Theoretical and Conceptual Understanding

Paul Stephen

Final Paper on abolitionist teaching

Introduction

Abolitionist pedagogy and teaching have been used by many people throughout America’s history to combat slavery, racism, segregation, and discrimination. It is a beacon of hope for those who continue to suffer from racism and discrimination. It also means that they have the will to fight until the end. Bettina Love, the author of the book “we want to do more than survive” defines abolitionist teaching as the “practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools (love, pg.2). In this paper, I will be analyzing this book to see what it has to say about abolitionist teaching and to understand what we need do with this pedagogy in our own life. I will be connecting this to Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and the concept of conscientization as it talks about developing critical consciousness to help liberate the oppressed from injustice. I will also be including other sources that connect to what has been said in this book on abolitionist teaching to further understand how we as educators can use this to bring liberation to the oppressed and to create a world that is predicated on equality in education and all aspects of life.

The Role of education and its Impact on the Lives of Black Students

At the beginning of the book, (Bettina Love) talks about the significance of being dark and the struggle that comes with it. She talks about how intersectionality should be used to understand inequalities we see within race, class, and gender. Our society has been divided due to discrimination, hierarchy, and the use of power and privilege that is given to white people through an intersectional framework, we can see that one group benefits from the superstructure in which our society and the people are bound to. Love also talks about “mattering” and the fight and struggle people go through to fight for justice. In my view, to matter is to fight for justice and freedom of the oppressed and to dismantle power structures that perpetuate inequality, and it is this fight and the willingness to matter that creates the hope that one day that all the oppressed will move from the constant fear of living in a survival mode to thriving mode. For the people of color, life has always been a constant struggle, a life of survival and at the same time, these people also commit to mattering and fighting for freedom, hope, and justice by using the abolitionist pedagogy to transform society into a place where the marginalized and the oppressed communities thrive.

Love also talks about how educational policies and reforms do not address racism at its core and how it perpetuates inequality that impacts the livelihood of black students attending schools. Racism is the root cause of the educational disparity we see in this society and yet little has been done to address this issue. Love talks about the effects of the educational survival complex which to this day has been continuing to segregate, disempower and harm black and indigenous students both on a physical and a spiritual level. She talks about white rage and how throughout history, the educational survival complex used desegregation as a way to benefit white students while black students suffered from the lack of resources, and economic and social mobility because the schools they attended were considered high poverty schools due to the majority of the student population being black. “We must use all the analytic tools available to understand how our children are spirit murdered and educated in a state of perpetual survival mode for the benefit of the education survival complex” (Love, pg.38). This was an important point that was made because, at the end of the 2^nd chapter, it infers that people believe that education is the one thing is that failing students while ignoring the racism that consistently seeks to undermine and dispose of black students. This connects to what I read from chapter 3 of Marxist education, where the first line of the chapter intrigued me because it started with the question “What is the role of schools in our society” according to the Marxist theory in education, they believe that schools are an avenue that teaches students to be controlled and disciplined in a system where their work can be exploited by the ruling class. In the article, Bowles and Gintis introduce the term, “correspondence principle” where they argue that schools create hard-working students, and train them to be workers in a capitalist society from the first time they start school. It’s also important to note that schools reflect a workplace because of the hierarchical structures where teachers give us instructions and we follow those instructions. One person has the power and authority, while the workers don’t. In the system that we live in and function under, there are so many who are manipulated into accepting their role in society which can also be a result of their race and class in terms of their social stature in society. “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important to alienate human beings from their decision-making is to change them into objects” (Freire, pg.85). Education was created based on the principles and ideologies of the ruling class and it has been a tool of oppression for a long time and so even though we want to change society, I think that it ultimately won’t change because education was founded by the dominant figures in society, and as long as people believe in the false conciseness from the ideologies of humanity and their role in a capitalist society, then these inequalities will continue to exist. A lot of people today don’t acknowledge that racism is at the forefront of educational inequality and that white rage, segregation, and disempowerment are all proponents of racism which benefits the educational survival complex that creates a continuous state of survival for the black students in this education system. This acknowledgment is the first step towards creating a society that fosters thriving rather than surviving. One thing is clear from the side of the oppressed, as an abolitionist, developing critical consciousness is important, so that they can question and fight against the ideologies of the dominant race while on the side of the oppressor, the acknowledgment that racism is at the forefront of sustaining inequalities in our education system is required and is a vital step in the process of transforming society to liberate the oppressed.

The importance of Civic Education and Community Building

Ch 4 of the book “we want to do more than survive” (Bettina Love) talks about the need for civic education rather than character education. When we talk about civic education, it also connects to Freire’s concept of critical consciousness. The chapter on Marxist education titled “Teaching to change the world” talks about building critical consciousness in schools. In the beginning, Wayne Au introduces the chapter by talking about the important role of critical consciousness and how it needs to be developed in students to be able to fight against the dominant forces that control our lives. He states that “education and learning have some space to develop forms of consciousness that are contradictory to, and can challenge, capitalist, social and economic relations” (Au, 153). He goes on to say that people need critical consciousness because it can help them understand the true state of reality and it can help build resistance. He then introduces Freire’s critical pedagogy and how we can use this pedagogy to build critical consciousness. “For Freire, to be human is to be able to both understand the world and take action to change that world: we are humanized through praxis” (Au, 160). He says that to understand the world, we need to be able to break things down into parts and analyze the world through questioning and praxis. “Once we discover our presence within a structure, “we are not as ‘imprisoned’ or ‘stuck to the structure of its parts. The very act of seeing the structure helps us break from it” (Au, 161-162). I like this quote because it asks us to raise our consciousness by learning and talking about the structure that we live under. As a community, we need to understand our role in society because that understanding can help us fight for liberation, to create a reality that we all want to see. The chapter also talks about how schools can use problem-posing methods to understand the structure and the reality that they’re living in so that they can figure out a solution to change that oppressive reality. Gloria Watkins, who was a feminist and a social activist, talks about her experience of reading and learning Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. She says that “she came upon Freire’s work as a woman of color dying of thirst, desperately seeking change. Freire’s revolutionary work in liberatory education quenched her thirst despite its flaws” (Watkins, 50). One of the main points that I got out of reading this chapter is that in a capitalist society where the ruling class benefits from that work and the exploitation of others, the oppressed must actively fight not just with their thinking or understanding of how to do it, but through praxis, by practicing fighting against oppression and work towards freedom. This also connects with what Wayne Au and Paulo Freire talk about in that education does have power, and the emphasis is that every student and teacher in the classroom must play an active role in the fight against oppression and fight for the liberation of the classes. Civic education is required in our education and building critical consciousness should play a huge role in developing students understanding of the world and the role they play in society as well as an understanding of how they can be active agents of change. Sadly, in today’s education, educators are more focused on measuring students’ grit and zest than to train and teach students, especially black and minoritized groups of students to think critically, so that they can fight against oppression. Education measures dark students’ grit, while it completely ignores the fact that the system and structure, they live in continue to test their grit and zest due to racism and white rage. “Dark students being gritty, full of excitement and energy, reciting self-improvement statements, and displaying social and emotional intelligence does not stop them from being killed in the streets or spirit murdered in the classroom” (Love, pg.73). In society today, black students continue to struggle with so many things including poverty, health, and finance and all this accumulates to the high levels of toxic stress that they have to deal with. Student who goes through this do not need their grit or character measured because that doesn’t benefit them, but there has to be a support system in mental health services, financial support that includes paid internships and support in any area that they struggle with. Education needs to be a place of support that empowers students rather than a place that measures student grit and character. By measuring student grit and zest, we produce the narrative that their success is determined based on the amount of grit they show in the world. To the white community Girt determines someone’s success, but for the black community, grit is about hope. “They work endlessly for the next generation and the next day with resolve, purpose, hope, faith, and desire for their children to thrive one day off the labor of their grit” (love, pg. 78). Love goes on to say that preserving students’ potential is more important than measuring their grit by sharing her life story of her being a basketball player and due to that, her grit, zest and protentional was protected, nurtured, and cherished because she was able to put a ball through a hoop. She had a community that had her back, but she says that there are a lot of black students who do not have the skill or talent of playing basketball, who do not have a community that recognizes or protects their potential and their grit and because of that they are forced to survive and navigate the world on their own. At the end of the chapter, love talks about community and how students whose grit is tested, need to have a community of friends or family to protect and nurture their grit and potential to fight against injustice and oppression. Ultimately, it goes back to what was said at the beginning of the chapter, which was to have civic education because we need to teach black students to play an active in the fight against the systemic inequalities that they encounter and to build hope so that they can envision a world where black students can thrive. In the “pedagogy of the oppressed” article, Paulo Freire talks about the” Banking System” where teachers are considered narrators and students are there to receive and memorize the knowledge that they have not attained. It goes on to say that teachers who use the banking model knowingly or unknowingly are perpetrators of oppression do they work to dehumanize students by teaching them to observe and fit into the world. The model creates separation between students and teachers and so Freire urges people who do use this model to reject it and instead use the “problem-posing” model. “Here, no one teachers another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in the banking system was owned by the teacher” (Freire, pg.80). This model is based on communication and dialogue, and it can lead to the liberation of the oppressed because in this model both the teachers and students are learners so that instead of teachers depositing knowledge to passive students, both the teachers and students are active learners who society and reality. Problem posing method “enables teachers and students to become subjects of the educational process by overcoming authoritarianism and an alienating intellectualism; it also enables people to overcome their false perception of reality” (Freire, pg.86). As this quote states, this transformation is required in the process of liberation and humanization. This model and this pedagogy are important to all schools because schools should help students think and learn from their intuition and questioning because that can be a huge push towards humanization, and it can aid them in overthrowing systems of powers that cause oppression. The first step, we must take as educators are that we must incorporate civic education as part of a curriculum that seeks to build the critical consciousness of students because, without that real change within oneself, transformation cannot take place in the world. We should not be depositors of knowledge, but rather we should incorporate problem-posing education, where we learn through questioning, critical thinking, and dialogue. As I stated before, I believe that this is required in our education to help liberate the oppressed to dismantle power structures that consistently perpetuate inequality.

Love also talks about the importance of abolitionist teaching in communities and reimagining a world where places like schools foster love and joy while also imagining a world where schools promote social activism, civic engagement, and education. She talks about two black communities which are the “Beacon Hill “in Boston and “Congo Square” in New Orleans that thrives on abolitionist pedagogy. Beacon Hill throughout history has been a place where many black men and women thrived in the past, from the first black woman to teach in an integrated school system to the first black woman to become a nurse. People who lived in Beacon Hill envisioned a place that consistently helped the black community thrive. Congo Square was also another place where enslaved African Americans gathered together to express and share their love, joy, and peace through art and music. It was a place of healing that helped people rejuvenate. She goes on to talk about freedom dreaming and its importance in imagining a world that fosters thriving. She says that “Freedom dreaming is imagining worlds that are just, representing people’s full humanity, centering people left on the edges, thriving in solidarity with folx from different identities who have struggled together for justice, and knowing that dreams are just around the corner with the might of people power” (love, pg.103). This is one of the main points of the chapter and the book itself because it talks about creating a just world where different groups of people with different identities thrive and learn to live together in peace and harmony. It’s a matter of people working together as a community for that dream and for us to create a world where we don’t use or rely on the educational survival complex but rather, we create a world where everyone thrives, a world that is created of love.

The importance of Theory and Wellness

In this Chapter, love starts by asking questions regarding how we make sense of the world and how our beliefs affect our daily decisions in terms of the way we teach or the interactions we may have with students. She starts by talking about the teacher education gap that exists today where a lot of white teachers do not have many interactions with black folx and due to that, their beliefs are driven by the stereotypes of dark students. She also says that, in teacher preparation programs, teachers learn about the ills of the dark community without an understanding of the context of what causes issues such as poverty, trauma, and unemployment. Love says that “if we, teacher educators, are going to ask teachers to be culturally relevant and culturally competent──Which I wholeheartedly believe are fundamental to challenging inequities and developing critical perspectives──then teachers should be required to study culture (love, pg.128). Teacher education programs also don’t require teachers to take classes on different ethnic studies. Teachers come into a classroom without an understanding of the culture of the students they are about to teach and without this knowledge, it leads to stereotyping and other issues that promote inequalities in education. She says that our perception of black students comes based on our beliefs and the privilege that people hold from being white and so they believe that one own hard work determines their success. While this may work for white students, it does not work for black students, and this leads to the blame game of blaming students and their families for being behind, most specifically in academics. She then says that to move past blame and to understand the systemic and structural inequalities that exist in this country, we must use theory to understand the true realities our students are living in and also understand the injustice that reproduces inequalities. Love talks about the critical race theory and how it’s been used to this day to understand how racism functions in schools and communities. Most importantly CRT uses narratives, stories, and experiences from dark folx to counteract the white worldview of ethnocentrism. She also talks about “toro Yosso” who created the cultural wealth theory where we use the resources, the knowledge, and the values of communities of color to strengthen our abilities to contribute and to fight against inequality that has been formed through racism. Ultimately CRT and CWT allow us to question and understand how racism functions in a world where we normalize white knowledge, and it equips us with the strength and wisdom to fight against it. Another theory that stood out to me was called “white fragility.” The theory says that when white people are confronted with conversations about race and racism, their immediate reactions are to become angry, or to be fearful, or to have guilt. “White folx cannot be coconspirators until they deal with the emotionality of being white” (love, pg. 144). For white people, this is an important step in their journey to an understanding of racism and the power that white people hold that perpetuates inequalities. Love states that understanding whiteness, white privilege, white rage, and its impact in dark folx is needed for them to move from an ally to a co-conspirator. She concludes this chapter by stating that “Theory explains what we see; it can take way whiteness glasses from our eyes (love, pg.148).

Chapter one of “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education”, talks about how race and racism are prime factors that create inequalities in our society and our schools. This chapter introduces three propositions, but the first proposition states that “Race continues to be a significant factor in determining inequity in the United States” (Billings & Tate IV, pg.22). The first proposition was race contributes to inequity was interesting to read from because it talks about race is viewed from a scientific or biological perspective in which we think of race as an ideological construct which would deny the fact that race is socially constructed and that our society is racialized. It goes on to say that gender and class have been theorized while race is not theorized. We have used theory and a theoretical lens to understand and uncover structural and socially constructed inequalities in gender and class, but we have not theorized race and so we don’t consider race as a factor that creates inequity. “By arguing that race remains untheorized, we are not suggesting that other scholars have not looked carefully at race as a powerful tool for explaining social inequality, but that the intellectual salience of this theorizing has not been systematically employed to the analysis of educational inequality” (Billings & Tate IV, pg.24). The authors want to use theory as a tool to reveal and examine the structural inequalities that encompass our education system while also determining that race is the result of social structure and cultural representation. It goes on to talk about how W.E.B DuBois uses race as a theory to understand inequality. This is why theory is important because it helps us move away from stereotypes that we may believe in, and it helps us understand the true realities that people of color live under, the inequalities that they have to fight through, and it also helps us to contribute to fighting against injustices caused by racism. Without theory, we cannot fight against racism. It’s important to use theory to understand how racism functions and impacts our life and the life of others before we use abolitionist teaching to take action against systematic inequalities that have been caused by racism.

In the last chapter of the book, Love talks about the importance of wellness within oneself. Love says, “Being well helps you fight racism with love, grace, and compassion and frees mental space to freedom-dream and to give them hell, and then to retreat to your community of love for support, fulfillment, and nourishment──your homeplace (love, pg.158). To do abolitionist work, it’s important to be well and to bring your whole self to fight against injustice. Being well means to bring the hurt, rage, and love every day to the abolitionist work that we do. Love also talks about wellness in schools, specifically focusing on students’ emotional, and physical health because if students are not well, then they are not going to be successful in the tasks they do. She also reinforces the idea that educators’ wellness is important to create schools that protect students’ potential. “Educators, students, and parents need to be on a path to wellness together for schools to be sites of healing” (Love, pg. 161). This was an important point because we need to recreate schools as a place of healing that centers on students’ and teachers’ well-being before anything else. Without a place of healing and love, hate, oppression, and trauma will continue to affect students’ well-being which in turn will affect students’ academic performance, and the same cycle of blaming students and teachers will continue to occur until we recreate schools to be a place of healing.

Conclusion

Abolitionist work and teaching are crucial to transforming society into a world where we can see black folx thrive. It all starts with the acknowledgment that race is an issue in this society, and it is at the forefront of creating and sustaining inequalities within education and that without that acknowledgment there cannot be systemic change. Secondly, building critical consciousness is important for both the oppressed and the oppressor. We live in a world where we tend to accept our role in society as a laborer who gets exploited by the work he does. As an abolitionist, it’s important to train people, especially black students to build critical consciousness to question the reality that they live in and to fight for the reality they want to live in. Without critical consciousness, we cannot fight for liberation and justice and so as an educator it’s important to build critical consciousness. This goes along with the importance of having civic education in schools, where we talk about race and inequalities. Dialogue around these topics is important because without it we would not know how to contribute to the fighting for the liberation of the oppressed in a capitalist society. Going more in-depth, understanding theory, and using theory to talk about issues around race, class, and gender is important because it helps us see how it all connects to the dehumanization of marginalized people and how it continues to cause harm to those communities. It all starts with education because education has the power to change society through teachers, students, and parents. What we teach as an educator and what students do with that knowledge that is gained through dialogue and the use of theory will ultimately help us change and transform society. Finally, mental, and physical wellness is important in the fight for liberation. Love talks about the importance of community and having support groups. As an abolitionist worker or educator, people go through constant struggle and it sucks all the energy out of them, so having a community around for support is crucial for people to continue to fight. One person cannot go and transform society, but with communities coming together to fight for liberation, justice, and equality, it certainly can happen. To transform society and to transform people will take time, but along with we have hope for the future, there is always someone who will for the world that they envision to live in, a world that thrives.

References

Ladson-Billings, & Tate, William F., IV. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record (1970), 97(1), 47.

Au. (2018). A Marxist Education: Learning to change the world. Haymarket Books.

Freire. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30^th-anniversary ed.). Continuum.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Love. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive. Beacon Press.