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Justice With Her Eyes Wide Open: Situated Knowledges, Diversity and Correctional Education in the Post Modern Era--Part I

NCJ Number
187045
Journal
Journal of Correctional Education Volume: 51 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2000 Pages: 348-354
Author(s)
Randall L. Wright
Date Published
December 2000
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This paper examines contemporary knowledge debates and their impact on corrections, educational theory, and correctional/prison education.
Abstract
There is a general recognition that knowledge is a social construction strongly biased by context, history, culture, and gender. Reality, knowledge, justice, and education are losing their sense of absoluteness as people become more aware that perceptions become reality, and perceptions vary by context, culture, and other stimuli. Under this awareness, correctional educators are faced with a challenge, because context is crucial at the juncture of education, the State, and social policy. The challenge for correctional educators is to meet students at their varying levels and types of knowledge formed by their subcultures. This paper looks at the knowledge debates across a number of fields, beginning with questions regarding objectivity in the sciences generally, i.e., the crisis of representation of social and natural facts that appears once the autonomous Cartesian ego has been put to rest. Unfortunately, education is currently still in transition to the kind of research and practice that honors persons (students and teachers); we are still caught up in a vision offered by definitions of knowledge that hold out the promise of greater technical control of human beings and nature. This technical or instrumental kind of knowledge, which is efficient and effective, is called upon to control or fix disturbances in the educational, social, and political system. This approach ignores and demeans the adult student's personal knowledge and perceptions that constitute individuality. Education in this modern age requires dialog with students, as each student responds to and incorporates the knowledge imparted from a given course of study into the student's distinctive existing knowledge brought to the course. Part two of this paper will bring some of the theoretical concerns examined to instances of social practice that reflect these new ways of seeing. 36 references

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