2025 Theses Doctoral

Art as a Practice of Freedom: A Post-intentional Phenomenological Inquiry

Ruyter, Maria

This post-intentional phenomenological (PIP) study explored the experience of educators who teach art in prisons. Prisons are “total institutions” (Goffman, 1958), with a culture of deprivation, domination, and dehumanization that may impact educators’ experiences. Prisons expect teachers to maintain an authoritarian hierarchy. Prisons strictly control what and how educators teach, with tight limitations on materials, time, and space. Despite that, many art educators commit to teaching art in prisons.

Using a PIP approach (Vagle, 2025), this study inquired: How might teaching art take shape for educators in the prison system, with all its complexity? How do unexpected moments—the surprises that happen while teaching—help co-produce experiences that create shifts in the prison classroom? How do non-human elements—for example, specific art materials or the prison environment—co-produce the teaching experience?

I spoke with four art educators who teach in prisons on Zoom over 3 months, using an open-ended conversational interview protocol. I supplemented their accounts with texts on incarceration, artists, and pedagogy as well as narratives of my own experiences teaching in jail. I am an abolitionist and committed to liberatory education. As I engaged in the iterative process of reading and reflecting, I remained open to thinking with other useful theories for analyzing the research materials and creating my text. I engaged in “thinking with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013), drawing on concepts from abolitionist thinking, critical pedagogy, and new materialism.

The narrative text I created shows how the complexities of prison teaching create obstacles to a positive learning environment. However, in collaboration with students, the art educators can work through and around barriers to create classrooms where liberatory pedagogy is practiced. The students in prison often surprise their teachers with unexpected observations and opinions, inspiring personal insight for the educators, and creating moments of connection between the teachers and the students. In particular, art is a powerful catalyst for building community. The tactile and visceral characteristics of art materials elicit nonverbal ways of knowing and possibilities for expressing vulnerability that deepen connections among the students and the teachers.