On the Margins of the Margins: Teaching Teachers Inside Juvenile Hall

This chapter examines the experience of aspiring teachers in a course on the foundations of learning taught inside a juvenile hall. The author describes what happens when he brings together incarcerated youth and college students across profound social boundaries to study educational inequalities and develop proposals to promote educational justice. Exploring the challenges of teaching toward more justice and more equity, while working with students inside the juvenile justice system, the author describes the potential of the Inside-Out Prison Exchange program to transform preservice teachers as they learn to put ideas about critical pedagogy into practice. The chapter pays particular attention to how the experience of taking a course inside a juvenile hall challenges aspiring teachers to reimagine the connections between communities and schools.