by Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy, Assistant Professor, Theatre and Dance
Overview
Given the history of chattel slavery in this country, the term “abolition” is linked in most folks’ minds to the end of the Civil War and to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. In recent years, however, and post-2020 in particular, the term has been applied more broadly to efforts to overturn policing systems—themselves rooted directly in the economy of slavery, since the first “police” in this country were men contracted to hunt and re-capture enslaved people who had fled from their places of imprisonment—and carceral prison systems. In fact, in her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander agues that the modern prison industrial complex is simply a re-branding of chattel slavery, given the disproportionate number of Black and brown folks who are or become justice involved, and the numerous systems and structures in this county—redlining, the school to prison pipeline, etc.—rooted in systemic racism and inequality. As Saher Al Khamash, author of “The 2020 Abolitionist Movement: A New Road to Liberation,” argues, “the Prison Industrial Complex and police function to relegate Black people to a second-class status by means of social control, economic repression, and political disenfranchisement.”
A significant part of the modern notion of abolition has been the development of abolitionist pedagogy—a system of practices, experiments, and revisions to traditional classroom teaching that are meant to support wider restorative justice efforts to overturn and redress systemic racial and social inequities. As anthropologist and abolitionist Talisa Feliciano argues in The Case for Abolitionist Pedagogy, “abolition is not only about ending the police, jails and prisons. It is dedicated to ending the conditions which lead people to them.” For me, and for many educators, the education system is one of many systems in dire need of a rethink. In Feliciano’s words, “our education system operates according to the norms of the larger society and the individuals that comprise our educational system have the capacity to cause harm.”
While we as professors and educators cannot—individually—get rid of housing inequality, systemic racism, school funding issues, redlining, standardized testing, etc., we can take space in our classrooms to empower students to think past the structure, language, and practices of these systems. We need to recognize our own position as agents of an institution—i.e. higher education itself—that has historically cased harm, and work towards not only redressing that harm but actively preventing any future instances of harm. Crucially, however, these efforts can—and likely should—carry with them some joy. Feliciano notes importantly that “abolitionist pedagogy does not merely focus on what needs to be destroyed but instead asks us to turn our attention to what needs to be uplifted. […] Centering Black and brown students, students with disabilities, queer students, and students who are neurodivergent forces a reckoning with how the educational system reproduces hierarchies of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, and ultimately power in our society.”
What follows is a list of the practices I have undertaken in my classrooms to uplift marginalized voices, to challenge these dominant systems, and to work—in small ways—toward restorative justice. The most important aspect of all of this in my own work has been abolishing the “cop in my head”: that voice that tells me what students should read, how classrooms should be run, how authoritative I should be as the person of power in any given classroom. All of these practices work to overturn the power differential between me and my students, allowing me to focus less on being a cop and more on being an educator. I get to teach them and collaborate with them, rather than police and penalize them. I should note that all of these practices are very much in progress, and that they will be more successful in some classes than in others.
Here’s my necessarily partial and in-process list of practices:
- Revising langue on my syllabi, assignments, rubrics, etc. to be warm and inviting rather than demanding. No language tied to policing, or to compulsory behavior. Students “get to” read things; they are not “required” to read things. Assignments have “guidelines,” “suggestions,” and “integral parts” rather than “requirements.” “Deadlines” become “due dates.”
- Reconsidering classroom policies based in surveillance (i.e. mandatory attendance policies, regulation of in-class use of devises, prohibiting late arrivals or early departures). Instead, we devise a system of:
- Community guidelines. What are our collective goals in a course or quarter, and how do we best serve those goals? It greatly enhances learning, for example, when everyone is present and prepared. Since I teach in theatre, it’s easy for me to lean on the notion of collaboration—we all have to be in a room to make a thing happen. This concept can be abstracted to other departments, however, if a sense of community and mutual support is one of the learning objectives of any particular course. How do we work together to enhance our own learning and that of everyone else?
- Allowing student input in creation of assignments, rubrics, and schedules, and potentially allowing students to choose course readings or topics (often from a curated list I supply them).
- Uplifting the voices of global majority, LGBTQIA+, and disabled voices in course readings, thereby divesting specifically from the canon of works in any particular field that are likely tied to some form of patriarchy and white supremacy. Similarly, choosing course material that is inherently anti-racist and that questions historical narratives of policing and Blackness.
- Whenever possible, creating assignments that rely on service learning or community-based work, allowing students to form meaningful relationships with their broader communities while considering their own layers of positionality and privilege.
- Being flexible (when possible) with due dates and extensions, acknowledging that students are people before they come to us as learners.
- Giving myself and my students the grace to continually develop our sense of ourselves in relation to the questions, challenges, and opportunities afforded to us by our particular political, social, cultural, and (in my case) artistic contexts. Understanding that we are always in a process of becoming.
(Some) References:
Chartrand, Vicki, and Justin Piché. “Abolition and Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching a Course
on Alternatives to Punishment, State Repression and Social Control.” Contemporary Justice Review : CJR 22.1 (2019): 23–42. Web.
Feliciano, Talisa. The Case for Abolitionist Pedagogy
Al Khamash, Saher, The 2020 Abolitionist Movement: A New Road to Liberation
Kuo, Rachel, The Abolitionist Reading List
Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of
Educational Freedom (2020)