Plot(ting), Community Gardens, and Plantation Futures: Understanding Resistance and Repair in Educational Reform in Liberia

• In Event: Reparative Education: The Politics and Practice of Repair

Abstract

In 2016 Liberia adopted the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP), outsourcing public primary schools to largely international for-profit school management firms. Promoted as a means of moving the country’s education system from a “mess to the best” through corporatized management and increased surveillance and standardization, the program was celebrated by international development organizations and investors as an “innovative” model for disrupting a failing school system, while criticized by local watchdogs, community-based organizations, and teachers over a perceived lack of teacher/community involvement and who likened the outsourcing to colonization. Today, LEAP encompasses over 500 primary schools, with plans to potentially expand the program to all public primary schools in the country. LEAP has produced a homogenization of school landscapes in Liberia through the use of scripted and standardized lessons and the surveillance of teachers, while treating students and communities as profit generating commodities. As a result, students and teachers have found ways to resist and even escape these schools, creating new community schools based around local understandings of the good life.

This paper, grounded in a historical analysis of corporate concessions (plantations) in Liberia, and drawing on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork, including over 100 interviews with teachers, parents, and national and international educational stakeholders, mobilizes the plot-plantation (McKittrick 2013; Wynter 1971) and reparative frameworks (Sriprakash 2022) to examine how teachers and communities understand, resist, and remake LEAP. It argues that LEAP’s homogenization and racialization of education represents a continuation of plantation legacies, with the “plot” representing three forms of resistance: “plotting” (as a verb) where teachers individually and collectively devise ways of resisting and escaping LEAP’s standardization and surveillance; “plot” as in garden, where families and community members cultivate alternatives to the plantation’s monoculture through a schooling rooted in local practices and epistemologies; and finally “plot” as narrative—looking at the battle over control of the narrative around LEAP, or whose stories are centered and told. Through the words and experiences of a variety of local stakeholders, this paper illustrates how these community plots serve as spaces of renewal and repair (Sriprakash 2022) where “otherwise worlds” are imagined and enacted. The significance of this paper lies in its contribution to theoretical and empirical understandings of global education policies and practices that increasingly attempt to standardize and surveil communities of color for the purpose of capitalist extraction/profit, and that are often opportunistically implemented during times of crisis with limited community input.

Author

• Tyler Hook, University of Pennsylvania