Dr. Bettina Love, Associate Professor at University of Georgia and award-winning author, spoke to a packed crowd of over 500 Minnesota educators, educational leaders, students, and community activists on November 13 on the East Bank campus. She issued a call to action to do two things simultaneously—fight against the structures of oppression in the education system that perpetuate the suffering of students of color, and to find joy, healing, and wellness. The crowd was electrified and responded with snaps, claps, and cheers.
Spoken word poet and educator Keno Evol, Executive Director of Black Table Arts, kicked off the event with a poem. Department of Curriculum and Instruction teacher candidates in English education, A’nia-Nicole Rae and Fadumo Haji-Aweis offered a powerful spoken word performance about the lack of teachers of color in the schools, and the struggle people of color face in the education system.
The lecture, hosted by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Office of Teacher Education, was the outgrowth on Love’s book, “We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom,” which sold more than 20,000 in the first week of its release. Her book and her scholarship focus on transforming the historically oppressive education system in the United States. She emphasizes the need for more teachers of color and better teacher education so teachers are grounded in the history and culture of black, brown, and Indigenous communities.
“Abolitionist teaching is built on the creativity, imagination, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists to demand and fight for an educational system where all students are thriving, not simply surviving, ” Love explained during her talk.
She closed by urging those with privilege to no longer be allies in the work, but to be full co-conspirators in social change, meaning using one’s historical and societal privilege to work alongside historically oppressed racial groups.
Dr. Love is a sought-after public speaker on a range of topics, including antiblackness in schools, Hip Hop education, black girlhood, queer youth, Hip Hop feminism, art-based education, youth civic engagement, and issues of diversity and inclusion. In 2014, she was invited to the White House Research Conference on Girls to discuss her work focused on the lives of black girls, and in 2016, she was named the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. She is from upstate New York, a historically important site for the abolitionist movement. For more information about Dr. Love watch her TedXUGA talk or visit Bettinalove.com.
Learn more about the research to advance social justice in education, as well as work to increase teachers of color and resist systems of oppression in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
