Honoring Youth Mental Health through Abolitionist Education: K-12 Students Researching Radically Healing Futures

Session Type: Invited Roundtable

Abstract

This K-12 student panel–trained as critical ethnographers–will explore how abolitionist education can address the mental health needs of and support futurity for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+, including multilingual students, as well as those experiencing poverty. Fifth-graders will examine how queer-, trans-, race- and translanguage-affirming abolitionist education is radically healing and imaginative for multilingual QTBIPOC, their school, and their community. High school students in a residential summer program centering culturally holistic care explore how abolitionist education improves the academic readiness and mental health of Black youth through the cultivation of joy and critical hope. Abolitionist and healing-centered scholars will frame the implications of the students’ research while the American Psychological Association President will inquire how pedagogy helped youth be “radically well together.”

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Teachers College, Columbia University

Participants

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco

• Joy Diaz-Noriega, Downer Elementary School

• Seth Duncan, University of California - Los Angeles

• Tiera C. Tanksley, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Keara L. Williams, University of California - Los Angeles

Discussants

• Bettina L. Love, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Wendi S. Williams, American Psychological Association