“A Pedagogy of Liberation”: Building Abolitionist Sanctuaries in Education

This seminar examines pedagogies, policies, and practices within the classroom and larger educational industrial complex. A particular emphasis is to identify the ways in which some educators are conditioned to use punishment and retribution as an external motivation and a response to achieve learning outcomes. Key questions for exploration are: How does the educational industrial complex resemble U.S. prisons? What (adverse) impact do punitive philosophies have on exploratory learning and innovation? How does abolition provide an alternative pedagogical approach to build safe and generative learning communities that are just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive? Applying a critical and an intersectional lens, participants will bring their syllabus or institutional handbook to conduct an audit, create a climate assessment, and construct interventions. The goal of this course is to decarcerate the classroom and educational industrial complex by identifying restorative justice practices and abolitionist goals to grading, assignments, course design, and institutional policies that create educational sanctuaries to foster learning, community, and safety.

Learning outcomes are:

• To understand abolition as an everyday ethic and pedagogical practice.
• To interrogate the continuities and discontinuities between the educational industrial complex and the prison industrial complex.
• To challenge punitive responses that undermine learning, community, and safety.
• To explore alternatives or solutions that generate liberative tools to audit and assess pedagogies, practices, and policies with attention to justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging.
• To identify restorative justice approaches and abolitionist interventions that decarcerate the classroom and create educational sanctuaries to build community.