Candidate Presentation: Kelsey Jones

Kelsey Jones, faculty candidate in Developmental Psychology will give a presentation titled "Adolescence Incarcerated: A Racial Literacy Approach to Healing the Wounds of the School-to-Prison Pipeline."

The presentation first summarizes racialized mass incarceration and the overrepresentation of Black and Brown students in special education as they relate to the school-to-prison pipeline. She will introduce a model of racial literacy–the ability to read, interpret, and resolve racial stress–as a psychological intervention to, first, interrupt racialized deficit-thinking in the classroom and, second, improve teacher-student relationships. She will emphasize her qualitative and collaborative research with formerly incarcerated youth and current classroom teachers and their students of color. The presentation will conclude with plans for her future research that will include youth participatory action research and the further development of accessible racial literacy curriculum for K-12 settings.