Abstract:
Teachers who enact and develop their practice within youth carceral settings work alongside young people who are among the most marginalised in our communities. This cohort, including a starkly overrepresented number of First Nations students, have often experienced schools as places of injustice and violence. They bring these experiences, emotions and relations into carceral education settings. Teachers often come to these settings with understandings of teaching and learning dominated by techno rationalist approaches to practice. These approaches cannot sufficiently account for the affective and relational labour involved in creating productive and safe learning spaces in such contexts. This paper puts into conversation the conceptual work of Michalinos Zembylas and Sara Ahmed, including difficult knowledge, pedagogies of discomfort and affective economies, in order to explore the complexities of teacher practice in Victorian youth justice contexts. By focusing on the relational and affective dimensions of practice, we can work toward a more authentic picture of the labour involved in socially just teaching and learning in youth carceral settings.