Struggling toward abolition and dreaming beyond ableism in teacher education

ABSTRACT

Abolition is a verb, referencing how people build safe conditions while dismantling (and developing solutions beyond) harmful institutions, including within education. Considering disability justice movement work in our roles as teacher educators, we explored how we might contend with the harmful purposes and functions of educational structures as we prepare future teachers to adopt abolitionist stances in their pedagogies. We begin with the premise that the current educational system, rooted in ableism, is fundamentally designed to rank, categorize and hypervalue/devalue children based on ability. Ableism intersects with multiple oppressions, fueling the inequitable distribution of resources in special/gifted education; and racist educational outcomes. To divest from ableism — decoupling learning from punishment in practice — we share three pedagogical examples from our own teaching, discussing how we support future teachers to imagine and enact teaching practices beyond providing services or accommodations, so that multiply-marginalized children and educators can be recognized as whole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional Resources

1. Lalvani, P., & Baglieri, S. (2020). Undoing ableism: Teaching about disability in k-12 classrooms. Routledge.

-Lalvani and Baglieri offer strategies for teaching about disability in K-12 classrooms. The book offers definitions and examples of ableism that are accessible for different ages and grade levels, including working definitions and guiding frameworks for educators. This text is a helpful resource for educators looking for tangible ideas for how to address disability directly with their students and to bring disability into their classroom discourse and ethos.

2. Piepzna-Samarasinha L. L. (2018). Care work. Arsenal Pulp Press.

-This book, through a series of essays, offers an overview of disability justice, examples of disability justice in action, and explores what disability justice means and looks like in the context of community and the work of caring for one another. Care work centers the community work that sick, disabled, queer people of color engage in to make a better world for everyone, rooted in love and collective care. It offers examples of spaces outside of formal systems, including community organizing spaces, where disability justice is occurring via care work, to highlight how disability justice does, can, and should exist beyond formal systems that often fail to provide comprehensive care for all people.

3. Pejcha, L. & Wang, R. (2021).Abolition is a disability justice issue: A digital zine. https://issuu.com/rashellwang/docs/abolition___disability_justice_zine

-This Zine focuses specifically on the relationship between  disability justice and abolition. It provides definitions for key terms and then moves into examining how disability justice and abolition relate to and can manifest in school systems. The Zine offers an introduction to this intersection and grounds it in the context of schooling.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by a funding agency.