Maisha T. Winn – författare

The United States of America is in possession of the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is predominantly and disproportionately made up of communities of colour and poverty. Between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled; the direct result of various ‘tough on crime’ public policies. Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the USA. The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term ‘the PIC’ aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, and the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm.Education and Incarceration highlights the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and documents scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails and prisons. This book provides snapshots of practices in motion: activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and larger justice movements, and to build abolition democracies.This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

This original account is based on the author’s experiences with incarcerated girls participating in Girl Time, a programme created by a theatre company that conducts playwriting and performance workshops in youth detention centres. In addition to examining the lives of these and other formerly incarcerated girls, Girl Time shares the stories of educators who dare to teach children who have been “thrown away” by their schools and society. The girls, primarily African American teens, write their own plays, learn ensemble-building techniques, explore societal themes, and engage in self analysis as they prepare for a final performance. The book describes some of the girls and their experiences in the programme, examines the implications of the school-to-prison pipeline, and offers ways for young girls to avoid incarceration. Readers will learn how the lived experiences of incarcerated girls can inform their teaching in public school classrooms and the teaching of literacy as a civil and human right.

This book offers specific ideas for how to teach writing in a culturally relevant way. Drawing on research-based understandings from NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, Winn and Johnson demonstrate how these principles support an approach that can help all students succeed.How can we reach all of our students—especially those who have been ignored and underserved in America’s classrooms? Maisha T. Winn and Latrise Johnson suggest that culturally relevant pedagogy can make a difference. Although it certainly includes inviting in the voices of those who are generally overlooked in the texts and curricula of US schools, culturally relevant teaching also means recognizing and celebrating those students who show up to our classrooms daily, welcoming their voices, demanding their reflection, and encouraging them toward self-discovery. Writing Instruction in the Culturally Relevant Classroom offers specific ideas for how to teach writing well and in a culturally relevant way. Drawing on research-based understandings from NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, Winn and Johnson demonstrate how these principles support an approach to writing instruction that can help all students succeed. Through portraits of four thoughtful high school teachers, the authors show how to create an environment for effective learning and teaching in diverse classrooms, helping to answer questions such as: How can I honor students’ backgrounds and experiences to help them become better writers?; How can I teach in a culturally responsive way if I don’t share cultural identities with my students?; How can I move beyond a “heroes and holidays” approach to culturally relevant pedagogy?; How can I draw on what I already know about good writing instruction to make my classes more culturally relevant?; and How can I create culturally responsive assessment of writing?

Futuring Black Lives is a historical ethnography examining Black institution builders in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their work to leverage the power of publications and the literary imagination to engage “concerned men and women” in conversations about the educational journeys and futures of Black children. While many began as reactions to anti-Blackness and American public schooling failing Black children, Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) came to be viable ecosystems anchored in a shared Black value system preparing Black children in three areas: identity, purpose, and direction.The rationale for establishing and valuing IBIs remains highly relevant, given the sociopolitical landscape of education today. In addition to persistent racial disparities in academic achievement and Black students’ highly disproportionate experiences of punishment and “discipline,” friction and legislation against critical examination of race, racism, and racist ideas in school settings are front and center, and children’s and young adult literature are under attack through censorship and outright book bans. Yet Black institution builders left useful maps of and for the educational future/s of Black children that remain available in journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Author Maisha T. Winn demonstrates how and why the historiography-grounded futuring of Black education can and should inform current pursuits of equity, justice, and liberation through education.

Futuring Black Lives is a historical ethnography examining Black institution builders in the late 1960s and early 1970s and their work to leverage the power of publications and the literary imagination to engage “concerned men and women” in conversations about the educational journeys and futures of Black children. While many began as reactions to anti-Blackness and American public schooling failing Black children, Independent Black Institutions (IBIs) came to be viable ecosystems anchored in a shared Black value system preparing Black children in three areas: identity, purpose, and direction.The rationale for establishing and valuing IBIs remains highly relevant, given the sociopolitical landscape of education today. In addition to persistent racial disparities in academic achievement and Black students’ highly disproportionate experiences of punishment and “discipline,” friction and legislation against critical examination of race, racism, and racist ideas in school settings are front and center, and children’s and young adult literature are under attack through censorship and outright book bans. Yet Black institution builders left useful maps of and for the educational future/s of Black children that remain available in journals, newspapers, pamphlets, and other ephemera. Author Maisha T. Winn demonstrates how and why the historiography-grounded futuring of Black education can and should inform current pursuits of equity, justice, and liberation through education.

The United States of America is in possession of the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is predominantly and disproportionately made up of communities of colour and poverty. Between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled; the direct result of various ‘tough on crime’ public policies. Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the USA. The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term ‘the PIC’ aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, and the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm.Education and Incarceration highlights the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and documents scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails and prisons. This book provides snapshots of practices in motion: activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and larger justice movements, and to build abolition democracies.This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

*Winner of the 2015 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Qualitative Research Special Interest Group (SIG).* What does it mean to conduct research for justice with youth and communities who are marginalized by systems of inequality based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship status, gender, and other categories of difference? In this collection, editors Django Paris and Maisha Winn have selected essays written by top scholars in education on humanizing approaches to qualitative and ethnographic inquiry with youth and their communities. Vignettes, portraits, narratives, personal and collaborative explorations, photographs, and additional data excerpts bring the findings to life for a better understanding of how to use research for positive social change.

Faith Made Flesh brings together the experience, insight, and stories of those actively addressing societal and educational disadvantages of Black children in Sacramento, California. Editors Lawrence "Torry" Winn, Vajra M. Watson, Maisha T. Winn, and Kindra F. Montgomery-Block seek to offer viable solutions to racial injustice by centering the voices of organizers, policymakers, educators, scholars, and young people alike. Focused on the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC), a ten-year community-driven initiative to respond to disproportionate health outcomes, the contributors analyze the impact of the BCLC's successes, providing an empirically rich narrative of its transformative alliances and radical actions. Through timely and urgent case studies and personal reflections, Faith Made Flesh advances the need to address societal challenges through creative engagement with diverse institutional and individual stakeholders. The findings offer an innovative model to other regions aiming to cultivate thriving community-city-school partnerships that center the well-being of Black children and Black futures.

Faith Made Flesh brings together the experience, insight, and stories of those actively addressing societal and educational disadvantages of Black children in Sacramento, California. Editors Lawrence "Torry" Winn, Vajra M. Watson, Maisha T. Winn, and Kindra F. Montgomery-Block seek to offer viable solutions to racial injustice by centering the voices of organizers, policymakers, educators, scholars, and young people alike. Focused on the Black Child Legacy Campaign (BCLC), a ten-year community-driven initiative to respond to disproportionate health outcomes, the contributors analyze the impact of the BCLC's successes, providing an empirically rich narrative of its transformative alliances and radical actions. Through timely and urgent case studies and personal reflections, Faith Made Flesh advances the need to address societal challenges through creative engagement with diverse institutional and individual stakeholders. The findings offer an innovative model to other regions aiming to cultivate thriving community-city-school partnerships that center the well-being of Black children and Black futures.

Restorative justice represents “a paradigm shift in the way Americans conceptualize and administer punishment,” says author Maisha T. Winn, from a focus on crime to a focus on harm, including the needs of both those who were harmed and those who caused it. Her book, Justice on Both Sides, provides an urgently needed, comprehensive account of the value of restorative justice and how contemporary schools can implement effective practices to address inequalities associated with race, class, and gender.Winn, a restorative justice practitioner and scholar, draws on her extensive experience as a coach to school leaders and teachers to show how indispensable restorative justice is in understanding and addressing the educational needs of students, particularly disadvantaged youth. Justice on Both Sides makes a major contribution by demonstrating how this actually works in schools and how it can be integrated into a range of educational settings. It also emphasizes how language and labeling must be addressed in any fruitful restorative effort. Ultimately, Winn makes the case for restorative justice as a crucial answer, at least in part, to the unequal practices and opportunities in American schools.

Restorative Justice in Education makes the case for restorative justice as a practice as much as it is a paradigm. Through essays, case studies, and interviews, the book outlines for educators and teacher educators how restorative justice can be leveraged to teach across disciplines.Building on the success of Justice on Both Sides, this book consists of four sections that explore instructional practices in history, race, justice, and language. The contributors examine a variety of educational issues and questions for teachers to explore through a transformative justice lens. Topics include how access to history and histories can promote agency for and among marginalized students; how science and mathematics education can be re-imagined to catalyze the creativity and capacity of Black math learners; and how restorative justice practices can foster healthy student identities.The book includes the voices of leading practitioners and scholars, who address the need for both restorative and transformative justice work within, across, and beyond the core disciplines. Particular attention is given to areas of education often omitted from these conversations: early childhood, special education, and ethnic studies.Restorative Justice in Education offers educators the pedagogical tools they need to transform their classroom into just, inclusive, and uplifting spaces.