User:Rachelismo/Abolitionist Teaching

Abolitionist teaching refers to practices and approaches to teaching that focus on restoring humanity for children in schools.

Abolitionist Teaching Network, whose mission is to "develop and support those in the struggle for educational freedom," while utilizing "the intellectual work and direct action of Abolitionists in many forms." This network was established by author and professor Bettina Love, also known for her book We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom.

Concept
Abolitionist teaching has its roots in critical pedagogy, intersectional feminism and abolitionist action. It is defined as the commitment to pursue educational freedom and fight for an education system where students thrive, rather than just survive. It is conceived as a necessary complement to critical pedagogy, as pedagogy is most effective when paired with teachers who fight for student equality and justice. Abolitionist teaching offers a path for teachers that is not reform but rather predicted on freedom. It is an approach that works to combat systemic oppression, racial violence, the school-to-prison pipeline, reliance on test taking and all other parts of a system Bettina Love calls the "educational survival complex."

Theoretical Background
Abolitionist teaching is inspired by Black feminist theory, abolitionist theory and direct action. The term can be traced to Bettina L. Love's 2019 work, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Love, an Associate Professor of Education at University of Georgia, defines abolitionist teaching as teaching with the goal of intersectional social justice for equitable classrooms that love and affirm Black and brown children. She co-founded the Abolitionist Teaching Network (ATN) in 2020, which empowers teachers and parents to fight injustice within their schools.

Abolitionist teaching resides at the intersection between education, race, abolition and Black joy. It is heavily influenced by intersectionality, which is a framework that focuses on how the intersection of a person's multiple identities influences the privilege or discrimination they experience. Some of these traits include gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion and disability. Intersectionality is a theory coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 in her paper "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." Crenshaw has revisited this theme in multiple subsequent papers and discussions.

Abolitionist teachings grows out of the prison abolition movement, which comes from the abolitionist movement. The abolitionist movement was the worldwide effort to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade and free enslaved peoples from bondage. There was no leader of this movement, as there were many groups in many different countries that worked to end slavery over a period of over one hundred years. In the United States, the abolition movement culminated in the Civil War. Though the trans-Atlantic slave trade is no more, there are many global movements aimed at abolishing unjust systems that are part of the tradition of abolition.

The prison abolition movement sees the prison system as a new form of slavery that must be abolished in order for oppressed communities to be freed. Political activist and scholar Angela Davis' is a major figure in the prison abolition movement, which influences abolitionist teaching. She co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization focused on abolishing the prison system. In 2001 article "Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex: California and Beyond," Davis and co-author Shaylor launch a strong critique of the US prison-industrial complex that includes data on the human rights abuses of women, people of color and the poor in prisons. This framework applies directly to other oppressive systems, like education, that govern members of society. One might posit that the Foucauldian evolution from discipline to punishment also extends to schools.

The feminist and scholar bell hooks' work also influences abolitionist teaching. bell hooks' seminal 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, encourages educators to teach students to "transgress" racial and class boundaries in order to pursue freedom. She also published Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope in 2004. In this book, as in Teaching to Transgress, hooks advises teachers to make the classroom life-sustaining, joyful and expansive. She encourages students and teachers to work in partnership, in order to mutually liberate one another.

bell hooks is deeply influenced by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose seminal novel Pedagogy of the Oppressed, excorciated the "banking model of education" and proposed a critical pedagogy to engage students as co-creators of knowledge. He argues that through education students can awaken critical consciousness, or conscientização, that will empower them to make change in their communities.

Freire and his legacy are the cornerstone of the field of Critical Pedagogy, of which abolitionist teaching is a part.