Teaching teachers inside juvenile hall

School of Education Professor Brian Charest remarks on his students’ interest in justice and equity issues. “They see themselves not only as teachers but also as individuals who can work collectively within their communities to effect change.

“Many of my students come from the Inland Empire, and they’ll be returning to the communities in which they were raised to put their education into practice.”

Charest knows they’ll have an impact—he has seen the evidence. In 2019, he and co-editor Kate Sjostrom published Unsettling Education: Searching for Ethical Footing in a Time of Reform (Peter Lang Inc., 2019), a collection of essays in which teachers share their efforts to resist standardization and reimagine their approach to education. More recently, he published Civic Literacy in Schools and Communities: Teaching and Organizing for a Revitalized Democracy (Teacher’s College Press, 2021). The book explores what teachers can learn from community organizers about connecting the work in schools with the concerns in communities. He also wrote a chapter, “On the Margin of the Margins: Teaching Teachers Inside Juvenile Hall,” in Minding the Marginalized Students Through Inclusion, Justice, and Hope: Daring to Transform Educational Inequities (Emerald Group Publishing, 2021), a book co-edited by Jose Lalas, director of the School of Education’s Center for Educational Justice.

To humanize the learning experience for Redlands students, Charest teaches a course, Critical Perspectives on Education and Inequality in America—the first of its kind in the University’s School of Education and part of an international Inside-Out Prison Exchange program. In the past, students visited a San Bernardino juvenile detention center to conduct face-to-face discussions with incarcerated youth, addressing the purpose of public education in society and the intersections of race, class, gender, and discipline in schools. This year, the course takes place in the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco.

“The incarcerated students get to take a college-level course for credit and in the process they become more aware of the possibilities open to them as a result of these educational opportunities,” says Charest. “And Redlands students have what I believe is a truly transformative experience. They come face-to-face with what happens to students who are pushed out of school and into the justice system.”