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Toward a Framework for Abolitionist Leadership

Fri, April 22, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina, Floor: South Building, Level 1, Pacific Ballroom 16

Abstract

Objectives: In this session, we will share 1) our process for developing a working group focused on abolitionist praxis, 2) key learnings, and 3) our emerging framework for abolitionist educational leadership.

Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives: Multiple educational scholars have applied the work of early abolitionists (e.g., Douglass, Truth), as well as modern abolitionists (e.g., Davis, Kaba) to disrupt schools’ role in perpetuating carceral systems. These scholars have applied educational abolitionism in terms of school discipline (e.g., Meiners & Winn, 2010), pedagogy and classroom activity (e.g., Love, 2019; Stovall, 2018), and, most recently, teacher education (Pour-Korshid et al., 2021). With the exception of Harvey (2021), however, abolition has not yet been applied to leadership in educational contexts.

Methods: In 2020, CSU East Bay's Department of Educational Leadership (DEL) convened a working group to understand abolition, its relationship to educational leadership and the program’s social justice leadership principles, developing a draft theory of abolitionist leadership that builds on the work of abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), the Abolitionist Teaching Network (2021) and DEL's social justice leadership principles (Department of Educational Leadership, 2017). From January through March 2021, the working group on abolitionist leadership engaged in cycles of reading and dialoguing about abolition, and facilitated public discussions about abolitionist leadership with educational abolitionists, or “thought partners,” who provided critical feedback on the emerging framework.

Results: We held a set of work sessions in the fall of 2020 in which we used small and large group discussions with faculty, students, and alumni to identify key ideas from abolitionist readings, translate those into the context of educational leadership, and synthesize group work into a draft framework. We then received feedback from thought partners, and in further workgroup sessions, synthesized these into the framework. Although work is still ongoing, we identified a set of knowledges (e.g.,understanding that anti-Blackness and carceral thinking/structures are pervasive in education and need to be disrupted), dispositions (e.g., oriented toward critical self-reflection and relational ways of thinking/being), and skills (e.g., ability to leverage power to create new practices/systems that move toward healing and full humanity for Black and Brown students). We also surfaced a set of challenges, including leaders’ ability to move toward abolition while serving as agents of the carceral state; and, since many of these practices are in their nascent stage, what they actually look like being carried out on a day-to-day basis.

Significance: Schools play a significant role in maintaining the carceral state--both in terms of thinking that constructs Black and Brown students as criminal, and the structures that feed the school to prison pipeline (Meiners, 2011). School leaders have an ethical imperative to examine and disrupt schools’ perpetuation of carcerality (Authors 2020), and educational leadership faculty must factor abolitionism into their preparation of future leaders to do so. To this end, this paper offers an emerging understanding of abolitionist leadership in theory and practice, articulates a rationale for educational leaders to embrace this important praxis of change, and explains how abolitionist leadership differs from other theories of change.

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