The Abolitionist Teacher Leads with Love

While white settler colonialism is not unique to the United States; the entire founding of this nation was based on the very fact that white settlers claimed the land and resources as their own, violently pushing out indigenous peoples and forcing the migration of Africans across the Atlantic to become part of a system of chattel slavery. As ideas about race came to be, white Europeans and American colonists created a structure in which white supremacy reigned.

Not only has white settler colonialism provided a framework for the founding of our nation, but it has also dictated what and how students are taught in both public and private schools. It is not surprising that the U.S. education system is in dire need of radical reconstruction. By adopting abolitionist teaching through a critical race lens, teachers actively work to reimagine and implement curricula that do not center solely around white narratives, but around those stories which are not traditionally told in American classrooms.

In this video, we interview Javier Payano and Miles Comiskey, two teachers at Lane Tech College Prep, who have spearheaded an Abolitionist Teaching Group that reaches beyond Lane Tech. At the beginning of the interview, we each address our positionality and how social and political structures influence our identities and create our biases. We explore the structure of schooling and how students’ voices are being denied in the planning process. As we endeavor to fundamentally shift the way that we think about our teaching, we are also actively working toward a more student-based and culturally relevant curricular experience for our students. Further, we hope to begin including more historically accurate narratives and perspectives in our teaching.