From the outside in: narratives of creative arts practitioners working in the criminal justice system

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley-Blackwell in The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice on 31/12/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12318 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The penal voluntary sector is highly variegated in its roles, practices and functions, though research to date has largely excluded the experiences of front-line practitioners. We argue that engaging with the narratives of practitioners can provide fuller appreciation of the potential of the sector’s work. Though life story and narrative have been recognised as important in offender desistance (Maruna, 2001), the narrative identities of creative arts practitioners, who are important ‘change agents’ (Albertson, 2015), are typically absent. This is despite evidence to suggest that a practitioner’s life history can be a significant and positive influence in the rehabilitation of offenders (Harris, 2017). Using narratological analysis (Bal, 2009), this study examined the narratives of 19 creative practitioners in prisons in England and Wales. Of particular interest were the formative experiences of arts practitioners in their journey to prison work. The findings suggest that arts practitioners identify with an ‘outsider’ status and may be motivated by an ethic of mutual aid. In the current climate of third sector involvement in the delivery of criminal justice interventions, such a capacity may be both a strength and weakness for arts organisations working in this field

Adult and permanent education in times of crisis: a critical perspective based on Freire and Gelpi

Besides other theoretical perspectives, the understanding of present adult education and learning policy discourse also demands contributions from social enquiry originated in the broader field of permanent education. The works of Paulo Freire and Ettore Gelpi, two of the most important authors who developed a critical perspective of permanent education may provide valuable resources for understanding what adult education has to offer in educating our way out of the current crisis. Both authors developed political pedagogies and dialectical approaches, which are central to critical studies. Inspired by the works of Freire and of Gelpi, this paper challenges the perspectives which argue that welfare state intervention has been the main source of the education crisis, that the withdrawal of the state can be a way of reviving individual learning, that the training of competent and useful human resources represents a strategy for crisis management and the promotion of economic competitiveness. On the contrary, it concludes that adult education in the light of a critical concept of permanent education is a key to the understanding of the crisis, and to ‘educating’ the crisis – a metaphor that both in a Freirian and Gelpian perspective stresses the importance of culture, work and social struggles for the transformation of the social world.This work was supported by the FCT under Project PEst-OE/CED/UI1661/2014.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio