Abolitionist teaching and the future of our
schools (video).
Bettina Love author, We Want to Do More Than Survive, Gholdy Muhammad author, Cultivating Genius, Dena Simmons author, White Rules for Black People moderated by Brian Jones of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture come together to share their common interest in abolitionist teaching.
I really appreciated Gholdy Muhammad's approach to abolitionist teaching. Her model has four goals in mind. Identity, Skills, Intellect, and Criticality. This model keeps the whole child in mind and creates equality for all students with each goal building upon the other. Bettina Love adds, "abolitionist education is starting over, evening the playing field, and a push for all humanity." Abolitionist teaching is a way of life. We need to abolish the education system that is oppressive. Steering away from standardized tests, state mandates, outdated curriculum, teacher evaluations, and policing in schools.
Bettina Love believes that we have started the change recently during the Covid-19 pandemic. She states that "so much became possible." All of a sudden there were no standardized tests, every student had a computer for home, free internet was available and there was a balance between parents and teachers. This definitely echoes Jeffrey M. R. Duncan-Andrade's Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete. " Socratic Hope requires both teachers and students to painfully examine our lives and actions within an unjust society and to share the sensibility that pain may pave the path to justice." Educators who foster this type of solidarity with and among students recognize the distinction between being liked and being loved by their students.
www.zinnedproject.org/materials/if-there-is-no-struggle-abolition-movement-history/
I also think Bettina Love's point about how the pandemic has created an optimum time for this abolition to take place is critical-if teachers can be trusted to act on their professional pedagogy to guide students through a pandemic, instead of strictly adhering to standards which only stand to serve the standardized tests and publishing companies, why can teachers not be trusted to do this in a normal year? If we can suddenly find the funds to give out access to technology and internet, then the funds must have been there all along, they were just being divided inequitably, and as Bettina Love also makes clear, this pivotal point if not one for reform, since that is just really the managing of inequality, but like you pointed out it is a time of reckoning and as Duncan-Andrade states, of socratic hope.
ReplyDeleteI loved your connection between this video and Andrade's article on hope. I did not even think to make this connection, but it is so important to see the connection between teachers and parents. I think distance learning really opened the eyes of so many parents about the difficulty of being a teacher, and it also opened up they eyes of teachers to see what support their students have at home.
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