Critical Race Theory & Abolition: Disrupting Racial Policy Whiplash In Teacher Education

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Winter 2023

Published In

Thresholds In Education

Abstract

In 2021, like far too many states around the U.S., educators in Pennsylvania have been forced to wade through a myriad of attacks against educating students for liberation and justice under the guise of combating Critical Race Theory (CRT). There is a fair amount of “racial policy whiplash” in educators, as many states are simultaneously incorporating culturally sustaining and antiracist pedagogies into their teacher certification requirements. We explore this racial context as teacher educators organizing in a racially and ethnically diverse department at a small liberal arts college (SLAC). We begin by naming our theoretical North Star, guided by CRT, abolition, and Yamamoto’s (1997) Critical Race Praxis (CRP) approach. We then argue that a societal “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 1995) continues to dominate teacher education at all levels (including our own), and highlight ways our teacher education community experienced the psychological, material and curricular violence of racial policy whiplash. The second half of this paper details the self-study of our departmental effort to center antiracism and abolition in all aspects of community and concludes by advocating for a ‘doubling down’ on both abolition and critical race theory as ways to sustain our own work and the field of teacher education.

Keywords

critical race theory, abolition, culturally sustaining pedagogy, antiracism, teacher education

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS