Abolitionist Pedagogy

B.Love reading sample <link

STUDY CIRCLE LINKS AND READING CONNECTIONS

Some guided questions for thinking about this text:

1. What are your thoughts, feelings and reflections on the concept of the educational survival complex?
2. In what ways are teachers in the educational survival complex enlisted in spirit-murdering?
3. What is mattering for a learner/child? Where did Dr. Love experience mattering?  How is this related to abolitionist teaching?
4. What does it mean to conceive of the classroom as homeplace?
5. In what way does Dr. Love add to your ability to challenge narratives of grit and zest?
6. What is abolitionist teaching? How is it related to freedom dreaming?
7. Why does Dr. Love feel most alive at Beacon Hill (Boston, MA) and Congo Square (New Orleans, LA)?
8. Why does Dr. Love use the term co-conspirator instead of ally?
9. What work do white educators need to do before being a co-conspirator and a teacher?
10. What is the teacher education gap?  In what way does it perpetuate whiteness?
11. In what way does Dr. Love contribute to interrogating whiteness?
12. Dr. Love offers several theories that serve as a North Star to her conception of abolitionist teaching.  What is most helpful to you in this section?
13. What is the difference between alright and well?   What is the difference between survival and freedom?
14. Now what?  After reading We Want to do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom, what are the implications for your classroom?  Teacher identity?  Activism?
15. What new learning/thinking are you experiencing as a result of reading this book?

Chapter Supplemental Materials Below

CHAPTER ONE
“We Who Are Dark”

We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity by Tommie Shelby
Reviewed by Bill E. Lawson, University of Memphis

Review excerpt: Shelby is (offering) “The Covenant with Black America.” It is a proposal for blacks of all social and political persuasions to work to resolve some of the pressing issues in “black” America. Can an appeal to pragmatic nationalism draw blacks of all political persuasions to this cause? I am not sure. Why? For all of its appeal to diversity, the Covenant still has some strong attachments to the collective-identity view of blacks in the United States. As Shelby notes, the black nationalistic traditions still hold adherents in the “black” community. The political goals have been expressed as blacks controlling their own landmass, controlling their communities within the United States, or controlling the basic institutions that impact on the life of the black community. Since blacks are not leaving the United States, they should at least have control over the institutions in the United States that impact their lives. These institutions would be schools, police protection, and other social institutions. If the goal is to have some black control over the basic institutions that impact their lives, then pragmatic nationalism with its emphasis on interracial membership will not work for many blacks. There is still a feeling among many blacks that blacks have to work out these racial problems by themselves with modest support from non-blacks. Blacks have to solve the problems of the black community “in house.” It might be argued that Shelby wants to open “our house” to those who have been the oppressor. It will be argued that blacks cannot with reason do this. Nonetheless, the value of Professor Shelby’s book is that it forces us to rethink many of our cherished beliefs about black solidarity and collective identity. What he makes clear is that the problem of racism and white supremacy are not solely the problems of blacks.

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CHAPTER TWO
Educational Survival
(REVISIONIST HISTORY PODCAST LINK)
Revisionist History: Miss Buchanan’s Period Of Adjustment

Brown v Board of Education might be the most well-known Supreme Court decision, a major victory in the fight for civil rights. But in Topeka, the city where the case began, the ruling has left a bittersweet legacy. RH hears from the Browns, the family behind the story.

excerpt from podcast: 
The Brown decision was all about children. The signature memories of the Brown Era are all about Black children being escorted into previously all White schools. We should have been talking about teachers.
About 3.5 hours to east of Topeka on I-70, there is a little town called Moberly. Moberly is in the area of Missouri called little Dixie, because it was settled by migrants from the south before the Civil War. There was a lot of slave owning in little Dixie compared with the rest of Missouri, a lot of racial hostility in that part of the state. And I don’t think you can understand what happened after the Brown decision without first understanding what happened in Moberly….(in depth court details on the firing all the black teachers in Moberly)…Moberly, Missouri gets rid of its Black teachers. And by the way, so does almost everybody else. Across the entire south, Black teachers just get fired left and right. It wasn’t something done secretly; it was done right out in the open. There was something like 82,000 African-American teachers in the south before the Brown decision. Within a decade, as the decision was slowly implemented across the country, about half had been fired.

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CHAPTER THREE
Mattering

This chapter discusses the critical cultural knowledge that bell hooks identifies as homeplace is excluded from public education for black children.

The chapter goes on to illustrate how Ella Baker’s model of participatory democracy can be transformative to the cultural knowledge within the classroom in Abolitionist Teaching.

bell hooks on HOMEPLACE and centering cultural KNOWLEDGE

hooks: Homeplace (A site of resistance)

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Ella Baker on PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY

Ella Baker and origins of participatory democracy

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CHAPTER FOUR
Grit, Zest, and Racism (The Hunger Games)

(ARTICLE AND VIDEO LINK)
‘Grit Is in Our DNA’: Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black: What a trip to Ghana taught me about education in America
By Bettina L. Love
February 12, 2019

This recent article from Education Week and the embedded video link of Dr. Love speaking about GRIT provide additional context to this chapter’s discussion.

Teachers and school leaders need to abandon teaching students to embrace “grit.” In my new book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, I spend an entire chapter explaining how these quick fixes pathologize African-American children and are inherently anti-black. I argue that the idea of grit seems harmless at face value—we can all agree that children need grit to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success—but is actually the educational equivalent of The Hunger Games.

Measuring African-American students’ grit while removing no institutional barriers, then watching to see who beats the odds makes for great Hollywood movies (i.e., “Dangerous Minds,” “The Blind Side,” “Freedom Writers”) and leaves us all feeling good because the gritty black kid made it out of the ‘hood. But we fail to acknowledge the hundreds of kids who are left behind because we are rooting for what we are told is an anomaly. However, if teachers knew how enslaved Africans made it to the United States and how we as African-Americans fight every day to matter in this country, I believe they would understand why questioning whether African-American kids have grit is not only trivial but also deeply hurtful. (excerpt)

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CHAPTER FIVE
Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy

Below is a link to an interview with Bettina Love on the podcast NOTHING NEVER HAPPENS.

Bettina Love Audio Interview on Freedom Dreaming:
The impossible demand involves demanding the impossible—studying what freedom educators from Ella Baker to Christopher Emdin do to create a model for restorative justice in education. Love believes, “You can’t have liberation without queerness,” and it is queerness that allows us to push what society says is normal and do the work of freedom dreaming. A radical feminist leadership sees “knowledge as an embodied practice” that is intersectional and anti-oppression. Racism, bigotry, and hate is a triad that only a participatory democracy can defeat. Love invites listeners to join the struggle for freedom.

In the audio file above Dr. Love talks about the work of Robin D. G. Kelley on Freedom Dreams.

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Below is a video of Robin D.G. Kelley in an interview talking about Freedom Dreaming and Black Joy.

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CHAPTER SIX
Theory Over Gimmicks: Finding Your North Star

Below is a link to an interview with Bettina Love on the podcast NOTHING NEVER HAPPENS.
Mattering Pedagogy: A conversation with Bettina Love: Part 1
Lucia and Tina talked with Dr. Love about hip hop education, freedom schools, and breaking the cycles of oppression. Love encourages her teacher education students to take risks and go beyond gimmicks and tricks in teaching. In the current resegregated public schools systems, abolitionist teaching requires creating a culturally-responsive pedagogy in which all students matter

THE NORTH STAR |  PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

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CHAPTER SEVEN
We Gon’ Be Alright, but That Ain’t Alright

And here is more about how Kendrick Lamar’s song Alright became a protest song.