An Abolitionist Teacher Residency

• In Event: Critical Turn in Teacher Residencies

Abstract

Schools are sites of unfreedom, suffering (Dumas, 2014), anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016), dehumanization (Irizarry & Brown, 2014), and spirit murder (Love, 2016), and are working as intended. We know this to be true historically and in our contemporary context within the US, and in Atlanta in particular, where we do our work. As such, we – a team of teacher educators working across institutions – engage in the work/writing/theorizing as a conceptual piece that follows as a collective endeavor of imagining--a freedom dreaming and co-constitution of non-negotiables of an abolitionist teacher residency (ATR) that guide us as we aim to build/do/be something different. Like many abolitionists before us, we are working to end practices and processes that harm people, both internally and externally (See Kaba, 2021), and we aim to do this within the context of a teacher residency program. We mobilize abolition as both a resistance of unfreedom (oppression, racial capitalism, racial calculus and anti-Blackness, exploitation, etc.) and a movement towards freedom (healing, interdependence, and intersectional justice) (see Davis, 2005; Kaba, 2021; Love, 2019; Sinha, 2016). Freedom is twofold; both a freedom from and a freedom towards. In this piece, we share an overview of the evolution of teacher residency models and how that intersects with recent calls for more criticality in teacher education, followed by a brief history of our collaborative teacher residency work and what brought us to this point. We then articulate the dream guides (i.e., the scholars and activists we draw on who have refused unfreedom before us) that support the main thesis of our work, namely our co-constituted non-negotiables for leading an abolitionist teacher residency.

Our dream guides illustrate the need to draw on radical imaginations, freedom dreaming, abolitionism, and abolitionist education to dismantle caustic systems. An ATR must: (1) attune to their geo-socio-historical and political situatedness, (2) be democratic/participatory in nature, (3) commit to an onto-epistemological orientation rooted in critical theories and abolition, and (4) emphasize learning as liberation. The authors will discuss the success, challenges, and possibilities they have engaged with as they have attempted to uplift the four non-negotiables via two years of research and programming.

As noted, this work is both a dismantling of oppressive educational regimes and creating spaces that embrace expansive visions of justice and freedom, and it is complex, daunting, and challenging. Much is required. Much is needed. We invite others into this ‘abolitionist turn’ within teacher residency work.

Authors

• Stephanie Behm Cross, Georgia State University

• Camea Davis, Research Partnership for Professional Learning