Freedom Dreaming: An Abolitionist Teacher Residency

Abstract

Schools are sites of unfreedom. As such we engage in freedom dreaming and co-constituting of non-negotiables of an abolitionist teacher residency (ATR). This conceptual article asks: what non-negotiables are necessary when centering abolition in residency work? Our dream guides illustrate the need to draw on radical imaginations, freedom dreaming, abolitionism, and abolitionist education to dismantle caustic systems. An ATR must: (a) attune to their geo-socio-historical and political situatedness, (b) be democratic/participatory in nature, (c) commit to an onto-epistemological orientation rooted in critical theories and abolition, and (d) emphasize learning as liberation. We invite others into this “abolitionist turn” within residencies.

Keywords

Teacher education Abolition Teacher residency pre-service education Abolitionist Education

Schools are sites of unfreedom, suffering (Dumas, 2014), anti-Blackness (Dumas, 2016), dehumanization (Irizarry & Brown, 2014), and spirit murder (Love, 2016), and are working as intended. We know this to be true historically and in our contemporary context within the US, and in Atlanta in particular where we do our work. As such, we—a team of teacher educators working across institutions—engage in the work/writing/theorizing as a conceptual paper that follows as a collective endeavor of imagining—a freedom dreaming and co-constitution of non-negotiables of an abolitionist teacher residency (ATR) that guide us as we aim to build/do/be something different. Like many abolitionists before us, we are working to end practices and processes that harm people, both internally and externally (See Kaba, 2021), and we aim to do this within the context of a teacher residency program. We mobilize abolition as both a resistance of unfreedom (oppression, racial capitalism, racial calculus and anti-Blackness, exploitation, etc.) and a movement towards freedom (healing, interdependence, and intersectional justice) (see Davis, 2005; Kaba, 2021; Love, 2019; Sinha, 2016). Freedom is twofold; both a freedom from and a freedom towards. In what follows, we share an overview of the evolution of teacher residency models and how that intersects with recent calls for more criticality in teacher education, followed by a brief history of our collaborative teacher residency work and what brought us to this point. We then articulate the dream guides (i.e., the scholars and activists we draw on who have refused unfreedom before us) that support the main thesis of our work, namely our co-constituted non-negotiables for leading an ATR.

However, before we begin, we are compelled to share three important notes. First, while we may not have all the answers to what an ATR can be, we can articulate what it is not and at times rely on how we know we cannot move/be/do in this work; as McKittrick (2021) reminds us, “the work of liberation does not seek a stable or knowable answer to a better future; rather, it recognizes that ongoing labor of esthetically refusing unfreedom” (p. 61). Second, we understand that our current schooling (e.g., k-12 and higher education practices and onto-epistemologies that center compliance and control over critical thinking) is steeped in domination, anti-Blackness, and unfreedom and that incremental change will not suffice. We must be bold in our dreaming/theorizing to dismantle this violence, and we begin and end this manuscript knowing we can and must do better. Finally—and we return to this idea later—we find great tension in thinking/being/doing social justice/liberatory/emancipatory work as a teacher residency. We are part of the state's certification, surveillance, and regulatory apparatuses. We are, at once, a collection of educators working to create a more just world while also being the long-arm of an oppressive state. We recognize that we inhabit the liminal space, a borderland (Anzaldúa, 2007), of being freedom workers and oppressors. With these ideas in mind, we invite other educators, researchers, community members, youth and scholars into this conversation of dreaming as we imagine other ways of knowing-in-being within teacher residency work.

Brief Overview of Teacher Residencies and Criticality in Teacher Education

For decades, university-based teacher preparation has been subject to continued critiques; as Cochran-Smith et al. (2013) suggested almost 10 years ago, “amid many contentious debates about teacher education policy in the United States, a single consensus resounds among its critics: ‘Teacher education is broken and needs to be fixed’” (p. 7). These critiques, alongside growing teacher attrition in large urban districts and among Black teachers in particular (Achinstein et al., 2010; Ingersoll et al., 2018) and the infiltration of neoliberal policies and practices that emphasizes the role of private interests and free markets over public interests and social policies (Harvey, 2005), have impacted teacher education program design and associated research. This has, in part, led to an increase in acceptance of and funding for alternative teacher recruitment and preparation programs, such as Teach For America, the Relay Graduate School of Education, and others (Zeichner & Peña-Sandoval, 2015), that many suggest further perpetuate white supremacy, racist teaching and teacher attrition in schools most in need of good teachers (Anderson, 2020; Love, 2019). For example, as Labaree (2010) contends, TFA provides corp members opportunities to “do good” and “do well,” personally benefiting from a “two year tour in teaching” before exiting schools to move on to other, more lucrative careers, benefited and supported by a new and far-reaching TFA corps social network. This not only benefits corps members personally at the expense of youth in schools who are constantly learning from new teachers who leave after 2 years, but it “reinforces an old and dangerous vision of teaching as a form of slumming, a missionary effort by the White middle class… through the medium of education” (p. 52).

Teacher educators working within university-based teacher preparation programs, in response to these critiques and alternative programs, called for shifts in teacher education program design and structures that would center criticality and position university-based teacher educators as partners with school-based teacher educators, district leaders, and community organizations (Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016), and many universities started to design, implement, and research their own teacher residency programs. In a report by the Learning Policy Institute, Guha and colleagues (2016) found that most university-based teacher residencies designed in the past decade follow the medical field model with extensive and scaffolded clinical experience. As outlined by Torrez and Krebs (2020) in their introduction to a new book on teacher residency models, that teacher residencies model themselves off of medical residency models with immersive clinical practice supported by “expert” instructor/coaches. Adding to this, most teacher residency programs are designed to recruit, prepare, mentor, and retain new teachers through programs that aim to build partnerships between universities, public schools, and community-based organizations, with the overall goal of connecting theory to practice through long-term clinical experiences and mentorship (Torrez & Krebs, 2020). Most urban teacher residencies also aim to develop community-oriented teachers seeking to improve student achievement, and many seek to address issues of social injustice and inequity in schooling practices (Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016).

Importantly, these university-based residencies often draw on what is termed “third-space” with the idea that university knowledge is not the authority over schools and that there is more boundary-crossing support in the preparation of teachers (Klein et al., 2016). The third space is participatory space where teacher educators, pre-service teachers, schools, and communities co-construct the path forward (Daza et al., 2021). These third spaces bring together different individuals, institutions, and epistemological orientations which then are entangled, creating openings, providing space for negotiating understanding and opportunities for hybridity—“the production of new cultural forms of dialogue” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 134). These partnerships between schools, universities, and wider communities are fraught with a myriad of challenges. For example, as Risan (2022) points out, hybrid teacher educators engaging in boundary-crossing work endure perceptions of hierarchies and power imbalances in the higher education context that oftentimes restricts school-based teacher educators’ enactment of expertise. Risan concludes, as we continue to promote work across institutional boundaries in pursuit of “balancing ‘research based’ and ‘professional relevance’ in the context of teacher education, it is important to gain a better understanding of the opportunities and limitations involved in employing educators that work at these epistemic intersections” (p. 9). Third-space teacher preparation demands re-imagining individual, institutional, and epistemological entanglements. This work rejects binaries between theory and practice, shifts frames from dualisms to expansive notions of both/and, and requires a framing of knowledge that does not privilege academic knowledge as the authoritative voice over other knowledges (see Flessner, 2014; Taylor et al., 2014; Zeichner, 2010).

Much of the early research on teacher residencies focused on documenting the overall design of teacher residency programs and understanding residents’ experiences within those programs, pointing to the importance of program coherence and course sequencing (Garza & Werner, 2014), context-specific inquiry (Hammerness & Craig, 2016), engagement with community-based organizations (Zeichner & Bier, 2015), and the use of clinical instructional rounds (Williamson & Hodder, 2015) to program success. As research (and associated funding) grew, and in response to increased pushes for accountability within teacher education focused on traditionally accepted outcome measures, more recent studies have turned to documenting the “effectiveness” of teachers trained through teacher residencies as compared to those training through more traditional teacher preparation programs, with early findings suggesting that students taught under the instruction of teacher residents show academic gains (Guha et al., 2016; Torrez & Krebs, 2020).

Although important to consider, this focus ignores important nuances in teacher residency work and research, and more recently researchers have attended to tensions and possibilities within “third spaces” (Bhabha, 1994). For example, in a 2016 study, Beck highlighted discord between university faculty and teachers as it related to the overall social justice mission espoused by the university, and offered a new partnership framework built on trust, calling for “power struggles to cease” and suggesting that higher education faculty and K-12 teacher educators must “come to the table as equals in the work of teacher education research” (2020, p. 388). Importantly, Klein and colleagues (2016) note the importance of distributed power and voice across partner organizations, including faculty, school-based team members, as well as teacher residents and community members in their design of inquiry-based and emergent curriculum across the program. While important, these scholars’ theorizing have yet to be taken up in practice, and often do not use critical framing or theorizing in their work.

Criticality in Teacher Education: Tensions and Possibilities

At the same time that teacher residency and third-space designs to support teacher learning and development are being implemented and researched, there continues to be both possibility and tension surrounding increased calls for centering criticality in teacher education. Historically, action toward more criticality within teacher education has taken many forms, from the mobilization of fugitive pedagogies (Givens, 2021), development of coalitions of black teachers and school leaders during segregation (see Walker, 2009), critical teacher education within freedom schools, and the development of multicultural and social justice teacher education (Cochran-Smith, 2003; Gay & Howard, 2000) to more recent demands that teacher educators resist whiteness in the academy (Matias et al., 2014), understand and resist anti-Blackness in schools and communities (Zaino & Bell, 2021), and acknowledge the history of Black pedagogical excellence within teacher education (Acosta et al., 2018; Muhammad et al., 2020). Despite the importance of this work, there is continued and heightened political tension and resistance, especially as many scholars move from pedagogies that focus on things like developing asset-based strategies when working with youth of color, to explicitly naming racism and anti-Blackness as the central construct of oppression, developing explicitly anti-racist practices in teaching and teacher education, and disrupting master narratives embedded in educational institutions (Kinloch & Dixon, 2017). In fact, in many states across the US, there have been bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other important topics related to race, racism, and whiteness in this country. Importantly, there are calls to understand this work as not only focused on individual beliefs and practices, as this often obscures a focus on racialized analyses of policies and practices within organizations and instead reifies the focus on racism as perpetuated by individuals only. As Vaught and Castagno (2008) suggest, barring structural transformation, racism adapts to any new ideology introduced, accommodating the discourse within a framework of continued racial supremacy. As such, any group of individuals within an institution, attempting to engage in critical/abolitionist/liberatory work, must be rooted in a shared, critical epistemological orientation. This becomes important when researching possibilities and problems within third-space teacher residency programs, where teacher educators are oftentimes left to dream up their own third-space curriculum and residency operating structures. As we have come to realize in our own work, while this space provides some freedom and opportunities for innovation, it also comes with potential danger as teacher educators are asked to navigate the same neoliberal, inequitable, racist systems, and structures that define their work, contend with university systems that typically do not value work in the field (Bullough, 2014; Cole & Knowles, 1996; Cross et al., 2018), navigate district-level bureaucracy and accountability pressures (Castagno, 2014), all while working within a field that almost exclusively values connections between teacher education and student outcomes, and nothing in between (Anderson, 2020; Cochran-Smith et al., 2012).

Overall, the research cited above demonstrates the potential of a social justice-oriented teacher residency to positively impact schooling while occupying the third space of teacher education, especially as it relates to more criticality within teacher education. However, noticeably absent from this intersecting body of work is a focus on how race and power show up in newly conceptualized third spaces of teacher education reform. Also absent from the conversation is how we move from teacher retention and student achievement toward liberation through teacher residency programs. Finally, it is important to note that many teacher residency programs are rooted in neoliberal ideologies and draw on learnings/histories from other fields (such as medical residency models) instead of on the rich traditions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, and the transformative justice/abolitionist work of the ancestors of the youth we are aiming to serve in these programs (Mungal, 2016). We return to this later in our paper.

Our Teacher Residency Program

As the reform initiatives outlined above have taken shape, funding has followed; according to Cochran-Smith et al. (2015), the large majority of federal funds for improving entry-level teacher preparation is reserved for alternative certification programs and urban teacher residencies. We know this to be true for our teacher residency program, and we have been fortunate to receive funding from state agencies and the US Department of Education for the past 10 years as we have designed, redesigned, scaled, and re-imagined our work.

We are situated in Atlanta, an urban district. Urban can often be coded language implying Black and Brown students from the working-class (Bertrand, 2019). Like Coles (2023), we utilize urban education as an emphasis on education that centers marginalized students (e.g., racial and ethnic students of color) in cities, which are often plagued with complex social ills (e.g., racial segregation, economic marginalization, and the like). However, we also recognize that the term often fails “to capture its rich and unique tapestry, which encompasses social, political, and economic histories and racial/ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and class diversity” (Farinde-Wu, 2018, p. 250). Urban districts are often faced with challenges in regard to resources, staffing, and student development (Milner IV, 2012). This is entangled with larger “urban” needs in geo-socio-historical and political contexts, which are often connected to capitalist exploitation and anti-Blackness (see Gilmore, 2022; Love, 2019; Vaught, 2017). Many of the nation's largest residencies are in urban spaces and thus we must take up the complexities of “urban.” We must also recognize that urban has been utilized “as a euphemism for deficit-based and often racialized characterizations of students” (Vernikoff et al., 2022, p. 33). Within our residency, we are pushing the notion of “urban” to recognize that our partnering schools are not one homogenized Atlanta Public School District but a constellation of multiplicities. Our work in urban residency programs needs to attune to the geo-socio-historical and political contexts of each school and the interconnective issues between those schools and communities. This process is democratic and values/uplifts the voices that constitute the individual space and then across those spaces with a critical orientation that emphasizes learning as liberation.

At its infancy in 2012, our residency program started with one main goal: supporting the development of new teachers through university–school partnerships and multi-year scaffolded supports for new teachers and their mentors. In the early years, our small team piloted a 3-year teacher residency program, which started during pre-service teachers’ final year in a university-based teacher preparation program and aimed to support them during their first 2 years as certified teachers. This work started small—with two faculty members across two university undergraduate programs in partnership with one local charter school in the urban district where the university is situated.

Over the past 10 years, we have grown this work to include a 3-year residency program at 18 of the schools in the district, and across four teacher preparation programs within the university.

Each year of the residency, we offer unique supports that address the professional and interpersonal needs of residents while simultaneously working towards developing their critical consciousness and ability to be skilled social justice educators. During the summer of their junior year, future residents participate in a paid 1 month summer academy focused on engagement with local community contexts, specific to the areas they will be teaching in. This experience is taught by university faculty and community leaders focused on context-specific community experiences and readings related to being a community educator. For example, students study and attend classes at the site of local historic landmarks and community centers. A key goal of this experience is for future teachers to learn the context-specific community history where they will be working, as well as developing a deep appreciation for the thriving communities pre-existing their entrance as a teacher. During the first year in the residency, in addition to completing their senior year as a teacher candidate, residents complete student teaching alongside carefully trained cooperating teachers (CTs) who help them make sense of their equity-centered coursework.

Residents receive additional support via monthly day-long “Together Time” meetings to encourage connectedness with peers, experience cognitively based compassion training that supports social emotional learning and regulation, and compassion toward self and others; explore racial identity and systemic privilege/oppression; work within and across racial affinity groups. Residents’ coursework, practicum assignments, and instructional skill-building experiences are guided by one primary educator serving in a “hybrid” role as the university supervisor and mentor for the CT in a coordinated, informed integrated fashion that connects the schools, university and community, titled University Supervisor and Coach (USC). Year one residents are supported with a $6,000 stipend. During the summer of year one, residents participate in a 5-week summer academy focused on teaching summer school taught by university faculty, residency leaders, and district representatives focused on how to create a welcoming and inclusive classroom culture. Residents make connections between readings on inequity, justice, privilege, and oppression in schools and what they are experiencing in schools and classrooms.

In year two of the residency, two certified residents are paired as co-teachers, fully responsible for one classroom, enabling them to collaborate and learn alongside a partner, while sharing all responsibilities of their work as teachers. Throughout the year, each teacher attends Together Time sessions, works with a residency instructional mentor (IM) who supports them with content and equity-centered instructional practices, and in using cognitively based compassion skills. Residents all work with a school-based mentor to develop a social connection to and sense of belonging with other equity-minded experienced educators. Year two residents are paid a teacher salary. During the summer of year two, residents attend a 2-week, paid summer academy focused on reflection and planning for year three. Year two residents are invited to optionally attend other professional development opportunities on diversity, equity, and inclusion, compassion, and culturally relevant teaching.

During year three of the residency, each resident teaches in a classroom as the sole teacher of record while continuing to engage several Together Times, work with a residency IM to accelerate a deep understanding of content and instructional skills. They also can optionally choose to work with their school-based mentor for another full year and/or take a full scholarship to study Math/Science. Full engagement in the programming generates a $5,000 stipend by the end of the school year.

Importantly, as we have engaged in this work and associated research, we realized the need to shift/expand our focus and we now also work alongside veteran educators and school leaders in the schools where our residents are placed. Adding to this, we have put much more focus/attention/resources toward creating opportunities for university-district-community co-learning and collaboration toward action and have come to realize that this is central to our work. Finally, we understood early on the need to thread justice and equity work from the university curriculum into the second and third years of the program and into our veteran educator institutes to dream differently about ways forward. We have also committed, as a programming team across school and university contexts, to learn from critical scholars of color before us through shared readings and critical conversations about power and oppression in schools.

What we have come to understand, however, is that change and growth processes are hard, especially if there is limited and/or conflicting articulation of constructs and measures for success. This is especially true when individuals are working within a system that we understand to be steeped in Whiteness despite organizational goals that aim for just the opposite, and when there are leadership and operating structures within the organization that limit opportunities for collective resistance. We have also come to understand that a lack of shared understandings of and commitments to our big picture, overall intentions and goals in this work—as grounded in shared theoretical and epistemological orientations—means that we cannot move forward collectively as resistors, co-conspirators, and dreamers. We have experienced all of these challenges as an organization, and this manuscript is our first step toward answering questions that will move us forward in better ways. In short, we knew that if we really wanted to move forward as an anti-racist, ATR, then we needed to articulate our non-negotiables in this work. In what follows, we articulate who we are in conversation with, inspired by, and follow in thinking deeply both in regards to deconstructing/dismantling and reconstructing/re-imagining education.

Dream Guides: Those Who Refuse Unfreedom

In our work of conceptualizing an ATR, we are guided by those before us who have done similar work, but in particular we draw on critical theories, abolitionism, the Black Radical Imagination, freedom dreaming, vision-driven justice, and abolitionist education. These frameworks layer together and are purposeful; critical theories remind us to be cognizant of issues of power and domination, while abolitionism provides a framework for thinking deeply about both dismantling those systems and creating new ways of knowing and being. We also draw on communities and scholars who have devoted their lives to radical imagining and freedom dreaming as we aim for collective resistance to modes of domination. Finally, we lean into abolitionist education literature, as it provides principles and tools for taking up this work in educational spaces in general. These frameworks, theories, and epistemologies—described further below—guide us as we both dismantle oppressive structures in education/teacher education and move towards creating an ATR that centers expansive notions of liberatory education, participatory/democratic processes, and human freedom.

Critical Theories → Towards Intersectional Justice

At the core of critical theories are questions of hidden assumptions and the examination of power and domination (Bronner, 2011). These critical explorations of power and domination may take up Afrofuturism, Anticolonial approaches, BlackCrit, Critical Race Theory, LatCrit, DisCrit, Indigenous theories, Intersectionality, Marxism, Queer Theory, and a variety of other critical theoretical frameworks to explore a given phenomenon. As we determine which critical theories guide our work, we understand that socio-political and historical situatedness influences which theories we draw on. For example, being situated in Atlanta, a city that is known as one of the cradles of the Civil Rights Movement, that is occupied by majority Black/African American citizens (51%) just 15 miles from a 90 foot mural—the largest in the world—of Confederate leaders Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, we foreground/center critical theories focused on race. In particular, we utilize BlackCrit as it (a) positions anti-Blackness as endemic, which is central to meaning making across social, political, and historical dimensions of life; (b) is in tension with the neoliberal-multicultural imagination and re-packaging of racist capitalist meritocratic framings that is present in some teacher education and teacher residency programs; and (c) “creates space for Black liberatory fantasy” (Dumas & Ross, 2016, p. 431). As Sharpe (2016) reminds us, before moving forward, we must recognize that the current educational climate is anti-Black and also understand that we are living in the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 2007; 2008).

It is important to note that others doing this work might foreground a different set of critical theories more aligned with their local histories and contexts in order to center the knowledges and practices best suited for the communities they aim to serve—including LatinX, Asian American and Pacific Island educators, or other folks rooted in that space. For example, if we were in South Dakota, with the 60-foot-tall carvings of U.S. Presidents desecrating the sacred Black Hills of the Sioux Nation, we might center Indigenous/decolonial theorizing in teacher education/teacher residency work. Importantly, however, both acts of desecrating sacred lands (i.e., Stone Mountain in Atlanta and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota) illustrate and illuminate that violence is intersectional in nature (e.g., the logics of settler-colonialism, Whiteness, racial capitalism, patriarchy, etc.), and we understand—alongside other critical scholars—that we must move towards intersectional justice in our work. Importantly, we must recognize that LatinX, Black, AAPI communities are not a monolith. As such, drawing on intersectionality as a complementary framing helps us—and anyone doing this work—to recognize how modes of domination are intertwined, overlapping, and intersecting (Crenshaw, 1989; Crenshaw, 1991; Hill-Collins, 1990).

Abolitionism: Theory-Practice

As we work to design an ATR in Atlanta, we understand that this work lives in the vein of those abolitionists, freedom fighters, scholars, and community members who have worked to disrupt, dismantle, and challenge all forms of oppression, domination, and anti-Blackness. As Rodriguez (2019) states, “abolition is and was a practice, an analytical method, a present-tense visioning, an infrastructure in the making, a creative project, a performance, a counterwar, an ideological struggle, a pedagogy and curriculum, an alleged impossibility that is furtively present, pulsing” (p. 1578). We are inspired and called to action by many: Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Ellen and William Craft, Martin Delany, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Cornelia Walker Bailey (see Heynen, 2021), and countless other freedom fighters. As Newman (2018) reminds us, the toolbox of activist methods used in early abolitionist movements prove efficacious elsewhere, and we need to study and draw on the work of those before us as we dream together new ways forward. While abolitionism is about dismantling oppression, it is simultaneously about birthing, dreaming, re-imaging, and creating. Du Bois (1932) put forth the notion of abolitionist democracy, which is not solely destruction, but also creation. As Angela Davis (2005) indicates, this work is about building new institutions, ones free of violence. Inspired by the abolitionist work pushing to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, our abolitionist work moves to dismantle the current oppressive onto-epistemic schooling and move towards abolitionist education. Davis (2003) reminds us, schools that emphasize discipline, surveillance, and security over critical thinking are “prep schools for prisons” (p. 38). Abolition is both a move to dismantle oppressive regimes and a call to new ways of knowing-in-being and being-in-knowing. To take up this work in education in particular, we look to the radical imaginations of marginalized communities (e.g., The Black Radical Imagination), freedom dreaming, and vision-driven justice in education.

The Radical Imagination: Freedom Dreaming and Vision-Driven Justice

We pull from the radical imaginations and traditions of those communities who have felt the brunt of injustices so that we may build a more just world. Those traditions emerge in relation to context. For example, this may include Indigenous theorizing, Chicana/x Feminism, the Black Radical Imagination, and the plethora of other radical imaginations pushing towards intersectional justice. In Atlanta, we pull from the rich tradition of the Black Radical Imagination. The Black Radical Imagination has pushed both our ways of knowing and being and has called us to a “revolution of the mind” which is, “about an unleashing of the mind's most creative capacities, catalyzed by participation in struggles for change” (Kelley, 2002, p. 191). Radical Black Feminists have shown us new ways of being, a radical humanism, steeped in equitable and humanizing inter/intra-personal relations (see the works of Crenshaw, Hill Collins, hooks). Black Surrealism, as Kelley (2002) states, “invites dreaming, urges us to improvise and invent, and recognizes the imagination as our most powerful weapon” (p. 159). The Black Radical Imagination is an act of freedom dreaming, a visioning of our possible humanity (Kelley, 2002). This dreaming is both an internal and external process, a struggle. Love (2019) expands this work by asserting these “dreams are grounded in a critique of injustice. These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance” (p. 101). This comes in alignment with abolitionism across time and spaces; as Newman (2018) reminds us, “abolitionism was both a meditation and a movement: a meditation on big ideas about freedom and equity, and a complex movement of people, organizations, and events designed to bring those ideas to fruition” (p. 2). As such, abolitionist movements must be rooted in radical imaginings and collective dreaming.

One component of this collective resistance is a visioning of the future which starts with locating ourselves within systems of domination, both our points of resistance and complicity. As such, along with freedom dreaming, we must do the internal work that parallels the outward-facing entanglements as we take up this call within education. We need to engage with vision-driven justice that requires a deep interrogation of the (a) self (who we are), (b) where we are (socio-political and historical locations), and (c) an awareness of what we are up against (Lyiscott, 2019). This equates to a recognition of what we are working to challenge and a visioning, “authoring into our collective futures” (Lyiscott, 2019, pp. 18–19). These dreams and visioning offer new onto-epistemological possibilities, center abolition/participatory democracy and intersectional justice, and usher us towards revolutions of the mind.

Abolitionist Education

This work, abolitionist work, requires visioning, dreaming, theorizing, and acting. In discussing abolitionist education in hard times, Dunn et al. (2021) put forward a set of principles to guide us in the work of rebuilding schools; we must center (a) radical joy, (b) radical trust, (c) radical imagination, and (d) radical disruption. Radical joy centers the onto-epistemologies of communities of color while also being attentive to their community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). Moving away from the alienating and isolating force of neoliberalism and capitalism, radical trust emphasizes individual and collective consciousness-raising, collective visioning of liberation, and calling out racism. Radical imagining “calls for educators to invoke new ways of life that are grounded in equity, inclusivity, healing, and resistance to dominant ideologies” (Dunn et al., 2021, p. 218). Radical disruption demands we move from punitive schooling to restorative justice orientations, divest from policing for more equitable funding to communities, end neoliberal high-stakes testing, and move towards community-centered curriculum rather than one size fits all models like those generated by Pearson and McGraw Hill. These principles push back against liberal interventions, Whiteness, racial capitalism, and patriarchy while also centering joy, community, imagining new possibilities, and disrupting/divesting from normalized oppression. At the level of teaching:

Abolitionist teaching is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools. (Love, 2019, p. 2)

Abolitionist education requires working with and for communities of color, re-imagining the allocation of power and critical resources. Education shifts from being about mastery and individual knowledge accumulation to broader communal and emancipatory aims. Similarly, there is a shift in accountability, which “focuses on justice, love, healing, and restoring humanity” (Love, 2019, p. 122). Abolitionist education lives in the vein of abolitionist democracy as it is both about destroying educational systems, knowledge structures, and classrooms that are steeped in white supremacy and anti-Blackness and creating systems, schools, and classrooms that center more expansive notions of humanity imbued with love and justice. As Givens's (2021) historical analysis of Black teachers and fugitive pedagogs demonstrated, Black fugitive pedagogs have been laboring for a re-imagined curriculum, new ways of being/defining human, a different way of knowing.

We build with critical theorists, abolitionists, freedom dreamers, and abolitionist educators working towards creating intersectional justice. Within this larger movement, we are honing in on what it looks like to do abolition within teacher residency work. As such, below we build on the ideas of those before us and share what we believe to be the fundamental non-negotiables of an ATR.

ATR Non-Negotiables

Similar to the communities and scholars we learn from—our dream guides—we do not have all the answers to what an ATR may become. We recognize that those taking up this call will dream in ways beyond our current capacities, beyond the confines of hegemonic capitalist, anti-Black, Eurocentric, colonial onto-epistemologies. We do, however, have a floor, those non-negotiables required to do this work that are the baseline, those necessities required to build upon; at its floor, an ATR must be (a) attuned to their geo-socio-historical and political situatedness, (b) democratic/ participatory in nature, (c) unapologetically committed to an onto-epistemological orientation rooted in critical theories and abolition, and (d) emphasize learning as liberation. We share details of those non-negotiables below, as we at the same time call for an “insurgent abolitionist futurity, a collective, vulnerable, experimental, and speculative imagination/performance/practice of liberation” (Rodriguez, 2019, p. 1607).

Rooted in Local Geo-Socio-Historical and Political Contexts

What has constrained and enabled the growth and flourishing of unfreedom and freedom in our given location? Each teacher residency must be in conversation with their socio-historical and political situatedness and must be attuned to the geo-socio-political and historical context of their community. We must explore what histories, regimes of truth/knowledge, power structures, political apparatuses, and communities (physical and intellectual) have emerged and held dominance within our context. How have resources been allocated across time and space? How has physical space been organized to orient communities? What discourses are at play? Discourse, as Barad (2003) reminds us, “is not a synonym for language…Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables what can be said” (p. 219). What is constrained and enabled within our context?

At the same time, all ATRs must acknowledge that we are a collection of educators working to create a more just world, while also being the long-arm of an oppressive state. All ATRs must consider they are a part of the state's certification, surveillance, and regulatory apparatuses and recognize that we inhabit the liminal space of being freedom workers and oppressors. As Love (2014) reminds us, urban students are often in schools that focus too heavily on surveillance and not learning. Those in urban contexts also have to take into account issues around density, size, and out-of-school factors (e.g., poverty, housing, employment, transportation, etc.) (see Hammerness et al., 2016). Similarly, there are the real aspects of urban areas (e.g., borders/boundaries, populations, buildings, and the like) and those imagined aspects (contradictory framings of difference, issues of pathologizing, and the like) influenced by various discourses (Vernikoff et al., 2022). ATRs must understand that they are attempting to change the state, re-imagine new ways of knowing-in-being and being-in-knowing, while also recognizing how they are agents of the state. As educators and teacher educators, we both bolster and support the state in our work (e.g., surveillance, teaching within the confines of oppressive structures, etc.) and move to disrupt and dismantle those oppressive structures, regimes of truth/knowledge, and ways of knowing-in-being. We must always be cognizant and wrestle with this issue of being both freedom workers and oppressors.

Is Democratic/Participatory in Nature—Centering Those Most Marginalized

How are we maximizing individual agency while simultaneously elevating opportunities for collective/democratic participation? Leigh Patel (2016) reminds us to always ask: what/who are we accountable and answerable to? Those engaging in the design and enactment of an ATR must constantly come back to this question. This work, hybrid work,¹ must center democratic processes that leverage and value the multivocality of those working towards justice, but especially those feeling the brunt of injustice. Partnerships must span across schools, universities, and communities. The work is relational (see McNeill et al., 2021). As a reminder, reforms, policies, or institutions are only as effective as the collaboration of the people working within and against them. Systems don’t save people; people save people. Parents, students, teachers, administrators, community members, professors, researchers, community activists, and all other individuals engaged in this work meet in these spaces as partners. However, these schooling spaces are often borderlands, places meant to reify binaries (e.g., us/them), and unnatural boundaries (for more on borderlands and living in liminality see Anzaldúa, 2007). There must be a constant pushing against those oppressive regimes of knowledge that prioritize credentialed voices, those with institutional power, authority, and capital. All voices must be heard, valued, and uplifted. These spaces are contact zones “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt, 1991, p. 34). Prior to entering these spaces, there are powers, histories, and a plethora of agents at play. These agents and power dynamics need to be accounted for and deconstructed. Democratic work is hard work; this democratic space, a third space, a movement beyond dualities/binaries uplifts and values all voices, but especially honors those voices that are all too often marginalized, to create something new, something beyond what was or has been, an aspirational becoming (Beck, 2020; Klein et al., 2016; Zeichner, 2010; Zeichner et al., 2015).

Adding to this, ATRs must understand and guard against shifts in education discourses dominated by neoliberalism, which emphasizes the role of private interests and free markets over public interests and social policies. For example, some teacher residencies grow out of pushes for competition among providers, privatization of traditionally public services, and as a basis for deregulation of public education/schooling and many alternative teacher recruitment and preparation programs, such as Teach For America, the Relay Graduate School of Education, and others partner with for-profit charter schools for “teacher training” or run their own charter organizations (Zeichner et al., 2015). According to Mungal (2016), “a common narrative of market-based reform is that public goods such as education institutions are viewed as bureaucratic monopolies and that deregulation opens the market to more agile, efficient, and less costly organizations” (p. 7). A push to break “the university monopoly on teacher education” has led to alternative teacher certification programs absent of much of the foundational, theoretical, and pedagogical coursework that is commonly found in university teacher education programs (Mungal, 2016, p. 8). As such, we return to this section's opening statement: ATRs must center democratic processes that leverage and value the multivocality of those working towards justice, but especially those feeling the brunt of injustice. We must center people over profits, and recognize democratic work is hard, messy, relational, and takes time.

Has an Onto-Epistemological Orientation Rooted in Critical Theories and Abolition

We must continuously ask ourselves: how is this work (teaching, research, action-oriented endeavors) rooted in critical frameworks and moving us towards justice and freedom? How are we resisting unfreedom? How are we pushing against injustice? Reading the world with critical theories and abolitionism as our frames means that we must examine issues of power and domination, work to dismantle oppression, and take action to create more just and expansive conditions of freedom. This cannot simply be an epistemological orientation, it demands a knowing-in-being and being-in-knowing that is steeped in critical theories and abolitionism. Our knowing and being are co-constitutive in how we think and be in the work and world. This orientation lives in the teaching, research, action, and accountability structures of the ATR. These accountability structures are participatory/democratic, utilize practices that center transformative and restorative justice both within the ATR and across hybrid partnerships/entanglements, and are answerable (Patel, 2016) to the community context. This critical onto-epistemological orientation pushes us to continuously return to the question: How are we both dismantling oppressive schooling and creating learning steeped in freedom?

Emphasizes Learning for Liberation

How are our practices, processes, and pedagogies leading to liberation? As mentioned, schooling sites are spaces of unfreedom; as Stovall (2020) reminds us, “many of our teacher training programs are structured to deter pre-service teachers from asking material and ideological questions of the school” (p. 5) Emphasizing learning as liberation is particularly salient as urban schools are spaces and places where physical, spiritual, and emotional violence occurs in “alarmingly high rates” (Wozolek, 2018, p. 838). Educative practices within an ATR must be focused on answerability/accountability to community, transformation, reciprocity, radical joy, community, solidarity, and liberation for all. We know this to be a needed and radical departure from what most current teacher residency programs—including ours—hold themselves accountable to.

Working in the vein of abolitionism, we must therefore ask ourselves: how are our educative practices leading to liberation? Again, we do not prescribe specific practices as they must emerge in relation to the needs of a given communal context. However, we do know what they are not. They are not Eurocentric, deficit/damage-based/racist/oppressive practices that continue to dehumanize those historically marginalized in school spaces. They are not scripted lessons that disregard teacher/teacher educator expertise and the importance of local histories and funds of knowledge; teacher educators/teachers are not technocratic instrumentalists that just utilize prescriptive teaching methods. Rather, teacher educators/teachers are transformative intellectuals/artists/theorists who always question what they teach, why they teach it, how they teach, and to what end their work is serving (Giroux, 1988). Zembylas (2021) reminds us that we must also be attentive to affective strategies, and shift from a lens of sentimentalism to invoking affective strategies of “mobilizing affective solidarity with the affective worlds of marginalized students” and “identifying complicity while engaging in anti-complicity praxes” (p. 132). We recognize that whatever practice these teacher educators/teachers utilize (culturally/community-relevant pedagogies, youth participatory action research, agitative literacies, historically responsive literacies, fugitivity, arts-based interventions, etc.), they are building upon abolitionism and abolitionist education (Love, 2019) and leading towards emancipatory aims. As Love (2019) reminds us, this work needs “to be rooted in an abolitionist praxis that, with urgency, embraces….education for collective dignity and human power for justice” (p. 13). Borrowing from the corpus of Freire's work—we must read and write the world. Liberatory education centers criticality, “the capacity to read, write, and think in the context of understanding power, privilege, and oppression” (Muhammad, 2020, p. 11). In short, we must constantly return to the question: how does our learning emphasize liberation?

Towards a Becoming…

As noted, this work is both a dismantling of oppressive educational regimes and creating spaces that embrace expansive visions of justice and freedom, and it is complex, daunting, and challenging. Much is required. Much is needed. We invite others into this “abolitionist turn” within teacher residency work. In Atlanta, we are currently re-imagining our residency. We recognize that because we are in Atlanta, we center the Black radical imagination as we serve mostly Black students and families. However, in communities that are primarily Latinx, AAPI, and other various racialized groups, folks must center those knowledges, histories, and wisdom while realizing these groups are also not monoliths. We are amidst the messy and complexly beautiful work of freedom dreaming around an ATR in Atlanta. For us, this included moving away from a hierarchical model that hoarded power and access among two leaders tasked to make all decisions and assign responsibilities toward a shared leadership model that embraces interdependence and decentralization (Brown, 2017). Our model shifted from one executive director and a principal investigator (PI) to five co-directors, each leading one portion of our collective work, and one PI working collaboratively with the co-director team. Each co-director works in service of their larger divisional team rather than leading from the top down. We are freedom dreaming towards working in ways that characterize interconnectedness, cooperative work, and collective sustainability.

As noted, this conceptual paper is an invitation to other teacher educators, researchers, activists, community members, and educators to join us in the abolitionist turn. The theorizations presented here are our bold dreams, merely a beginning of all that may be possible in working toward a more free future for all. We invite you to dream bolder dreams and employ dream guides to help us get closer to the free. A part of this project is invoking an indebted critique, a “labor of finding what was already there but could not be fully thought or lived out within the systems that came before” (Singh, 2021, p. 142). It is a seeking out of the past, taking from it what serves our future, those seeds that were planted, dreams of that which is yet to come.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Thomas Albright

Notes

Author Biographies

Thomas Albright is an Assistant Research Professor at Georgia State University's College of Education & Human Development's Department of Middle and Secondary Education. His research at Georgia State is focused on a university, community and school-based teacher residency to explore structures that support racial justice in teacher education. Other lines of inquiry focus on schooling, resistance, and school-university-community entanglements. Current studies include exploring youth inquiry as a form of resistance to schooling, a posthumanism accounting of schooling, and examining issues of racial and social justice within teacher education.

Stephanie Behm Cross is an associate professor in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education in the College of Education & Human Development. Her scholarly work focuses on urban teacher preparation and whiteness in K-12 and university settings. Her most recent research, funded through a multi-year Department of Education grant, investigates the impact of a three-year residency program on teachers' retention, satisfaction, and overall critical consciousness. Using critical co-ethnography, and drawing on both Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Theory, Cross and her colleagues investigate the overall culture and equity-centered practices within this teacher residency program.

Camea Davis is the co-director of the Center for Equity and Justice in Teacher Education and a research assistant professor at the College of Education & Human Development, in the Department of Middle and Secondary Education. Her research focuses on racial justice in teacher education, critical collaborative ethnography and critical poetic inquiry. Current studies include researching a university, community and school-based teacher residency to explore structures that support racial justice in teacher education, youth civic action and qualitative methodologies that view research as a liberatory act.

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