A phenomenological study of teachers' experiences on face-to-face higher education courses in Mexico city's prisons

This dissertation is a phenomenological inquiry about the experiences of teachers who have worked for the Higher Education Programmefor Re-adaptation Facilities in Mexico City (PESCER). Its rationale considers the face-to-face modality as a central aspect of education, especially within prisons. It aims to contribute to the knowledge of educational practices in penitentiary contexts and to provide useful tools to improve them. I suggest that higher education in prison is a research field quite unexplored in many ways and that exploratory research that accounts for how teachers act, think, and feel, is vital to designing effective and dignifying prison higher education programmes, particularly regarding face-to-face education. Therefore, the research questions inquired about the motivations, ideas, pedagogical practices, challenges, and alternatives undertaken to teach inside detention facilities. My theoretical framework for prison education stems from penal systems' sociology and educationas a human right. The central premise is that Latin America suffers a trend of criminalisationof poverty that has caused the imprisonment ofthousands of persons, who are revictimizedwhile in prison due to the prevailing human rights crisis within most Latin American prisons, which usually follow a punishment logic and are underfunded. In this context, education should not be considered only as a tool for social re-adaptation, but as a right and a humanizing act with multiple possibilities. I adopt Daroqui's conceptualisationof prison education as a two-way 'crack' caused by the entry of theuniversity intothe prison, a helpful idea for understanding the interactions between the different stakeholders who take part in the educational processes. This research revealed that some prison dynamics hamper the educational processes by creating diversetypes of tensions. It showed that students' lifesituations impact significantly how teachers approach their classes. Teachers' willingness to adapt their educational practices to the prison context revealed implicit and explicit notions of inclusive education. In a similar vein, teachers' ideas on the role of educationas a rightwere central to their motivation and practices. The findings revealed the importance of acknowledging teachers' limitations in the face of a powerful violent context, and of having a clear leadership to look for guidance when issues that could affect their classes or their well-beingarise. Although this is a q