Towards Abolition

 Towards Abolition

What ideas here feel close, like you can touch them? What ideas feel far away/ hard to wrap your mind around/ impossible? What does this have to do with youth work? With social justice? With your daily practice?

I started by reading and participating in the activity packet "Cosmic Possibilities", while I enjoyed it, I also found myself very resistant at first. Abolition seems so far away and I could not even imagine a word where all my and my loved ones needs are met. It wasn't until I listened the the webinar "Abolitionist Teaching and the Future of our Schools" that I started to better understand the concept of abolition and see it as a possibility. In the webinar, they used concrete examples of abolition showing up, including slavery and even how our practices shifted during COVID-19. I believe it was Bettina Love who made the point that during the pandemic we saw school buildings close and education take a massive shift - no school shootings, no testing, teachers were trusted upon to innovate to educate and engage their classes, communities worked together to provide wrap around services for every family, every child had access to a device and internet and so on. When I hear these examples I am truly inspired, I feel as though we were and still are so exhausted from the pandemic that we forgot to the things we wanted to keep from it. I cant help but ask what Bettina Love would say now that everything is "back to normal"? While these examples give me hope, they also disappoint knowing that we reverted back to everything before the pandemic.

The sad part is that I have touched it, I know what it is like to stop testing our students, what it means to engage them on a level beyond attendance and what it feels like to support each other as people within a whole community. We rushed into going back in person to the point where we gave up all the things we actually liked about the pandemic and now it all does seem so far away again. 

If I were to have answered our facilitation question of "abolish a part of a system you work within," my answer would be testing students. I envision a world where students dont stress so much over testing because there is non; that they dont have anxiety and panic attacks, where they aren't being taught, and are learning just to pass a test but are challenged to actually think. I envision a public school system that focuses on the success and capability of every student rather than focusing on strict academics and skills.

As for me and afterschool, I think there's a lot to take away from Gholdy Muhamed, moving forward I would like to think more about how to incorporate "cultivating genius" practices into our STEM programs.

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