Struggles to Transform the School
Week 4 - 9/19/2019
“Abolitionist teaching starts with freedom dreaming, dreams grounded in a critique of injustice. These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance”
- Bettina A. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive, p. 101
Summary
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How do theories of schooling relate to configurations of power? How do these theories conceptualize the relationships between schools, individual actors, collectivities, the state, and society?
theorizing Resistance and Education
Henry Giroux. 2001. “Reproduction, Resistance & Accommodation in the Schooling Process” in Theory and Resistance in Education: Toward a Pedagogy for the Opposition. Bergin & Garvey Press.
Philadelphia Contexts
Matthew Countryman. 2005. Up South, Ch. 6 “Community Control of the Schools,” pp. 223-257. Penn Press.
Kristina Rizga. 2016. “Black Teachers Matter.”Mother Jones.
What have been some of the struggles to transform or provide alternatives to The School as we know it?
Contemporary Struggles
Susan Booysen (ed). 2016. Fees must fall: student revolt, decolonisation and governance in South Africa. Ch. 2, “The roots of the revolution,” pp. 54-73, Ch. 3, “The game’s the same: ‘Must Fall’ moves to Euro-America,” pp. 74-86, and Ch. 6, “Standing on the shoulders of giants? Successive generations of youth sacrifice in South Africa,” pp. 126-147.
Eve L. Ewing. 2018. Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.Ch 3. “Dueling Realities” and Ch. 4 “Mourning,” pp. 94-156. U Chicago Press.
Movement For Black Lives. 2016. “A Vision For Black Lives.” 2016. The Movement For Black Lives’ policy platform related to education. [On Canvas: M4BL Education Plan]
“The Problem We All Live With,” a two-part series of This American Life podcast focusing on segregation in U.S. schools. Part One (7.31.2015) and Part Two (8.7.2015).[56 min]
Precious Knowledge (2011), film detailing the banning of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson Arizona. [70 min] View here.
What ways of being/becoming does abolitionism offer us, and how does it inform our praxis?
Abolitionism
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Ch. 2. “The University and the Undercommons,” pp. 25-43. Minor Composition.
Fred Moten. 2016. A Poetics of the Undercommons. 1st ed. Sputnik & Fizzle.
Abigail Boggs et al. 2019. “Abolition University Studies: An Invitation”from Abolition University—studying within/ against/beyond the university.
Bettina Love. 2019. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Ch. 5, “Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy,” pp. 88-123. Beacon.
“Restorative Justice in School: An Overview,” an episode of The Cult of Pedagogy podcast. Feb. 17, 2018. Episode website and link to Apple podcasts.
Class Recap
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Quotes from Class Notes
Educational Survivor Complex (Bettina Love) - Education built on the oppression of indigenous and Black students. Students learning to survive; schools as a training site for a life of exhaustion. We begin to think that there is something permanent/acceptable about educational inequality (Pg. 27)
System creates people who feel like they are entitled to every space and others who feel they are unfit for subjectivity. What about staying outside biopower, refusing to participate in system, remain indiscernible?
Eve Ewing: Institutional mourning following the loss of institutional spaces. Closures of schools are not just about buildings - culmination of history of racism and a harbinger of things to come (see pg. 127)
Integration very visible/dominant in conversations as the solution to educational inequality. But Up South discusses Black Nationalist approach - separatism, more resources for predominantly black schools, elevation of Black leadership.
We can interrogate where we are, we can theorize our reality, but if we are trying to construct a new reality, the key question is what do we do?
Why are we talking so much about schools? We know them to be violent, why give them so much power? Schools reproduce power and ideology. Schools are also powerful centers for community. “University’s appearance of necessity is no mere mirage” (pgs. 3 -4 in Abolitionist University Studies article); “It cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment” (Harney and Moten, pg. 26)