We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational FreedomWinner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice. |
Other editions - View all
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of ... Bettina L. Love No preview available - 2019 |
We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of ... Bettina L. Love No preview available - 2020 |
Common terms and phrases
Abolitionist teaching African American anti-Blackness antidarkness Atlanta Baker Beacon Hill Black feminism Black folx Black girls Black joy Black Lives Matter Black women Brown called charter schools civics classroom coconspirators color Congo Square create culture dark bodies dark children dark folx dark students dark suffering democracy economic educational survival complex Ella Baker fight FIST freedom dreaming gender grit healing high school homeplace homophobia human Ibid ideas injustice intersectional intersectionality Islamophobia kids killed knew Latinx learning mother movement National Neoliberalism never oppression organizations parents pedagogy people’s percent police political poverty prison prison-industrial complex protect queer youth race racial racism resistance Rochester sexism sexual slavery social justice solidarity spaces spirit-murdering struggle studies teacher education testing theory thrive transphobia trauma Trump understand violence W. E. B. Du Bois White folx White rage White students White supremacy York