Thread by @CarlaShalaby

One way educators can support the #NationalPrisonStrike is to recognize how we model and teach a carceral philosophy of throwaway people when we rely on punishment, exclusion, removal, control, and policing as our strategies of "classroom management." 1/

Too often, teachers think classroom management is something to do in order to get to the real teaching. In fact, classroom management is teaching itself. It's a curriculum, a set of lessons that young people are learning from us.

Are we intentional in these lessons?

How might the everyday experience of schooling be different if we imagined classroom management as a prison abolition curriculum?

What might lessons in freedom look like, instead of lessons in authoritative models of control that teach strategies for powering over others?

Freedom does NOT mean doing whatever we want. Or just having lots of choice. It means getting to be our whole, human selves, in community with other whole, human selves, and using our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, treated with dignity, and fully embraced.

Given this definition of freedom, we are not free if we don't consider how to support these prisoners on strike. Because we would be failing to use our power to demand that each of us is taken care of, treated with dignity, and fully embraced. Teachers have lots of this power.

Freedom is a VERY high standard of "classroom management," not the loosey-goosey, chaotic free-for-all that educators often fear. We must notice and stop classroom practices that model a culture of policing and prison, AND we must also draft a freedom curriculum with children.

What might that look like? Ask your kids. They're the ones with their imaginations still intact. Ask them what human beings need to be their best, most whole human selves. And how we can each use our power to meet those needs, in community and with community. No throwaway people.

Take a lesson from @DingleTeach's approach, which was to work with her students to understand together that they need one central "rule" as their approach to classroom management: "We will take care of each other."

I invite classroom teachers to imagine their possibilities as prison abolitionists. This primer is a good start. thenation.com/article/what-i… "As @C_Resistance explains in its definition of abolition, 'we must build models today that can represent how we want to live in the future.'"

What models could you build today within the four walls of your classroom (WITH YOUNG PEOPLE, not FOR them!) that can represent how we want to live in the future?

That's a freedom question that could guide your classroom management curriculum this new school year.

When you feel stuck or if you are scared to misstep, you could look at your classroom management practices that day and ask students, "what did I teach through how I treated you? What did we learn by my model?" Invite them to help you do better, to teach one other to do better.

Angela Davis says, "[prison] relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.” She tells us, "prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings."

Suspension and expulsion do the same. They don't disappear social problems, they disappear human beings, as Davis teaches. So don't let anyone fool you into believing that throwing young people away is a question of safety. We don't disappear danger by disappearing human beings.

A safe world will require us to learn freedom, together with young people and with reverence for the lessons of our elders, and to use schools as a way to engage children in addressing social problems rather than hoping to simply disappear the human beings who make them visible.