by Kushya Sugarman

“… that which is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.” 

– Moten and Harney (2013, p. 152)

Elementary school teachers share a space with their students all day, trying to provide care amidst daily examples of injustice and oppression. In my first year teaching fourth grade in NYC, I was unprepared for how deeply I would connect to the 28 eight and nine year olds in my class. That first year, I would often find myself crying in front of my class. I cried happy tears because Cameron began his Hatch essay with a personal connection, just like I had modeled the week before. I cried tears of injustice when one of my students came out to me during recess but confided that he would never tell his father. I cried tears of frustration because the principal observed my class on Valentines Day, and had to stop my lesson halfway through saying “the tone was off”. My students took my tears in stride. They joked that I was going to “die of dehydration” at their graduation. Sometimes, when they felt something poignant building, they would chant “Cry! Cry! Cry!” and pump their arms, like a scene out of Lord of the Flies. We built a beautiful community on those tears, one that allowed for profound intellectual work as well. When we switched from learning about Indigenous people to explorers and the 13 colonies, Alex asked what happened to all the Indigenous people. This is why I don’t like school, he explained. Alex’s question sparked a collective investigation into Indigenous accounts of the conquest of America and the founding of the 13 colonies. Looking back, I’m proud of these moments. I was connected enough with my students to really listen and build off of their interests – enacting subversion before I knew the word. 

This all changed, when we began test-prep in late February. Under No Child Left Behind, the ratings of my colleagues, myself and the small school in which I worked were resting on the performance of my students. My flexible curriculum, which took unforeseen turns based on children’s inquiries, became test prep and drills. Garvey, who had made me earrings in Metal-Work in October, didn’t want to come to school anymore in April. Alex, who had begun our discussion of Indigenous communities, asked why I was always mad at them now. I shifted from encouraging my students’ creativity to wanting to control and monitor them, stooping to draconian practices, such as writing their names on the board. After the tests, we returned to our normal curriculum, and even wrote and performed a play together. On the last day of school, Alex asked if we could all line up for hugs, but it was never the same. I don’t think I ever regained their trust, and I know I didn’t cry with the same vulnerability. Over the course of the last 15 years of teaching, I’ve learned how to maintain more of myself. I now understand testing not as a measurement of my students’ (and therefore my) success, but as one of the many apparati of control in a system designed to prevent solidarity (Patel, 2016). Yet, I still feel the pull towards jail warden every time I have to give a test. 

Now that I am a teacher educator, I build from these experiences of entanglement in a harmful system when I create assignments. Part of my process involves revisiting my own teaching experiences with an understanding of the structural issues. Such practices have allowed me to develop what educational scholars have called abolitionist pedagogies, or pedagogies designed to undermine the current system while gesturing towards new relationalities (Cole et al., 2021). For me, these radical engagements often look playful and highly reflective. Abolitionist pedagogies means providing the space for my students, whether they are nine or twenty-nine, to look into each other’s eyes, tell their stories, and make connections. It entails looking out and in at the same time. In a system that feeds on competition and individual accumulation, this process of learning to see one another’s humanity is revolutionary (Kaba, 2021).

In this paper, I describe a case study, taken in an elementary teacher education classroom, of a multimodal, collaborative assignment. True to my own development as an educator, the pedagogical experiences invite preservice teachers to revisit an educational harm they have witnessed or engaged in, and create a visual representation. In class, students present their work, engage in a conversation about divesting from the harmful, and develop a visual representation of their imagined divestment. To determine whether abolitionist thinking had taken place, I employed a framework from Mariame Kaba (2021), a contemporary, Black feminist abolitionist educator. This framework structures abolition as a set of myriad practices that (1) begin within ourselves, (2) experiment with collective responsibility, (3) reduce contact with the legal system, and (4) change everything. I hope this work can extend our collective understanding of abolitionist pedagogies in a diverse, urban teacher education classroom. 

Literature Review

Racial Capitalism 

Many critical education scholars work to interrupt white supremacy through curricular changes that honor the voices of marginalized students (Ladson-Billing, 2009; Paris, 2012). These pedagogies, though an important piece of our collective struggle for liberation, can be implemented without understanding the connection between racism, capitalism and modernity. Without that link, which Cedric Robinson (2005) termed racial capitalism, teachers cannot see our collective entanglement in an unsustainable world built on a foundation of separability and disposability (Kelley, 2018; Rodríguez, 2010). As Jodi Melamed (2015) summarizes, “Capitalism is racial capitalism. Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups” (p. 77). Thus, racism is intrinsically linked to the capital that makes racism profitable and we cannot rid ourselves of one without the other. All of our conversations about race must be conversations about the very structures of society that allow racism to continue. These, much deeper conversations in which we are all part of the problem (and the solution) are much less frequent in institutions such as schools (Rodríguez, 2010). 

A racial capitalist lens can help teachers understand how seemingly progressive reforms morph to invite surveillance, inequality and re-entrenchment. Racial capitalistic structures in education include the norming of standards and benchmarks based on a very small (white and middle class) segment of the world, the militant way that adults and children adhere to assessments at the expense of human potential, and our collective contempt and disregard for those who fall short of the benchmarks (Bullock & Meiners, 2019; Black, 2016). Even interventions designed to help students overcome the “achievement gap” rarely consider the racial capitalist forces that require some students’ disposability for others’ “success” (Nxumalo, 2020). The very fact that interventions have become a billion dollar business puts on display the insidious relationship between achievement, race and capital that modernity conflates with learning (Sojoyner, 2013). Simply pouring more effort into the same goals will never enact systemic change because the goals of our system – respectability, achievement, individual accumulation – have been designed by those in power to uphold their power. Therefore, reconfigurations of schooling must “be accompanied by careful attention to how they can be usurped to work in service of those who benefit from racial capitalism” (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 169). It follows that we need highly complex solutions that provide the tools to both recognize and respond to moveable threats, and underscore each of our complex relationships to racial capitalism and modernity in general. Historically, fugitivity and abolition have offered promising avenues towards these types of solutions, as they require divestment from the structures of racial capitalism (Cole et al., 2021). 

Fugitivity 

Grounded in the deliberate acts of disruption of enslaved Africans, fugitivity involves disengagement and divestment from “violent and oppressive institutions that negate Black existence” (Caldas, 2021, p. 137). Fugitivity can take many overlapping forms, such as flight from these institutions, refusal of the goals of the institutions, purposeful disorder that undermines the sovereignty of the institutions, or even freedom dreaming (Campt, 2014). Perhaps the most abstract of the manifestations of fugitivity, freedom dreaming, for me, is the conceptualization that dreaming of freedom amidst injustice is an arduous, necessary part of enacting that freedom (Kelley, 2018). Dreaming of the beyond requires a break with one’s current conditions and the expected goals of the status quo, hence its ties to fugitivity. Further, and perhaps most important for me, fugitivity requires a re-working of one’s understanding of the transgressive practices of the fugitive. No longer a derelict or troublemaker, fugitivity allows us to understand the fugitive as a nimble, insightful revolutionary. This “canary in the coalmine” (Shalaby, 2017), can help those of us entrenched in the system to recognize the violence that permeates the air. As we learn to listen to those most affected, the fugitive is no longer an individual, but part of a larger, collective Black struggle for otherwise. A fugitive space, then, becomes a space by which those of us interested in collective liberation might go to unpack fugitive teachings, develop our own fugitive practices, and freedom dream together (Harney & Moten, 2013). In this paper, I consider to what extent I can create a fugitive space in a teacher education classroom. 

Abolition

While fugitivity implies individual and collective escape, abolition calls for the destruction of systems altogether. Abolition is grounded in global insurgency against Black chattel slavery and grown through the work of the Black Radical Tradition in general and Black feminist prison abolitionists in particular (Rodríguez, 2019). Gilmore (2022) defines the Black Radical Tradition as “a constantly evolving accumulation of structures of feeling whose individual and collective narrative arcs persistently tend toward freedom” (p. 490). The Black Radical Tradition involves finding and re-finding ancestors (including contemporary ones) whose example can help to bring about Black futurity, or that which must happen now in order to enact an unbounded future (Campt, 2019). The Black Radical Tradition forms a throughway from abolition of slavery to abolition of prisons. In fact, Angela Davis (1996), one of the pioneers of the prison abolitionist movement wrote, “I choose the word ‘abolitionist’ deliberately. The 13th Amendment, when it abolished slavery, did so except for convicts. Through the prison system, the vestiges of slavery have persisted” (p. 26). Abolition calls for the dismantling of all prisons in part by making prisons and police obsolete through creation of societies that support and care for one another (Kaba, 2021). Since our society currently relies upon dispossession and punishment as the primary forms of protection and harm reduction, prison abolition requires radical imagining and the building of new worlds (Gilmore, 2022). As such, abolition and fugitivity both create pathways to freedom that require radical imagination. 

In her book We Do This Til’ We Free Us, Kaba (2021) offers a framework that suggests how we might engage in an abolitionist praxis.  She writes: 

First, when we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. … Second, we must imagine and experiment with new collective structures that enable us to take more principled action, such as embracing collective responsibility to resolve conflicts… Third, we must simultaneously engage in strategies that reduce contact between people and the criminal legal system… Fourth, as scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, building a different world requires that we not only change how we address harm, but also that we change everything (p. 4). 

Though this may seem daunting, that we change everything, we are all intrinsically part of the system.  Therefore, we are in the privileged position to change the system as we change ourselves (la paperson, 2017; Stetsenko, 2017). It follows that at the core of abolition work is the notion that we are both indispensable from the fight and inadequate to create sustainable change individually (Machado de Oliveira, 2021).  In this article, I employ Kaba’s framework as I consider to what extent fugitive learning has taken place in our teacher education classroom.

Fugivity and Abolition in Teacher Education 

Abolitionist teaching is predicated on the idea that schools are entangled with and elemental to the carceral state (Sabatí et al., 2022). Teachers and teacher educators may be familiar with the school to prison pipeline whereby minoritized students are ushered from schools into prisons at a young age (Christle et al., 2005). The notion of a school-to-prison-pipeline, though powerful, gives the impression that only a few schools are “bad” and would benefit from reform. Recent scholarship has complicated the matter, invoking a school-prison nexus in which prison is not a faraway place for which students are being primed, but an interlocking system of control, violence and dispossession whereby school plays a historic and intersectional role (Meiners, 2007). The school-prison nexus illuminates the interdependent nature of schools and prisons, from the geographies of surveillance to the schedule structure (Meiners, 2007). Sojoyner (2017) removes the binary completely, describing schools as enclosures “that function to negate alternative social visions … which might otherwise resist and counter the multiple forms of violence inherent in contemporary capitalism” (p. 455). By this definition, inclusion in schools is counter-insurrection whereby freedom dreaming and solidarity building become increasingly difficult as the individuals’ years of schooling accrue. In this light, schools were designed to depoliticize the Black radical imagination and criminalize an unbounded Black life. 

Though it is rarely conceptualized as such, schools of teacher education also serve as an enclosure, particularly for minoritized education students. Teacher education programs, even critical ones, rarely prepare education students to do the complex work required to subvert the harmful system that they will enter into upon graduation. The reasons for this are multilayered. For one, teacher education programs tend to teach from a western, eurocentric model that promotes linear, measurable academic achievement and capital accumulation, rather than learning for liberation (Patel, 2016). Within the programs themselves, the focus on improving children’s grades and test scores have led to an “obsession with methods at the expense of theory” in teacher education programs (Kitts, 2022, p. 84). These methods courses, intended to instruct future teachers to effectively teach a specific subject, often paint marginalized students as “at-risk” without addressing structural forces that put children at risk (Kitts, 2022). Preservice teachers’ primary engagement with children becomes scrutiny, remediation, and intervention, rather than imagination, mutual growth and joy (Martin, 2019). Further, many methods courses take either a student-centered or a teacher-centered approach to education, both of which reduce learning to the acquisition of skills as opposed to a creative, collective endeavor (Vossoughi et al., 2021). When teachers are educated to understand their role as intervening to fix children, especially marginalized ones, it becomes almost impossible for novice teachers to make the leap to fugitivity and abolition once in the classroom. 

As such, it is vital that teacher educators employ abolition and fugitive pedagogies in their classrooms so that future teachers have experiences with these concepts and practices when they enter into their own classrooms. These experiences, as well as the communities that form from doing this collective work, make it easier to refuse the status quo as we gesture towards more liveable futures. Yet, what do abolitionist and fugitive practices look like in practice? And how do teacher educators and professors teach fugitivity in their classrooms? In this section, I offer a review of the burgeoning field of abolitionist higher education and teacher education scholarship. In this review, three overlapping themes emerge: (1) centering fugitive epistemologies, (2) employing creative methods in teacher education classrooms, and (3) emphasizing and acknowledging the emotional aspects of abolition. 

Fugitive and abolitionist teacher educators often center marginalized experiences and epistemologies and I argue should center specifically fugitive epistemologies. Teacher education programs have traditionally relied upon western, white, middle-class curricula that subtly reinforce white supremacy. Our over-reliance on strategies of control, such as testing and racialized data, has perpetuated the myth that a white interventionist can teach a young child more in one hour than his or her community can over a lifetime (Martin, 2021). Abolitionist and fugitive teaching understand marginalized communities as the sources of radical imaginations and deep histories (Stovall, 2017). This epistemological shift honors marginalized peoples’ experiences subverting, interrupting and reorganizing their lives in light of oppressive systems (Cole et al., 2021). Abolitionist teacher education specifically critiques and works to untangle the conjoined systems of education and incarceration. For instance, Sabati et al. (2022) call attention to the fact that practices, such as finger-printing prior to employment as a teacher, deny access to those most affected by our unjust system. This reality, so obvious to those impacted by the criminalization of Black lives, is rarely if ever discussed in institutions of teacher education. Opening pre-service teachers up to the possibility that guilt and innocence are complicated is a vital element of abolitionist and fugitive pedagogies that allow educators to build alternative systems. In that way, by specifically turning towards those who have been cast as guilty and understanding them as leaders in worldbuilding, abolitionist and fugitive pedagogies are distinct from social justice pedagogies that might still rely on normative justice framings. 

The difficult work of developing new educational pathways beyond order, compliance, assimilation and inclusion requires a radical imagination that few institutions work to promote. As such, an essential element of abolitionist pedagogy is the employment of creative tasks that push future teachers to reimagine narratives, particularly those around safety, success, and justice. This article builds off the work of one educational theorist in particular, Ester Ohito (2020), who in The Creative Aspect Woke Me Up, reflects on her experience using a multimodal essay composition as a “fugitive literacy practice” in a semester-long course. Ohito highlights how working in multiple modalities allowed her undergraduate students’ to reimagine Blackness, underscoring the connection between creativity and fugitivity. Indeed, creative expression, with its emphasis on rule-breaking, and reconstituting what is normally taken for granted, is often associated with radical thought. Abolitionists, who tend to emphasize radical collective study, can help reframe creativity from the pursuit of an exceptional individual to the expression of a collective effort towards community resistance (Stetsenko, 2019). My work extends Ohito’s fugitive literacy practice, as my students apply artistic lenses to explore their relationships with racial capitalist structures. 

Lastly, some abolitionist and fugitive researchers emphasize the affective aspect of abolition to better understand how to “mitigate misery” in the classroom (Rodríguez, 2010). Though joy, especially joy born out of collaboration and comradery, is essential for our collective imaginings, teacher educators cannot avoid messy feelings, such as guilt or shame, in their work with future teachers (Liberali et al., 2023). When novice educators shy away from uncomfortable emotions, they cannot learn from their mistakes, which leads to the de-politicization of the field (Douthirt-Cohen et al., 2023). Therefore, fugitive and abolitionists teacher educators have emphasized the importance of creating communities in the classroom based on shared affective experiences – both positive and negative. Recently, Zembylas (2021) has theorized the need to employ the “affective strategy of identifying complicity and engaging in anti-complicity praxis” to develop abolitionist practices (p.121). Discomfort and dissatisfaction are part of confronting how racial capitalism has infiltrated our relationships, and our collective responsibility for enacting alternatives. We must also connect these individual actions to larger racial capitalist structures, which falsely reward our compliance while subtly killing us all (albeit unequally) (Kelley, 2022). This involves providing room for education students to develop a nuanced relationship to modernity and its false promises. 

In this study, I extend the work of Zembylas and other theorists who recognize the importance of creating change “by encouraging self-reflection and a deeper understanding of …particular situations” (Lather, 1986, p. 263, as quoted in Yeh et al., 2023, p. 210). My praxis attempts to help teachers and students understand the ways that carceral logics are at play in schools and all other systems, and as we are all implicated in the problem, we all have a collective responsibility to be part of its abolition (Kaba, 2021). In what follows, I describe my attempts to work alongside my teacher education class to build a fugitive space in which we might develop abolitionist and fugitive pedagogies. 

Methods

In this project, I employ an autoethnographic case study approach (Ellis et al., 2011; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007) to explore whether fugitive learning has occurred in a teacher education course and what our examples of fugitivity can teach us about abolitionist pedagogies. This case study looks closely at the “results” of novice and preservice elementary school teachers’ collaborative multimodal assignment in a public urban university. As such, this is one example of what fugitive learning might look like. Though not generalizable in the classical sense, case studies allow us to consider conditions for fugitive learning so that we can foster their growth (Zaino, 2021). Further, as the case study takes place in an elementary teacher education classroom, it can serve as inspiration for how fugitivity might look in a university or modified for children. 

The Course

The official purpose of the course is to introduce preservice and novice teachers, many of whom are part of the bilingual elementary teacher program, to “effective teaching practices.” As a two-credit course in a 30 credit program that includes a part-time internship followed by a full-time student teaching apprenticeship, I am given a lot of flexibility with the syllabus. Students, who are preparing to teach elementary school, usually take this course in the first or second semester of their graduate program. Since this class is part of a public university, many of the students work full-time and are career-changers. Therefore, unlike other teacher education graduate programs which are often majority young, upper middle-class white women (McKinney et al., 2005), the student population tends to be diverse – with international students, career-changers, caregivers, and students who work full-time during the day. This class took place at night, from 7 – 9. With the late start-time, I offered for students to take the course online if it suited them. Therefore, during most classes, half of the class was online for various reasons, including illness or care-giving responsibilities. 

The Assignment 

The overall purpose of this class was for early career and preservice teachers to think critically about the role of teachers and education more generally. I used this course to provide educators with the opportunity to cultivate dissatisfaction with our current systems, which I hoped would open a pathway towards fugitive pedagogies. As such, in order for such fugitive learning to occur, I wove readings from diverse theorists with assignments designed to develop community. Therefore, the multimodal collaborative project around which this study centers, was not implemented until the middle of the semester, once students had built relationships with each other and myself. Further, the assignment itself was built based on feedback from my students over the course of three semesters. This article explores the third iteration of this assignment. 

For this assignment, students were asked to “create a multimodal project to show an educational harm that you perpetuate or that you feel strongly about.” When I introduced the assignment to my students, I showed them an example of my own assignment (Figure 1) – a multimodal recreation of how I feel giving tests. This multimodal assignment – pictured below – includes a recent passport picture of myself with a blue overlay and has been reflected vertically.  Surrounding my picture are blue, white and light gray circles that frame my face. I chose these images and colors to invoke the robotic, apocalyptic nature of human potential measured by data and machines. I wanted to suggest that while giving a test, I reverted to being not quite human, as fading into the structures of modernity.  A black and white starburst also surrounds my picture, and in it sits a black and white old-fashioned school, though it is impossible to makeout with all the layers of images.  These images are set against a dark-blue background with white dots to give the impression of stars and outer-space, which I include as a nod to Afrofuturism. Quotes float along the corners of the piece, allude to common phrasing around testing – No talking! Eyes on your own paper! You have eight minutes left to finish. The title – Test in Session – is written in white and in bold in the upper left corner of the picture. A black and white drawing of an eye and dried leaves are glued over the picture. 

Figure 1: Test in Session by Kushya Sugarman 

As a class, we discussed the aesthetic choices that I made and then some alternatives to testing that might address this harm. I made the decision to include my own example based on feedback from the students from the year before – they had said that it was easier to engage with the material if they had a model. Moreover, I know that part of my strength as a teacher is my own vulnerability and modeling of self-reflection. I needed to share myself with my students if I expected them to share with me. I needed to try out this activity and put myself back into the dis-ease of a scene like I had described in this opening if I hoped for this assignment to be something more than just another assignment on my students’ to-do list. Lastly, as indicated in the opening, my uneasy relationship with giving a test remains an important part of my own fugitive journey and one that I need to perpetually revisit. This project, then, became an opportunity for me to also enter into a fugitive space.  

The following week, students came to class with their multimodal assignments. Since the class is a hybrid, we broke into two groups, one online and one in person. Each group consisted of about seven students and I recorded both sessions via zoom. Students shared their projects individually, by casting them onto a smartboard in our classroom. After each student shared their thinking we spoke about the educational harm and the structures that enable each form of slow violence or violence that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed over time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011, p.  2). From there, we consider possible ways to divest from the harm and create new systems. Since I took part in the in-person session, I have focused on three examples of fugitivity from the discussion in which I was a part of. After the discussion, students were given two weeks to create another multimodal project to show their new systems or divestments, as well as to write a one or two page artist’s reflection. 

In what follows, I look to answer the question: what can a multimodal, collaborative project teach us about the creation of a fugitive space and the development of an abolitionist pedagogy for preservice teachers? To illustrate our creation of a fugitive space that allows for the development of abolitionist aims, I organize my analysis around Mariame Kaba’s (2021) abolitionist framework. The five elements, all of which overlap with one another, are: (1) understand you are entangled in our current system, (2) be part of a collective, (3) embrace collective responsibility to resolve conflicts, (4) create social structures that are less hierarchical, and (5) divest from harmful systems. Though there are students that illustrate each part of the framework, I have chosen to focus on three that not only show we created a fugitive space, but deepen our understanding of what abolition might mean in teachers’ practice. 

Using descriptions of students’ projects, my field notes from class discussions, transcripts from class discussions, students’ reflections and my research memos, I create vignettes of students’ responses to this assignment. In order to analyze the work, I developed codes based on the framework, then from memos and recordings, I extended what abolition means in a teacher education classroom. On the last day of class, I had students reflect on their experiences and give suggestions for future iterations of this assignment. Students’ ideas on what worked and possible next steps were included in the discussion. Lastly, I shared my initial analysis with my students, gave them the opportunity to shape how their work was being presented and gave them the option to veto if they no longer wanted to share their work with the world. 

Results/Analysis

In this section, I analyze three of my students’ projects that best represent our efforts to extend the abolitionist tenets of (1) being part of a collective, (2) embracing collective approaches to conflict resolution and (3) divesting from harmful systems. Within each of the sections, I explain the importance of this assemblage of the framework in teacher education, include how teacher education programs and/or K-12 schools typically approach the domain and follow with our community’s approach and what that means for abolitionist pedagogies more broadly. To conclude, I describe a work that did not illustrate abolitionist pedagogies to the same degree as the others that are highlighted, which sheds light on the ongoing nature of this work.  

Being Part of a Collective 

Traditional schooling rewards achievement and competition, and directly undermines collectivity (Patel, 2016). Neoliberal reforms, such as the standardization of curriculum, give the false impression of progress, remediation and even equity, while increasing the workload for teachers and the standards of compliance for students all while making solidarity between teachers and their students nearly impossible (Sonu & Benson, 2021). The inability to develop strong relationships cuts into our very humanity, and weakens our ability to imagine otherworlds (Stein, 2021). As such, any form of fugitivity or abolition necessitates expansive collectivity, which includes the capacity to attend to perspectives that have been traditionally ignored. Growing in these dimensions allows us to proceed with greater accountability, responsibility and imagination than we might individually. 

Elements of collectivity are present throughout many students’ projects, particularly in teachers’ offerings of care to students. However, instead of these more traditional approaches to collectivity, in which teachers work with students to meet students’ curricular or emotional needs, Eliza’s project, which investigates gun violence in schools, considers how our inherent collectivity might allow humanity to meet the larger challenges of modernity. In having us sit with pain, Eliza reveals abolitionist collectivity in schools to be affective, biological and unbounded. 

Eliza: Sitting with collective pain 

In traditional teacher education classrooms, students do not discuss gun violence, though my students have described it as a large component of being a contemporary classroom teacher. Eliza chose gun violence as her educational harm, creating a multimodal project that depicts a picture of her with a red cross-fire over her smiling face. The picture of her, which is in color, is set against a black and white collage of headlines of school shootings that date back to the shooting in Columbine in 1996. Eliza chose this template to illustrate the prevalence of gun violence in our schools, something that she was worried about when she chose to become a classroom teacher.

Figure 2: Untitled By Eliza

Affective. Our discussion during Eliza’s artist talk shows abolitionist collectivity as not merely intellectual, but an uncomfortable, affective coming together. Eliza warned her classmates before presenting her project, explaining that though the pictures were not graphic, she had worked hard to aesthetically present her feelings in a way that she hoped would impact others. “I have myself with the target,” she explained, “because we are all targets ourselves in the classroom.” Her classmates nodded sadly and somberly in response to the shared threat. Later, when reflecting on our experiences, a student described Eliza’s unveiling as “dealing with the darkness of humanity.” Therefore, we were not only potential victims. Eliza’s work invited us to deal with a disturbing reality. This distinction is important because when we work together, our affective discomfort allows for us to learn from and move forward through these feelings. 

Eliza’s work highlights teachers’ entanglement in systems of violence, showing that abolitionist pedagogies must create affective communities around shared responsibility. As evidence of the pervasive nature of gun violence in contemporary America, that morning there had been a shooting outside a local school where an education student had been student teaching. In response, all the children had to go into “lockdown.” (Lockdown drills are when a bell rings and students hide in a corner of the room to “prepare” for an active shooter.) As the discussion progressed, students described how the elementary schools in which they were serving as student teachers dealt with lockdown drills. Most of the novice teachers had been told by their administrators to lie to the children. One of the education students even said that they had been instructed to tell children that they were preparing in case there was a wild dog on the loose.  In such an environment, young teachers did not know how to proceed honestly with children while still maintaining safety.  Though our conversation did not provide any clear-cut answers, discussing the mistakes that we have made and the questions we still have is an important part of developing the capacity to interact honestly with children and each other in the future. Thus, through her portrayal of gun violence, Eliza expands our understanding of abolitionist pedagogies to include sitting with negative emotions in the pursuit of more expansive connectivity and responsibility.

Biological. In her reflection, Eliza turns to neuroscience to illustrate that we are all 

connected on a cellular level. This novel consideration of connection as biological is based on the understanding that  we have all emerged from the same soupy mess and therefore are different expressions of the same primal elements (Da Silva, 2016). Eliza reflects:

In fact, a growing body of research indicates that gun violence in schools has a lasting, deleterious, and pervasive impact on society, as it greatly affects everyone, not just those directly impacted by school shootings. This research has specifically examined how exposure to school shootings, both directly and indirectly, can have major neurological and physiological effects on young people, as it can actually impact our students’ biological stress systems, which can cause enduring damage to their developing brains (Abrams, 2022). 

In this unexpected turn to the “hard-sciences,” Eliza shows that racial capitalism, and all aspects of modernity, impacts us on a cellular level, though we might not recognize it as such. Our environment and biology are inseparable from one another, so we are all deeply connected to both the beautiful and ugly parts of the universe (Stein et al., 2022). This biological understanding of collectivity adds new flavor to an important aspect of abolition, that since we are all deeply entrenched with one another, none of us are free until we are all free (Combahee River Collective, 1977). Therefore, Eliza alludes to collective accountability as ingrained in our very humanity. 

Essential. Lastly, Eliza’s project shows that collectivity is an essential part of our humanity, as exhibited through Eliza’s complex understanding of solutions to gun violence rooted in collective care. In her reflection, Eliza wrote that in addition to advocating with her students to enact stricter gun laws, she would work to foster a sense of belonging in her class, where children would not feel as though their humanity was conditional. This, she argued, would do more to prevent gun violence in schools than any amount of legislation. In that way, Eliza employs an abolitionist ethos because she recasts even those who would be violent towards children as part of an intricate web of injustice for which we are all partially responsible. Attention to belonging in its most broad sense illuminates how abolitionist pedagogies complicate and expand the role of a teacher (Rodríguez, 2010). Rather than providing access, Eliza shows that abolitionist pedagogies may awaken teachers and students to the many ways in which we already belong. In this way, Eliza challenges teachers to enact what researchers call “relational rigor,” which can be “defined as an approach that interrupts modern/colonial tendencies to treat relationships as utility-maximizing transactions between two separate parties, and instead fosters relationships that recognise our independence with each other and all beings on a shared, finite, living planet, and that thus seek to foster trust, respect, reciprocity, accountability, and consent” (Stein, 2021, p. 490). When we operate with relational rigor, we act with “unbounded” accountability that allows us to learn from and affect everything around us (Whyte, 2020). 

Embracing Collective Responsibility to Resolve Conflicts 

From collectivity, it follows that we must specifically embrace collective responsibility to resolve conflicts rather than to rely upon others, such as the police (Kaba, 2021). This form of collective responsibility is especially important in schools because modernity has encouraged teachers (and most adults) to look for quick, painless solutions (Stein, 2021). Since most teacher education programs do not teach the history of education, including its violent colonial past-present, many teachers have not investigated the ways in which we have become the foot soldiers for racial capitalism (Kelley, 2022). Therefore, when teachers outsource the responsibility to resolve conflicts to deans, administrators or parents, they lose the opportunity to engage with the mistakes that they might have made and develop the capacity to have a conflict without it ruining the relationship (Stein et al., 2020). This skill is needed if we hope to build a world that does not yet exist, because it will take millions of experiments in problem solving. 

Georgia: A Revolutionary and Oppressor 

Georgia’s educational harm depicts the high-rate of school suspensions for Black and Brown students. For her project, she superimposed an unhappy face over the background of an actual suspension notice. Though she had never been suspended, and described herself as a “rule-follower,” as a dark-skinned Spanish woman, she knew that children that look like her are disciplined at a much higher rate than white children. So, she chose to depict how she would feel if she got suspended, and made the suspension notice red and blurry. She explained, “Anytime I get in trouble or I perceive that I made some mistakes, I just see red and all the bad words are huge. I tried to show that.” Georgia explained that she wanted to show the feeling that anyone could be put in this category. That it felt very random and very scary. The discussion that followed Georgia’s introduction shows how as a class we began to develop collective responsibility that moves beyond binaries, engages with storywork and allows for complex, collective solutions. 

Collective Responsibility: Beyond the Binary. Traditionally, when schools of education consider suspensions, teacher educators warn preservice teachers that Black and Brown students are suspended at a much higher rate than their white counterparts (Coles & Powell, 2020). Be one of the good teachers, a white professor might urge a room full of white pre-service teachers, and then move on to another topic. Very rarely do education students discuss the pervasive narratives of punishment and justice or teachers’ complex role in upholding criminality (Rodriquez, 2019). By contrast, Georgia’s framing allowed us to consider teachers’ relationship to the status quo. In our discussion, a student, quoting one of our readings, suggested that teachers “could either be a revolutionary or an oppressor.” Georgia complicated the matter, reflecting that perhaps rather than thinking about teachers as revolutionaries or oppressors, it might be helpful to “think of ourselves as revolutionaries AND oppressors.”  All we can do, after all, is strengthen our revolutionary side through generative actions. In moving beyond a simple binary, Georgia shows that no matter what, our actions will enact some sort of harm. The point is what do we do with that harm? How can we learn from our mistakes and make different mistakes in the future? This is the beginning of abolitionist thinking. 

Storywork. Though research into the empowerment of Black, Brown and Indigenous communities has begun to include the careful implementation of storywork, the same cannot be said for the traditional teacher education classroom, where sharing stories holds little weight. Storywork, one of the oldest technologies of human development, refers to “the storytelling and storylistening practices that people engage in with lands/waters and each other, for educational purposes” (Marin et al., 2020, p. 2200). Alongside storywork, abolitionist educator Piper Anderson (2022) has termed abolitionist storywork for the type of storywork that is particularly utilized to change narratives around incarceration. Georgia, I argue, engages with abolitionist storywork through the story that she shared afterward presenting her piece. 

After Georgia showed her project, she described how she witnessed the suspension of a Black boy in the elementary school where she served as an assistant. She described: 

but [he’s] just placed in a different class without any work. He’s just sitting there. And then he was still misbehaving because what am I supposed to do? Yeah, I don’t have any work. I’m going to talk to the person next to me.

Georgia then paused, shook her head and explained that she was worried about what would happen to the boy in the future. She touched her chest, and whispered that even describing it made her really upset. After she shared her story, many students shared their experiences of dealing with family members’ unjust suspensions. In sharing this story, Georgia breathes emotion into the details of a system designed to dehumanize. Importantly, it is this story, rather than the statistics on suspension rates that provokes emotion in her and invites other students to share their experiences. Storywork allows people to learn from one another’s experiences across time and space, which is necessary for developing abolitionist pedagogies.

Complex Solutions to Harm. Neoliberal teacher education programs and the K-12 classrooms that result from these programs emphasize simplistic solutions for behavior management. For instance, education students who learn about the school-to-prision pipeline might think that implementing a liberal practice, such as a talking circle will “solve” the problem of disproportionate suspensions (Delpit, 2019). When these conflicts inevitably do occur and a talking circle is not a perfect solution, a young teacher might revert to punitive classroom management approaches instead (Delpit, 2019). Instead of calling for a bandaid on a gaping, societal wound, Georgia’s collective approach to conflict generates more complex solutions. 

One important aspect of complex solutions is that we cannot change how we respond to discipline without reframing criminality. In response to the implementation of restorative justice approaches to discipline based on Indigenous people’s traditional practices, a student said that some parents worry about the lack of “accountability” for the individual student when there are less punitive approaches to discipline. In response, another student said, “we are all accountable to everyone else. We – the teachers – must be held accountable because we have created this world in the first place.” This idea of collective accountability, rather than individual accountability gets to the heart of what it should mean to be an educator. Abolitionist pedagogies must work to complexify our collective approaches to harm. 

Over the course of our discussions, our community imagined a number of creative solutions to behavior issues that speak to the importance of collective responsibility on multiple levels. For instance, we spoke about a school with a lot of gang activity in which grandparents and/or fathers came into the schools or hung out around the block in order to keep an eye on the youth. These father-figures would get to know the kids, joke around and help them cross the street. The extra set of adult eyes (and hearts) had a huge impact on the school. As a result, the rate of suspensions went way down and the violence in schools dropped precipitously. These more care-full forms of discipline and accountability allow even those who have done something wrong to maintain their humanity,  and help young people resolve conflict more gracefully. Community-based approaches have a long tradition in Black and Indigenous communities and ripping children from these more care-based practices is part of the violence of a racial capitalistic approach to schooling (Sojoyner, 2013). Embracing more complex solutions, rooted in the community’s response to conflict, is a necessary element of abolitionist pedagogies. 

Divest from Harmful Systems 

Some critical teacher education programs may create collectivity and even support collective approaches to conflict resolution, however, few exhibit sustainable divestment from systems of harm. Perhaps this is because teacher educators, as primarily white, middle-class women, are particularly invested in many of these structures (Souto-Manning, 2021). An abolitionist approach, by contrast, involves closely examining and circumventing harmful elements of our day-to-day practice – from curriculum, to classroom management to recruitment (Sabatí et al., 2022; Souto-Manning, 2021). We cannot worldbuild until we learn from our current mistakes and proceed differently, however, we must still live in a world in which these structures are a reality (Stein, 2021). Therefore, divestment from harmful structures represents the heart of abolition and the most difficult assemblage to enact. 

Though the backbone of abolition, upon analysis, only one student created a response to schooling that included a fundamental divestment from harm. In what follows, I describe Amanda’s depiction of her struggle with OCD. In it, Amanda reveals how traditional schooling contributed to the deterioration of her mental health and discusses how educators can develop relationships based on different standards of success. Amanda shows that abolitionist pedagogies may allow teachers to see connections between systems and personal issues, question popular narratives, and look for alternative relationalities. 

Amanda: The Personal is Structural 

In introducing her educational harm to the class, Amanda explains that she goes to therapy and takes medication for OCD and anxiety. “School has enabled that for me, it’s something that kind of came up in middle school and got worse through high school and into college,” she reflected. Amanda’s project depicts a chalkboard with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder across the center. Below, she includes three different brain-scans titled “normal controls,” “clinical OCD,” and “I’m so OCD.” The brain titled “normal controls” and “I’m So OCD” look the same, with “Clinical OCD” lit up with more yellow. Amanda writes that this was to show that clinical OCD is a real brain disorder. By contrast, Amanda includes quotes all around the brain scans. These include “outgrow” in green, to show that many adults think that children will simply outgrow OCD tendencies. The other quotes, which show positive feedback, are in smaller writing against what appears to be notebook paper, and are included in order to depict teacher praise. Below, there is a picture of a child in black and white with their head in their arms and clocks circling around them. This picture has a brick frame. It’s included to depict the feeling of having OCD. 

Figure 3: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by Amanda

While education researchers tend to emphasize the inequities of teachers labeling children who struggle with task completion as disposable or “unteachable,” there is another side to this issue. As Amanda alludes to, traditionally, teachers (and students) equate learning with task completion (Patel, 2019). So, when students complete a task “perfectly,” teachers reinforce this achievement with positive praise. In addition to reinforcing the so-called learning, teachers are training children to desire more outside praise (Yeh et al., 2021). Equating belonging with schoolwork contributes to the colonial logic whereby children (and later adults) become invested in our harmful system. In the following sections, Amanda connects her experiences with OCD to larger systems and calls upon teachers to do the same. Her work expands abolitionist pedagogies to reveal how our individual struggles are symptoms of everyday practices of racial capitalism.

Connect Systems to Personal. Amanda’s description of her experience with OCD shows what decolonial scholars have called dissatisfaction with our current system. Dissatisfaction, these scholars urge, is a necessary prerequisite for any change that we might collectively enact (Stein, 2021). In her reflection, Amanda writes: 

Which gets feedback like, oh, this is so organized, it’s so thorough, it’s perfect. That’s above and beyond excellent attention to detail. And it’s like my attention to detail is so excellent that I’ll do something 20 times until I get a feeling that it’s right. Perfect. And then maybe I can go meet a friend or sleep or something like that.

However, no teachers ever questioned the excessive thoroughness and exactness of my work or checked in with me genuinely and regularly enough to get me the help that I needed at that formative time. Maybe they were ignorant of the signs or had just labeled me “A+ student” without a second thought. But by consciously or unconsciously allowing my compulsive approach to schoolwork to continue, they fell and fed into a harmful work-is-worth culture rooted in U.S. capitalism while my health declined. 

In her project, Amanda paints OCD as a personal issue that has been exacerbated by the white supremacist culture of schooling, showing dissatisfaction with the system that has manipulated students at the expense of their mental health. It follows that even those who appear to benefit from our system are still suffering. In The Undercommons, Moten and Harney (2013) suggest that when those with privilege – such as Amanda – begin to see the ways that we are all harmed by our current system, that true solidarity can occur. Albeit unevenly, we are all subjected to the violence of racial capitalism, which seeks to separate us from each other and therefore from our own humanity. Amanda’s work suggests that teacher educators must give education students opportunities and resources to reflect on connections between personal struggles and systematic oppression, as this work may help generate true solidarity.

Question Popular Narratives. Part of Amanda’s efforts to divest from harmful systems involve interrupting harmful narratives perpetuated in racial capitalistic schools. Amanda argues that popular conceptions of OCD as a “‘genius disorder’ or a glamorous ‘“boon to U.S. capitalism’” make it difficult for teachers, and students, to take the seriousness of the disorder to heart. OCD sometimes shows up as having exceptional drive, like in her case, but can also create the circumstances in which a child may be “perceived as defiant or deficient in attentional capacity.” Amanda argues that, “Regardless of whether or not a child’s obsessions and compulsions make them conform to the traditional idea of the ideal student, teachers need to put equity and wellness above all else. I am hopeful that teaching to disrupt the status quo and care for students as complex human beings will begin to repair the harm explored in this project.” In this, Amanda shows that regardless of the ways that children show up in the classroom, they deserve to be treated as valuable members of the community. Amanda calls to mind the Indigenous saying that “We are all both inadequate and indispensable,” which is in direct contrast to popular narratives of exceptionalism and exclusion. 

In addition, Amanda’s call for teachers to question their own preconceived notions about what to expect from students links abolitionist pedagogies to affective literacy. Amanda believes that teachers need to revisit their expectations for children and the structures from which they take root. In questioning what a teacher wants from a student, Amanda gestures toward the development of affective literacies, which, as defined by Stein (2021), “can be understood as the self-reflexive capacity to disarm our common defenses and develop a suspicion about our own presumed innocence and the benevolence of our desires” (p. 485). Put another way, Amanda invites teachers to divest from what the Black Panthers called internal colonization, or the false promises of modernity and racial capitalism (Bryan et al., 2022). It is only when we learn to refuse the seductions of modernity that we can learn from our harmful structures and move toward abolitionist pedagogies. 

Look for Alternative Ways to Relate. While our traditional approaches to relationships are based on transactions and profit, Amanda shows the importance of abolitionist pedagogies in helping teachers and students develop alternative ways of relating. In her reflection, she writes that her second multimodal project allowed her to “envision a world in which students are treated as critically thinking human beings in need of care rather than future laborers ready to be shaped in ways that advance capitalist interests.” She shows in her collage a child that “smiles at the knowledge that their struggles are explainable and that mental health is possible with the right supports. Rather than ‘outgrow’ the disorder, they can truly grow with a community committed to learning and empowering them and tools like Exposure and Response Prevention, which enables children to face their fears.” Therefore, Amanda imagines a world in which the purpose of education is completely different than we might see in American schools. Through her analysis of mental health, she calls for belonging based on shared humanity. 

As such, Amanda invites students to practice purposely not following all of the rules in order to make decisions for themselves and “face their fears.” She invites students with “just right” OCD or obsessive-compulsive tendencies to purposely skip a question on a homework assignment, make a few deliberate punctuation or capitalization errors, or use their non-dominant hand to write a messy sentence, for example. They would sit with the discomfort of not doing their “best work” and practice non-judgmentally noticing the urge that they have to fix it–without acting on that urge–until the feeling subsides and they move forward. This can be a deeply distressing exercise depending on the nature and severity of the child’s OCD. But it’s exactly the thing that will help them get well. 

In order to fulfill this shift effectively, Amanda argues, the following needs to happen: 

Schools need to grapple with their values, teach the importance of mistakes, deliberately foster self-compassion, re-structure their days to prioritize rest, train their teachers, equip themselves with mental health professionals, destigmatize mental illness, and normalize psychoeducation for educators and students alike. 

Such action would force teachers to see their role as more than behavior managers or conveyors of knowledge. Instead, teachers would embrace the opportunity to develop expansive relationships with their students, and themselves that are not based on rule following. Therefore, divesting from harmful systems must be based on the creation of new ways of relating. 

Other Students 

Though almost all students began the journey of abolitionist and fugitive thinking, not all students created work that shows the same divestment from harmful systems and engagement with collective responsibility as the students highlighted in this paper. I will now highlight a student, Daisy, who did not show the same level of abolitionist pedagogy as the others in order to show that the development of an abolitionist pedagogy is an arduous journey that is never complete. 

Daisy’s work began with a discussion of the achievement gap between white students and Black students as an educational harm. Though Daisy discussed structural issues that lead to the “achievement gap,” such as white supremacy and poverty, she did not question the arbitrary standards and the myth of linear learning that this gap is based upon (Nxumablo, 2021). Further, she did not make connections between the gap and racial capitalism, which feeds off of inequality (Melamed, 2021). As a result, Daisy suggested interventions to increase the achievement of individual students, rather than divestment from systems that enshrine human disposability (Shalaby, 2017). 

Interestingly, Daisy, like most students who did seek to interrupt the root of the harm, engaged with this activity online, and did not have the benefit of discussing the issue in proximity of her classmates. In addition, in her reflection, she mentioned that many ideas were new. Therefore, Daisy’s work shows that she has begun to grapple with these ideas and her feedback will make the next iterations of this course more meaningful. In the next section, I discuss next steps with this project, taking into account students’ reflections and feedback.

Discussion 

In a traditional teacher education classroom, even a critical one, students do not often have the opportunity to engage creatively with the material. Therefore, perhaps it is not surprising that of the 15 students surveyed, 12 students reported that the creativity of the project was what made the assignment most meaningful to them. They said that the artistic aspect made them think differently about how they related to the ideas, because rather than think about word choices, they were thinking about aesthetic choices to convey feeling and meaning. For instance, one student said that choosing where the pictures went made her think about the types of emotions that she wanted to convey and how best to convey them. Creativity allowed the students to register and convey the undercurrent of violence in our system in new registers by utilizing different modalities. In addition, since students are all novice artists – it is a teacher education program, not an art MFA – the creativity aspect was low stakes and playful, it allowed for a level of relating, imagining, and playing without fear of judgment. 

The creativity of the assignment allowed community members to relate beyond words. When Eliza showed her picture of school shootings, there was an audible gasp across the room, in which the students were processing Eliza’s picture. This deeply shared experience as presented in an image calls to mind fugitivity literacies in which multiple ways of relating are developed beyond the spoken or written word. Arts allow people to connect through embodied affect, tapping into something deeper than attempting to make change through intellect alone (Ohito, 2020). This activity, and the space created in concert with it, is a testament to the power of visual images to create a fugitive space where we might push ourselves beyond our normative ways of relating to one another. In addition, since the projects were more impactful when students were physically present underlines the importance of a shared physical environment in which we might look into each other’s eyes and feel each other’s energies (Trowbridge, 2017). As such, next semester I will have all students present their work to their classmates in person to develop a physical fugitive space, and, under the recommendation of one student, I will have students create the second part of their assignment alongside their classmates, in order to make the assignment more collaborative. 

In most graduate programs, students either have a group project or work in pairs. This collaborative multimodal activity was different because students developed the initial educational harm themselves, from their own experiences. Then, they shared their work with our class community and took the input from their classmates and myself to create a way of divesting from the harm. As such, though working independently, students were able to make agentive choices based on the input of their peers. This unique structure was one of the elements that students enjoyed about this assignment, calling the process “agentive” because they weren’t simply dissecting a harm, but thinking collectively about ways of moving forward.  Students appreciated this form of problem solving, because as one student stated, we are often pressured to act as though we have all of the answers, especially as future teachers. When we learn to listen to the point of views of multiple people, we might not move as quickly through the process, but we learn to hold multiple truths at once, allowing us to consider the multi-layered nature of our collective experience.  This is because our culture rewards individuality, hubris and decisiveness. Instead, in order to deepen the use of abolitionist pedagogies, this project allowed students to work collectively, humbly, and with slow contemplation and care. For instance, one student commented on Amanda’s work and said that she had never considered how positive reinforcement might harm children and reinforce neoliberal conceptions of achievement and success. As a result of seeing Amanda’s work and talking about some solutions – particularly around brain development, she had a greater understanding of OCD and appreciation for what children with OCD might struggle with. This would not have been possible if I had just had students turn in their projects, without the artist presentation, the discussion afterward and the opportunity to engage further with the material. 

Improvements 

Though the artistic element was incredibly important, students brought up a number of ways that the art could be improved upon. First of all, they thought that we should all be in class when we were working on these assignments. Though I had made the class hybrid initially in order to accommodate different schedules, I agree. So, in the future, for experiences that are especially embodied, such as this one, we will be working together in order to build off of the shared experience of working together in one space (Trowbridge, 2017). 

Second, students thought that we should spend more time working on this project because the conversations were so rich and meaningful.  As such, in future iterations, I will allow for two weeks of sharing as well as a day whereby students will work on the project in class together. The act of working on the assignment in class together, especially the divestment slide, should help to deepen the experience and turn us into a community who learns together. 

Lastly, students wondered about different practices that we could enact in response to these harms. More specifically, what might these ideas look like in practice or what steps could we take in order to create different experiences for children? Therefore, further work needs to be done into how to prepare students to practice these concepts in our teacher education classrooms so that they are better able to embody these ways of being outside of the classroom. 

Conclusion

The implementation of the collaborative multimodal assignment is part of a long process of abolitionist practice for myself and my students. In this work, after positioning schools within the system of racial capitalism, I illustrated how abolitionist and fugitive thinking have been helpful for collectively considering alternatives to current K-12 schooling and teacher education. Working to generate a fugitive space in my own teacher education classroom, I described a case study of a multimodal, collaborative assignment in which the preservice teachers revisit an educational harm that they have witnessed or engaged in, and create a visual representation. I organized this paper around three students who I argue show abolitionist thinking by (1) being part of a collective, (2) embracing collective approaches to conflict resolution, and (3) divesting from harmful systems – a framework that I borrow from Mariame Kaba. Rather than just critiquing the system, these education students build off their own experiences to give new depth to what abolitionist thinking might mean and look like for emerging teachers in NYC. The success of the assignment shows the importance of creativity, collectivity and personal connection for the development of abolitionist thought in preservice teachers. More research should, then, be focused on the second half of the assignment, how we might collectively divest from these educational harms, and the creation of lesson plans and classroom structures that might allow for these divestments to take root. 

Notes on Contributor

Kushya Sugarman has been an elementary school teacher for 15 years, focusing on student-centered pedagogy and play as a pathway to liberatory change. She has collaborated with both traditional and community educators and artists. Currently, Kushya is a PhD candidate in Urban Education at the Graduate Center (CUNY). There, she collaborates with teachers and children to study how play, storywork, and art support fugitive and abolitionist pedagogies. Her work aims to co-create environments that nurture Black futurity, embracing social visions of radical freedom beyond systems of oppression.

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