The abolitionist work of scholars and activists offers unique tools to transform our pedagogy. In this piece, I’d like to offer practical ways to dehierarchialize the classroom, inspired by emergent strategies (brown 2017) in abolitionist and transformative justice work. From co-creating the syllabus, to ungrading, to inviting students to work toward external motivators; abolitionist pedagogies offer us ways to fumble towards repairing (Kaba and Hassan 2019) the discipline and punish framework we inherit in the contemporary neoliberal university.^[1]

I started teaching an upper-level undergraduate course on abolition at a small public liberal arts university (UNC Asheville) in the wake of the homicidal police brutality against George Floyd that reinvigorated racial justice movement work. Activist students on campus were increasingly identifying as abolitionists and advocating to defund carceral institutions and abolish police and prisons. At the time, I was researching the intersection of abolitionist histories with the anti-trafficking world after a number of Eritrean refugees from the community I worked with in Italy became accused of human trafficking for taking care of their migratory family members (Hung 2024). I also had a history of involvement in prison abolitionist education programs like the inside-out Green Haven Prison Program led by SNCC veteran Lawrence Mamiya (Bleifuss Prados 2014). I had hit the streets to call for the abolition of ICE since its formation in 2001 (United We Dream), had been on the outskirts of sanctuary work in Durham, NC (CityWell; NC Council of Churches; Keep Pastor Chicas Home) and was thinking about the utility of framing migratory policing and surveillance in the Mediterranean through an abolitionist lens in my scholarship (Sharpe 2016; Hung 2019). I often found myself diving into transformative justice teachings on holding people accountable for harm by caring for its root causes, thus necessitating transformative redistribution of resources away from punitive carceral institutions and toward community-based care infrastructures and mutual aid networks (brown 2020; Piepzna-Samarasinha and Dixon 2020; What Is Transformative Justice? 2020).

I came to abolitionist work from an expansive variety of angles and thought it would be helpful for students to get a more expansive understanding of abolitionism outside of the narrow scope that I sensed they were exposed to on their social media feeds. So, I proposed teaching a 25-person course in the spring of 2021 called Abolitionism: Activism and Social Justice, which I retaught as a 15-student mixed graduate/upper-level undergraduate seminar at Cornell University in spring 2023. I didn’t feel like I was the best person to craft this class, but I could tell there was a desire on campus to engage in this kind of work, so I just dove in.

The following are preliminary considerations on working toward transforming a university classroom that emerged from these experiences. They constitute attempts to incorporate abolitionist teachings on dismantling discriminatory hierarchies, working horizontally, and focusing on community building in and out of the classroom. One site of intervention for this work is the syllabus, which has acted like a formal binding contract where professors set the terms and expect blind conformity from students. This contribution considers how we can collectivize the syllabus and put it in the hands of students themselves, encouraging them to take a more active role in their own learning by transforming the syllabus into a malleable record of negotiated consent.

Co-Creating the Syllabus

Most anthropology professors are already well versed in the art of incorporating student input into their syllabus. Co-creating a syllabus with students can be as simple as asking students what they want to read. A student’s ability to identify what course material they want to engage with varies—some are eager to influence the syllabus and some just don’t know what they don’t know. If you are struggling to get students to be more active participants, take time during introductions to ask what they care about and connect their response with readings already on the syllabus or that could be added. For example, to a student majoring in education and training to become a secondary school teacher, I direct to the week we read Savannah Shange (2019) and Bettina Love’s (2019) texts on abolition education as well as Teaching to Transgress (hooks 1994)—and I’ve had students then suggest we collectively read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed ([1968] 2000). If a BIPOC student expresses concern about how heavy the class is going to be, I direct them to the syllabus section called Freedom Dreams, named after the eponymous book by the historian activist Robin Kelley (2003), suggesting we filter in more texts on radically imagining otherwise (brown 2019; Bruce 2021; Cox 2022). If students are interested in prison abolition (Davis 2003, Gilmore 2007, Roberts 2019, Burton 2023), I ask if and how they want to expand that section. Working in this way models to students that their input can actively change our collective learning space and encourages them to step into this role more as the class goes forth into the semester. Making the syllabus editable allows students to remix readings, add events and even recipes, turning it into a collective workspace renegotiated through consensus practices. Working with students to co-create the syllabus is a tool that can be useful in classrooms across thematic areas.

If you find yourself wanting to teach an anthropology class on abolitionism you may struggle, as I have, to find enough material in the anthropological cannon to fully flesh out a syllabus on abolitionism that is relevant for students grappling with these questions today. While we need more, we do have a number of key books that provide brilliant and formidable insights — from Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia (2019), to Laurence Ralph’s The Torture Letters (2019), to Aimee Cox’s Shapeshifters (2015), to Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear (2023), and Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema’s Global Sex Workers (1998). This limitation also presents an opportunity to shift away from disciplinary insularity and engage with the work of activist-scholars like Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, adrienne maree brown, Ejeris Dixon, Dorothy Roberts, Critical Resistance, and INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, as well as the speculative confabulations of abolitionist legacies in the work of Saidiya Hartman (2008, 2018). It allows for a deeper dive into racial capitalism (“Racial Capitalism and Prison Abolition Zine 2020,” Robinson [1983] 2020, Williams [1944] 2021) and Indigenous conflict mediation practices, as seen in the work of Pirie on legal autonomy in a Ladakhi village, Audra Simpson’s work on a politics of refusal in Mohawk Interruptus (2014), and Natacha Nsabimana’s work on how political violence is reckoned with in Rwanda (2023), as well as the 270 Years of Resistance and Hollow Water documentaries, which are all in kinship with abolitionist and transformative justice practices, even if they do not explicitly name them as such.

Ungrading

While most professors are comfortable with co-creating the semester’s reading list, collaborating with students on forms of assessment or even letting them grade themselves can ruffle some feathers. On the other hand, for those attuned to the pervasiveness of punitive systems, grades are understood to act as a tool of oppression and getting rid of them is thought to be for the good of our learning environments. I have also heard from students that grades can act as accountability measures, helping them structure their learning. Allowing students to articulate their learning commitments through self-assessment can help determine the utility of grading and unlock pathways toward greater collaboration, mutual understanding, and the dismantling of discriminatory hierarchies.

There are a variety of pedagogic resources on ungrading—or encouraging students to grade themselves (Nilson 2014, Blum 2020, Crogman, Eshun, Jackson, Trebeau Crogman, Joseph, Warner, and Erenso 2023, Stommel 2023). One approach is to let students determine the weight of each assessment criterion, encouraging them to negotiate with each other, build consensus, and align on expectations (e.g.: “should attendance count for 10% of the final grade or 50%, what about the final project 30%”). While it may be tempting to rely on democratic majority to sediment a decision, I would instead urge consensus building where students generate and tweak the numbers until every one of them is on board. Another tool is incorporating process papers, where students reflect on their learning journey and detail their evolving understanding of the material.

I offer students two grading options, contract grading and consultative grading. With contract grading (also called Specs, short for Specifications Grading), I suggest a breakdown of how different types of work (e.g. weekly summaries, participation, final paper/project), correlate to grade ranges (A, B, C). In consultative grading, I take a more flexible approach, and invite students to decide how they want to be assessed. I’m always surprised that the majority of students in a course on abolishing systems prefer structure and opt for contract grading rather than consultative. I am also surprised by how many students contract for grades lower than an A. I’ve since realized that by holding every student to the expectations of an A, I was pushing them in ways that weren’t in alignment with their own priorities and distribution of time and resources. While it is non-negotiable that every student has fair and equal access to excelling in a course, it is important to acknowledge that many students have external commitments such as childcare, major requirements, or mental health needs. Contracting for a grade lower than an A reflected an honest assessment of their time and energy and was a wakeup call that my job isn’t always to push for predefined excellence as much as it is to meet students where they are and get them to where they want to go with the class. I was less surprised that some students in my courses from underrepresented backgrounds tended to deflate their grades, which aligns with existing research (Ogbu and Simons 1998; Hu and Hancock 2024). Each time I offer a choose-your-own-grade adventure, I explicitly name this dynamic at the onset and reserve the right to adjust grades in consultation with students (either up or down) to address egregious forms of internalized bias over-informing their self-assessment. I commit to being conservative around invoking this right. I encourage students to assess their own learning in dialogue with me as a mentor rather than judge. I offer a template for articulating learning commitments here (link opens in new tab) that you are welcome to retool, repurpose, and adjust to fit your own classroom dynamic.

An abolitionist pedagogy addresses inequity in the classroom by dehierarchalizing classroom dynamics in order to undermine abuses of power and build horizontal systems that empower learners to better articulate their learning needs and get those learning needs met. Ungrading works in correlation with co-creating a syllabus and other dehierarchalizing techniques which decenter the professor from the role of disciplinarian, punishing students with lower grades for deviating from a standard set by them, to facilitator of learning based on shared commitments built through consensus. Traditional disciplinary classroom dynamics often play the cat-and-mouse game of coercion where students are cultured to do the least amount of work for the maximum grade and teachers try to get students to do evermore by raising the bar to an A, effectively rewarding those who come to the class with more preparation instead of evaluating learning within the classroom itself. This dynamic can marginalize neurodivergent students or those facing personal and social challenges, creating greater barriers to learning when students are disabled, sick, or struggling. Furthermore, we inherit an impulse to create and maintain hierarchies of value in the disciplinary classroom setting rendering some students disposable failures, not worth investing limited resources in. This is something that it is imperative for each of us to actively dismantle. I strive to build a classroom of honesty, where students are not penalized for not completing work on time as much as they are encouraged to keep learning with a penalty free late work policy and a focus on time management skills. Transformative justice principles encourage us to address the root systems of underperformance as opposed to punishing it with lower grades. In the abolitionist courses I facilitated, students, including those who just audited the course, report dedicating more time and effort because they care about the material and have a feeling of mutual obligation to each other. Their motivation exceeds the metric of getting a good grade, which brings us to the importance of external motivators.

External Motivators, Authentic Assessment, and Community Building

Encourage students to work, not for you, but for the communities they want to impact. Final projects can serve as stepping stones or prototypes—for a community-centered initiative, a journal article, or a proposal for funding to support their advocacy. Create ways for students to identify the conventions in community zines, grants, journals, podcasts, magazines, local papers, artist statements, and write or create toward those conventions. For students writing papers, work with them to consider how their writing could be revised and developed for publication in your university’s undergraduate research journal (or if you are working with graduate students, a journal in their field) by identifying the conventions of those journals to write toward. If a student is writing a zine, talk through distribution and consider how to implement changes to better address certain audiences. Many students in an abolitionist class are probably already involved in community activism, and some might even ask how direct action can count toward their assessment.

Authentic assessment, linked to real-world outcomes, is ideally about empowering learners to see their academic work as one tool in a larger, ongoing conversation within and outside of the classroom. Authentic assessment can thus facilitate working toward transforming the classroom from a place focused on individualized inducement (Grande 2018) into a space of more active community engagement, potentially undermining the grip of the neoliberal university on us and redirecting the resources we have in the classroom toward the communities we want to impact.

In the Clutch

Engaging with abolitionist ideas, legacies, and practices gives us unique resources to rethink and reimagine how learning environments can be reconfigured in order to better educate us. An abolitionist lens helps us understand how discrimination gets baked into institutional practices of education. Working to address those inequities by abolishing practices that engender marginalization insists on rebuilding in the image of practices that reorient toward social justice, which is easier said than done and needs continued nourishing. These three experiments from the abolitionist classes I facilitated reworked the syllabus and remade our learning environment in small but substantial ways. I have since allowed these pedagogic tools to transform my teaching in other courses on topics other than abolition. They are limited products that are responsive to the shape of the struggles we confront as educators and will need to shift and grow as we maintain faith in abolition especially while teaching in the clutch of scarcity and constraint (Shange 2022). They are offered in the spirit of collectively building a more robust transformative pedagogical toolkit.

Footnotes

^[1] Foucault [1975] 1995; Ferguson 2012; Harney and Moten 2013; Cooper 2018; Boggs et. al 2019; Love 2019; Mingus 2019; Jobson 2020; Rankine 2020; Ronda and Utheim 2020; Gillespie and Naidoo 2021; Ciribassi 2024