Correcting for the Correctional: Liberatory Practice at Project Remix

Abstract

This paper intends to provide a qualitative description of an experimental alternative education program for formerly incarcerated adolescents. In doing so, it intends to construe this school as a site of liberation - in opposition to its former iteration as a correctional institution. It examines the school’s architecture, pedagogical practices, and practices around care to reveal that this institution has been reconfigured to empower students in any number of ways - from meeting their material needs to providing the conditions for immense intellectual enrichment. This ethnographic exploration may be used as a manual for replication or as fodder for thought on what education can do and mean.