We Can’t Talk About Abolition Without Talking About Adultism

• In Event: Imagining Beyond the Epistemes, Structures, and Practices of Schooling: Black Intergenerational and Interdisciplinary Abolitionist Perspectives

Abstract

This paper urges abolitionist academics and educators to dismantle adultism. In line with this call, Authors 1 and 2 are both 13-year-old daughters of West African immigrants, and Author 3 is a 14-year old Guyanese and African American male. Our paper stems from a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez et al., 2020) launched in the spring of 2022. Along with our 7th-grade history teacher (Author 4, a white woman, now a teacher educator and doctoral student), we co-created a learning environment by engaging with abolitionist principles. Through analysis of student interviews, as well as through our own reflections on the research intervention, we uncovered that adultism renders the classroom a training ground in domination and disposability. We, therefore, contend that dismantling the episteme of adultism is necessary to effectively pursue abolitionist classrooms together.
Our paper connects abolition literature with literature on adultism. Abolitionists advocate for an engagement with literature in the field of education and with theories of prison abolition simultaneously to move toward liberation for Black, Brown, and other minoritized students in school settings (Anderson-Savala et. al, 2017; Love, 2019; Meiners, 2009; Muhammad, 2020; Shange, 2019). Abolitionists in education challenge punitive classroom management (Shalaby, 2021) and imagine classrooms that foster self-determination, community solidarity, and self-knowledge (Stovall, 2020). While addressing daily harm young people face in schools (Love, 2019, Stovall, 2018, Shange, 2019), this literature often overlooks adultism as an episteme of domination (Authors, 2023) that must be abolished. Our paper thus intertwines abolitionist literature with literature on adultism, or adult superiority and control over young people. Supplementing other oppressions, adultism can drive youth to low self-esteem and harmful behavior (Bell, 2010). Uplifting the way that adultism not only guides adults to overpower young people but also teaches young people to accept mistreatment or pass it onto others (Bell, 2010), we highlight how adultism–if unrecognized–impedes abolitionist pedagogy. Our argument thereby builds off radical abolition studies (Authors, 2023) asserting that uprooting adult domination is essential to embody abolition in our school spaces.
We substantiate our theoretical contribution by drawing on youth participatory action research’s encouragement to deconstruct “who can ‘do’ research, what constitutes research, and who benefits” (Cammarota & Fine, 2008, p. 8). We blend our own reflections from the abolitionist curricular social-design-based research experiment with thematic analysis of 10 student interview transcripts in which our classmates emphasize uprooting adultism as vital for embracing abolition in the classroom. Our initial analysis suggests that teachers can disrupt harm cycles within and beyond classrooms by 1) self-regulating, 2) applying nonviolent communication (Meenadchi, 2019) and transformative justice, and 3) inviting young people into the fold of decision-making.
While acknowledging that teachers exist within a larger system, our paper invites teachers to claim the power they do hold to cultivate students’ abolitionist consciousness through their responses to our mistakes (or choices). By uplifting the episteme of adultism, the paper contributes theoretically to abolition studies in education. Moreover, we offer a methodological contribution by centering youth as authors and researchers in abolitionist educational research.

Authors

• Maliatu Jalloh, Poly Prep High School

• Kadijatu Barry

• Johnathan Evelyn

• Maya Park, Graduate Center - CUNY