Breaking, Building, and Blooming: Operationalizing Abolitionist Pedagogy in the Middle School Classroom

• In Event: Abolitionist Praxis and Broadening Perspectives on Educational Carcerality

Abstract

In partnership with Black youth and community members and embodying abolitionist pedagogical principles, we—teachers and researchers—developed and instituted a six-week curricular intervention that replaced a normative Civil War history unit with an abolitionist-oriented historiography of the nation’s complicated founding. Through this social design-based intervention, we sought to answer the question: what are the tensions and possibilities of enacting an abolitionist history curriculum in the seventh grade classroom? Preliminary analysis of classroom video observations, student interviews, and student work samples identified several abolitionist pedagogical heuristics such as (1) making student feedback about instructional techniques visible, and (2) engaging embodiment in the classroom space as a collective project, among others that can used in abolitionist teaching.

Authors

• Kia Turner, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Maya Park, Harvard University
  Presenting Author

• Mikaela Belle Martin, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Darion A. Wallace, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author