Abolitionist teaching, also known as abolitionist pedagogy, is a set of practices and approaches to teaching that emphasize abolishing educational practices considered by its proponents to be inherently problematic and oppressive. [1] The term was coined by education professor and critical theorist Bettina Love. [2]
Proponents of the approach have criticized test-taking [2] and prohibitions on cheating, [3] as well as deemphasize traditional literacy and math improvement programs. [1] Private organizations working under the banner of abolitionist teaching have stirred controversy bringing progressive politics and activism into classrooms, which includes promoting anti-police, anti-capitalism and anti-Zionist viewpoints. [1]
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. [2] Love further notes that it is a necessary complement to critical pedagogy, as pedagogy is most effective when paired with teachers who fight for student equality and justice. This teaching method is intended 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." [2] [4] Other parts of the system that the practice is intended to combat is cheating, as Drs. Lore/tta LeMaster and Meggie Mapes note that "Rather than punitive measures, abolitionist pedagogy requires rethinking how narratives of cheating perform and to what and whose ends such narratives serve." [3]
Some scholars, such as Denise Blum, have argued for a neo-abolitionist pedagogy in educational institutions, a "'third space' to process emotional responses and discuss social positionalities to prevent unproductive feelings of guilt or pity that function to further otherize immigrants." [5]
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. [2] 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. [6]
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 Kimberlé 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." [7] Crenshaw has revisited this theme in multiple subsequent papers and discussions. [8] [9]
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. [10] 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. [11] This framework applies directly to other oppressive systems, like education, that govern members of society. This draws on the Foucauldian notion that discipline evolves over time, both in the penal system and in schools. [12]
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. [13] She also published Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope in 2004. [14] 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 novel Pedagogy of the Oppressed excoriated 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. [15]
Freire and his legacy are the cornerstone of the field of Critical Pedagogy,[ citation needed ] of which abolitionist teaching is a part.
Pedagogy, most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken as an academic discipline, is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context, and it considers the interactions that take place during learning. Both the theory and practice of pedagogy vary greatly as they reflect different social, political, and cultural contexts.
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences as of 2016 according to Google Scholar.
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
The prison abolition movement is a network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation and education that do not focus on punishment and government institutionalization. The prison abolitionist movement is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is intended to improve conditions inside prisons.
Intersectionality is a sociological analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, height, age, and weight. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic field focused on the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws, and media. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, not based only on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in neo-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.
The ecopedagogy movement is an outgrowth of the theory and practice of critical pedagogy, a body of educational praxis influenced by the philosopher and educator Paulo Freire. Ecopedagogy's mission is to develop a robust appreciation for the collective potentials of humanity and to foster social justice throughout the world. It does so as part of a future-oriented, ecological and political vision that radically opposes the globalization of ideologies such as neoliberalism and imperialism, while also attempting to foment forms of critical ecoliteracy. Recently, there have been attempts to integrate critical eco-pedagogy, as defined by Greg Misiaszek with Modern Stoic philosophy to create Stoic eco-pedagogy.
Donna Alvermann is an American educator and researcher in the field of Language and Literacy Education whose work focuses on adolescent literacy in and out of school, inclusive of new media and digital literacies. Her most recent research interest involves developing historical-autobiographical methods for uncovering silences in scholarly writing that mask more than they disclose. She is the Omer Clyde and Elizabeth Parr Aderhold Professor in Education in the Mary Frances Early College of Education at the University of Georgia (UGA). She is also a UGA-appointed Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education.
Feminist pedagogy is a pedagogical framework grounded in feminist theory. It embraces a set of epistemological theories, teaching strategies, approaches to content, classroom practices, and teacher-student relationships. Feminist pedagogy, along with other kinds of progressive and critical pedagogy, considers knowledge to be socially constructed.
Critical mathematics pedagogy is an approach to mathematics education that includes a practical and philosophical commitment to liberation. Approaches that involve critical mathematics pedagogy give special attention to the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of oppression, as they can be understood through mathematics. They also analyze the role that mathematics plays in producing and maintaining potentially oppressive social, political, cultural or economic structures. Finally, critical mathematics pedagogy demands that critique is connected to action promoting more just and equitable social, political or economic reform.
Critical pedagogy of place is a curricular approach to education that combines critical pedagogy and place-based education. It started as an attitude and approach to place-based and land-based education that criticized place-based education's invisible endorsement of colonial narratives and domineering relationships with the land. The scholars critiquing place-based education mainly focused on re-centering Indigenous voices in the curriculum. In the early 1990s, C.A. Bowers advocated for a critical pedagogy of place that acknowledged our enmeshment in cultural and ecological systems, and the resulting need for this to figure in the school curriculum. In 2003, David A. Greenwood introduced and defined the term "Critical Pedagogy of Place." In the years since, the general ideas of critical pedagogy of place have been incorporated into many scholars' critiques of place-based, land-based, and environmental education.
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women while failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. Whiteness is crucial in structuring the lived experiences of white women across a variety of contexts. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women in the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.
The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is an educational model that describes the intersections between technology, pedagogy, and content for the effective integration of technology into teaching. TPACK became popular in the early 2000s.
Andrea J. Ritchie is a writer, lawyer, and activist for women of color, especially LGBTQ women of color, who have been victims of police violence. An abolitionist, her activism consists of demand for the elimination of police and prisons. She is the author of Invisible No More, a history of state violence against women of color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition with Mariame Kaba.
Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all human beings in all manner of experiences. It also redefines traditional delivery sites to include non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes, and alternative practices such as rhetorical listening and productive silence. In her book, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), Cheryl Glenn describes rhetorical feminism as, "a set of tactics that multiplies rhetorical opportunities in terms of who counts as a rhetor, who can inhabit an audience, and what those audiences can do." Rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences view rhetorical appeals.
Bettina L. Love is an American author and academic. She is the William F. Russell Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she has been instrumental in establishing abolitionist teaching in schools. According to Love, abolitionist teaching refers to restoring humanity for children in schools. Love also advocates eliminating standardized testing.
K. Wayne Yang is a professor and scholar of community organizing, critical pedagogy, and Indigenous and decolonizing studies. He is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego and Provost of John Muir College. He writes about decolonization and everyday epic organizing, often with his frequent collaborator, Eve Tuck. Currently, they are convening The Land Relationships Super Collective, editing the book series, Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education, and editing the journal, Critical Ethnic Studies. He is interested in the complex role of cities in global affairs: cities as sites of settler colonialism, as stages for empire, as places of resettlement and gentrification, and as always-already on Indigenous lands.
Susan Elaine Sandretto is an American–New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in working with teachers to develop critical literacy in primary and secondary school pupils. Sandretto also works on unintended consequences of educational policy, such as changes to active transport.