Harm and Healing: Reading with an ABAR (Antibias, Antiracist) Lens
Sarah J . Donovan2021, Voices from the Middle
Across June and July, we read middle grade novels together and met online to talk about sharing these books with our middle school students. Recognizing the limitations of some multicultural education programs to solve social inequities, Paulo Freire (1970) advocated for critical pedagogy, a social justice approach of teachers and students engaging together with "critical information, awareness, and understanding of social inequities to take corrective action" (quoted in Bell, p. 31). Love's work calls for abolitionist teaching: "[T]he 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" (p. 2). Through this protocol, students begin to interrogate systems that enable the harm we notice in our reading: classroom or school rules, gender binaries, policies, laws, media coverage, and various institutions that allow for bystanders and inaction.
