“It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Thing”: Abolitionist Teaching in Practice

ABSTRACT: Teaching, learning, curriculum, and abolition are deeply entangled. Much of our understanding of abolition emerges from teaching spaces where curriculum becomes a method for liberation. These are sites where literacy is a means of acquiring knowledge for political power and freedom, where curriculum fosters self-determination and world-making, and where speculative fiction opens portals to abolitionist futures. This article explores the abolitionist teaching practices of a high school teacher in New Jersey who cofounded and teaches at a fugitive curricular space that challenges injustice, disrupts traditional schooling, and interrupts the “world-ending” public school system to engage in abolitionist world-making.