We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Betinna Love
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER ONE
"We Who Are Dark"
CHAPTER TWO
Educational Survival
CHAPTER THREE
Mattering
CHAPTER FOUR
Grit, Zest, and Racism (The Hunger Games)
CHAPTER FIVE
Abolitionist Teaching, Freedom Dreaming, and Black Joy
CHAPTER SIX
Theory Over Gimmicks: Finding Your North Star
CHAPTER SEVEN
We Gon' Be Alright, but That Ain't Alright
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Publisher Marketing:
Winner 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.
