Doing Abolition: Educator Visioning and the Making of Black Educational Transformation

• In Event: Black Vision for Black Politics

Abstract

Achieving Black educational transformation hinges on undoing schooling structures that sustain Black children’s racial harm. This study presents a year-long qualitative investigation exploring the central role of Black educators' visions in driving the structural change essential for transformation. A phenomenological case study, it draws on over 40 hours of non-participant observation, 27 initial one-on-one interviews, 18 follow-up interviews, and an analysis of school-wide communications and policy documents. The findings underscore the risks of competing visions of freedom among educators and the implications of such misalignments for doing abolition. The article concludes with discussion of unthinking inherited disciplinary logics, unsettling structures rooted in control, and embracing progressive conceptions of care as setting the conditions for Black educational transformation.

Authors

• De'Ja Wood, Vanderbilt University

• Chezare A Warren, Vanderbit University

• Carla Wellborn-Watts, Vanderbilt University, Peabody College