Post course reflections (March 2025)
Students had a lot of questions about how to apply what they were learning about in our class--the practical, nitty-gritty of what it means to incorporate an abolitionist approach in their everyday lives and as future educators, parents, and community members.
Lessons in liberation provided very useful examples for students about how to incorporate an abolitionist approach to multiple aspects of education, which we think helped them especially in conceiving their final projects
Freedom Schools also provided a grounded historical perspective that addressed many of the questions we’d been grappling with--for example, the role of whiteness in the struggle for racial equity; the role and purpose of education in the broader struggle for freedom
We were pleased to see that they were able to incorporate this approach in a myriad of ways in their final projects.
The time we had to provide feedback on their final projects allowed us to have fruitful discussions about how to navigate and demonstrate their understanding of abolitionist principles and practices
It allowed some of them to be very concrete in how they might use this approach in their lives post Carleton
Even as we appreciate how amenable students were to the abolitionist approach, the two of us still came back multiple times to how hard it was for us in our own work to get outside of the liberal/accommodationist frameworks.
We tried to create assignments that were meaningful to student learning, rather than just having them to have assignments
The reflection posts, for example, scaffolded their responses and interactions with each other. It allowed them to process readings and their peers’ reactions outside of class. The structure lent itself to more thoughtful and engaged responses to each other and the content.
While we believe that the assignments and the course structure worked generally for our context, we would encourage you to think through what would be useful in your content, taking into account time and capacity of both instructors/facilitators.
Early on in the term, we noted that a particular dynamic was developing: It seemed like the classroom was mostly a Q & A style with students asking Marika or other guest speakers questions that they wanted concrete answers. We wanted the students to do more of the intellectual heavy-lifting, and not have the classroom feel as didactic. We did not want the class to be about “just tell us the answers.”
The field trip seemed particularly useful as a way for students to apply what they were learning and it also gave them a chance to compare their own high school experiences to the one we all experienced together.
The students left with more curiosity than doubt.
We found it intriguing that the students did not push back substantively on the idea of abolition. The students seemed to appreciate the idea of abolition as building towards something, rather than just dismantling what we have now. We attribute that to multiple factors--deference to us as “experts”; their encounters with these topics in other Educational Studies courses; and we hope that the power of the framework, the narratives, and the examples was also a factor.
Our course norms and guidelines were useful, especially as we revisited them regularly
One particular classroom scenario led the two of us to think through what it means to take an abolitionist stance as facilitators--for example, to reflect on the intent versus impact principle that many of us are familiar with. We reflect on what it means to have pedagogical practices that move against carceral logics. How do we think about accountability outside of punitive frameworks when often we think of accountability itself as being punitive?
In general, our weekly debrief and planning meetings were a crucial part of our own learning--we got to know each other better as educators, we got a chance to dig into the readings, we were able to make changes as necessary to the classroom flow and structure.
As always, we did not get to discuss everything we had planned and as some of the student reflections will point out, there were themes or readings that would have been useful to include.