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Lessons for educators and families: Learning from We Want to Do More than Survive

  • Beloved Community Initiative (Upstairs at Old Brick) 26 East Market Street Iowa City, IA, 52245 United States (map)

Join us for a discussion of of Bettina Love’s book, We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Even if you haven’t read the book, come and listen to some of the lessons and key recommendations it contains.

From Amazon:

Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

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Earlier Event: January 22
Free Movie: SELMA
Later Event: February 7
Black Lives Matter at School Gala