On June 23rd, Haymarket Books hosted a webinar on "Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of Our Schools." The discussion was moderated by Brian Jones, the associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. He gathered the voices of three women who are educators and abolitionists:
- Dr. Bettina Love, professor, Harvard Fellow, and author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching
- Dena Simmons, the director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, abolitionist teacher, and writer.
- Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, professor, and author of Cultivating Genius: A Four-Layered Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy
With current discussions around police and prison abolition, the suggested move is for money allocated to the police to be spent on education and public services. These women discuss how the abolitionist movement needs to extend to schools and education. If the police were to be defunded and that money then reallocated to be spent on education, then the current education system will need to be abolished and rebuilt to correctly serve the students. White supremacy is as foundational to the education system as it is foundational to the police in the United States, and must be abolished because it causes harm and trauma to students as they are failed by the system every day. Abolition may feel impossible, but it does feel possible to make great strides of progress when our previous way of life has been upended by COVID-19. The demands and concerns around returning to the classroom have been focused on health, safety, and sanitation. Health has always been influenced by race, and not enough schools are considering a reopening plan with an anti-racist lens. With the demands for a clear plan that is considerate of others' health and safety, teachers should also demand anti-racism curriculum and policies as we work our way back into classrooms.
I recommend watching the entire webinar, but if you are short on time or need more convincing (then you probably need even more anti-racist education besides a 90-minute webinar), I've summarized the points that resonated with me.
The school system is "managing inequality," not dismantling it.
Inequality is pervasive in the education system and Bettina Love argues that the current structures continue to uphold that inequality and teachers become responsible for managing that inequality rather than dismantling the system that has created and perpetuates it. "Meeting students where they are at" is a phrase that is used in teacher conversations. This phrase is loaded in that it suggests knowledge and understanding that the system has not served students and that teachers are going to continue this management in the future. The system creates the tests and labels that create the mental mathematics of how we determine how smart or intelligent or ready students are. Teachers then work within the system to advance students and move their labels to something more advanced and developed which shows that teachers are complicit in the system that we know is unfair and underserving kids.
This mismanaging of students and managing of inequality is because the school system has been built on a racist, white supremacist foundation. This white model that has led the way is "deadly and offensive" because it conditions the minds of educators of what is considered "standard" which has been created and defined by white people. Teachers need to create a curriculum that is responsive to students' stories and does not require them to assimilate into white culture.
Love provides an example of the way that schools have been built for student failure by addressing some of the problematic language that is used when students, programs, and schools succeed. Often times, there are awards that are given called "Beating the Odds" (in the Academy that I teach, we have given this award, and I never want to do it again). Love argues that this phrase is an example of white supremacist language because it acknowledges that the people who are doing to awarding know that there are barriers and that people are not supposed to be able to succeed in the face of their gender, their socioeconomic status, their race, their family structure, their past attendance record, their disposition in the classroom, etc. The awarders know that all of these barriers prevent success, and instead of working to remove those barriers to success, they are measuring people against them.
You cannot talk about ideas of understanding "the self" or self-awareness without explicitly addressing white supremacy.
There has been a popular movement in education to introduce social-emotional learning to create awareness in students and to manage behaviors. Dena Simmons cautions against administrators and school leaders who introduce social-emotional learning and even labels it, "white supremacy with a hug." Simmons argues that no educator can effectively do work around social-emotional learning or trauma-informed teaching unless they acknowledge that white supremacy has done harm and trauma in our students' lives. Educators need to do the work themselves and not as a tool to control students.
I would like to push her explanation one step further: if we use social-emotional learning to teach students about their self-awareness in society, then how do we define the society that we are asking them to exist in? By teaching them self-awareness, are we teaching them how to assimilate? That if they are a little quieter, a little more open about the things that they might want to keep private, or a little more aware of their emotions, then they'll be better, more acceptable students that the system values. The white perspective has always been depicted as the professional norm and objective, so if white teachers (over 80% of teachers in the US are white) are trying to teach students how to exist within society, but have not done their own social-emotional intelligence work to understand how they operate in society and that the way that they view their students is a reflection of themselves, then they will be perpetuating a narrative that supports students' assimilation and fails to realize that students' differences do not equal a deficit that needs to be fixed or changed or filled with a narrative that does not value their existence. As Audre Lorde stated, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." We cannot undo systems of oppression if we are perpetuating them and pushing visions of what the classroom should look like based on the oppressive system that has taught us. There is essential un-learning that needs to happen before and socio-emotional learning is taught.
Further, as I write this, more information about the death of Elijah McClain has come to light with her mother's plea to revisit the investigation around his death. In the video where is beaten and arrested, he shows self-awareness, "I'm an introvert. I'm just different," "Why are you attacking me?" "I don't do that stuff." It is not Elijah McClain who needed social-emotional learning in order to understand himself, it is the cops in the video who need social-emotional learning. If they reflected and learned about the systems that they operate in, they would realize the damage and harm that they do to the communities that they are supposed to serve.
If your school supports social-emotional learning, question whether it is done to help students or control them.
19th-century abolitionists and educators taught children how to read the world as a model for humanity.
Writer and educator, Gholdy Mulholland wrote a book on the four pillars of education that could cultivate genius. Her ideas are based on the 19th-century abolitionists who are the model for educating people to fight oppression and truly thinking critically of the world around them. She offers this model and the most humane model for education which challenges the current move in education with the Common Core Standards that focuses solely on skills and students' ability to use those skills in assessments.
The four pillars are briefly explained below:
- Cultivating skills: the abolitionist teachers valued math, language arts, history, and science, and these subjects were all areas that were emphasized as important for developing skill sets that can be used to better humanity.
- Identity: essential questions were taught that centered around: how can I understand who I am, who I'm not, who I want to be? Collective identities in the community were defined and explored, origin identities gave explanations for history, and curiosity was fostered by learning about people whose identities are different than them.
- Intellectualism: there was always a desire to be smarter about something. They didn't learn how to cite textual evidence or how to correctly format a paper, but they learn how to deepen their understanding of the world through curiosity.
- Criticality: advance their understanding of power, equity, and other forms of oppression. They were taught to question and name oppression when they were able to see it to be able to break it down and eliminate it.
The goal was for these 19th-century abolitionists to not take everything they heard or read as truth and learn the necessary aspects to navigate the world toward anti-oppression.
In response to COVID, districts, states, and other governing bodies have shown their cards. Don't let them walk back on their decisions now.
Bettina Love commented that districts, states, and other government bodies have shown their cards by eliminating testing this year and emphasizing compassion over content, skills, and standards.
It is necessary for teachers to hold their leaders to these messages moving forward, as compassion should be the driving force of education at all times, not just during a pandemic.
Don't let administrators, parents, and school boards forget how quickly teachers were able to adapt, still support students, and show compassion for each students' situation.
As Ibram X. Kendi says, "Any return to normal is a return to the normality of racism."
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