methods of investigation used combine narrative with ethnography, and the result is an insider’s personal account of an unfamiliar world. This inside-out approach to research uses prisons as an educational context and academe as a kind of correctional institution (with paradigms of correctionalism in operation). The author views teachers and teacher educators as inmates of correctional-educational systems who must strive to become writer-outlaws in order to transform paradigms of control. Through their own actions, inmates, whether in prisons or academe, can learn that storytelling is a source of human caring that connects unlikely worlds and persons. Many empowering opportunities are described that can arise among co-inquirers, even within the most restrictive circumstances.