Presentation Schedule
Abolitionist Teaching as Love, Justice, and Equity: Resisting Authoritarianism Through Praxis in Teacher Education During the Trump 2.0 Era (95167)
Session Chair: Nermin Vehabovic
Wednesday, 11 June 2025 15:45
Session: Session 3
Room: Room 116 (1F)
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation
This qualitative study situates abolitionist teaching as a framework of love, justice, and equity within teacher education, centering resistance to authoritarian forces shaping educational policy and praxis in the Trump 2.0 era. Situated in a southeastern U.S. city, this ethnography draws on two years of community and global engagement with multilingual children, youth, and families with refugee backgrounds. Through a collaboration between a private comprehensive university's School of Education and local community organizations, teacher candidates have opportunities to extend learning beyond classrooms into families’ homes, fostering relationships rooted in care, cultural responsiveness, and community knowledge. Using qualitative methods that foreground humanizing research, this study captures how aspiring educators develop abolitionist teaching dispositions through community and global engagement. Participants engage in shared reading, draw on translanguaging, and pursue various learning activities, disrupting deficit narratives about refugee communities while strengthening their own commitments to critical love, justice, and equity. Findings reveal that care-centered teaching, rooted in equity and dignity, enables both teacher candidates and multilingual families to resist erasure and oppression. This work highlights the urgent need for teacher education to push back against authoritarian policies and approaches to teaching and learning that suppress critical pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally sustaining practices. By foregrounding abolitionist teaching as an act of political and educational resistance, this research underscores the transformative power of learning with and from historically marginalized communities. It offers a model for teacher preparation that sustains democratic, inclusive, and liberatory approaches in an era of democratic erosion.
Authors:
Nermin Vehabovic, Elon University, United States
About the Presenter(s)
Dr Nermin Vehabovic is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Elon University in United States
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