Can you give us an introduction of yourself, your work, your background? 

I’m a white queer educator and organizer. I was a high school teacher for a long time before I started a PhD in Urban Education at Graduate Center, CUNY. I think I came to that work in large part through activism and organizing that I did in high school and college, and seeing education as a space for liberation, but also schools in particular as a space that causes a lot of harm and oppression. I started my PhD in Urban Education in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic and the uprisings around George Floyd. My research focuses on a group called the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE), which is a group I’ve been organizing with since I moved to New York City and started teaching in about 2012. My research focuses on the history of the group and the kind of ways in which teacher activists engage in social movements and NYCoRE specifically has participated in a couple of different social movements. I think a lot of my approaches to pedagogy developed first in K12 spaces and then more recently in higher education. My work is influenced by social justice, liberation, and abolition, specifically thinking about the purpose of education for liberation. 

Can you expand on how being a high school teacher influenced your work later in your graduate studies? 

I taught English as a New Language at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn for most of my time teaching. Not all multilingual learners are immigrant students, but the majority of the multilingual learners I worked with were immigrants. I’ve done organizing at various spaces around racial justice, Palestine, and queer rights during my college; and once I started teaching, I really started thinking about language justice and immigration. So, the primary organizing space I was in as a teacher was thinking about how to support and work in solidarity with undocumented students. I did a lot of organizing with a group called the New York State Youth Leadership Council, which is an undocumented youth lead organization in New York City. Part of what led me to the PhD was questions coming from being in that organizing space and then also in the group I mentioned before, NYCoRE. Broadly, the questions were around how we are participating and working in solidarity with marginalized communities in relationship to their experiences in schools. Thinking through tensions around what we do and what our role is. When I first applied to the PhD, I applied to work with Ariana Mangual Figueroa who does a lot of work around immigration and working with undocumented students. I thought that was going to be my focus and then in a variety of ways, I shifted more broadly to teacher activism and social movements. But it’s still influenced by my participation in the immigrant rights movement as an educator.

You have written about abolitionist pedagogy and social movement pedagogies; can you tell us what is that about?  (You can find the links to Jenna’s articles on aforementioned topics here: An Invitation: Slowing Down Time and Nurturing Relationships within a School Abolition Political Education Group, Pedagogical Lessons from Social Movements) 

First, I will talk about how I came to school abolition and then I will talk about how I define school abolition. I came to abolition in part through once again, immigration, of thinking about the ways in which we as a society turn people into criminals to justify dehumanization. When I was in the immigrant rights movement – the movement was developing analysis in part influenced by Black Lives Matter– there had been this rhetoric of good immigrants versus bad immigrants and the movement was trying to move away from that binary. Good immigrants like Dreamers whose parents brought them here when they were little kids and it’s not their fault versus their parents who are criminals and also there are the gang members, etcetera. We see that with Trump as well now. I think in many ways Black Lives Matter, and other abolitionist spaces had me thinking about systems of policing and punishment and prisons in the US. Also, there’s a lot of scholarship around the school to prison pipeline or the school to prison nexus that critiques the way in which, especially public schools in poor areas, track students from schools into prisons or function in many ways like prisons do. As an example, students have to walk in lines like incarcerated people do in a prison. Around the time of the 2020 uprisings, there was a lot of discourse and online conversations about school abolition and thinking about the ways in which schools replicate carceral logics. There’s also some scholarship that distinguishes schools from education. So school abolition has us think about how there are “state sanctioned schools” that operate to both replicate carceral logics but also kind of indoctrinate students into a capitalist system and rank students through things such as grades. I think part of my interest in grades as punishment and “un-grading” that I wrote about at the Humanities Alliance came through the route of school abolition. There are things that we don’t want in schools but there are spaces, informal spaces in schools where education can be really liberating and can help young people and adults think about their role in the world, how they change the world, how they make the world a better place where we acknowledge everyone as full human beings. NYCoRE has program-like groups called Inquiry to Action Groups (ItAGs), which are kind of like 6-week study groups where you explore a topic and think about as a teacher what action looks like either in your classroom or school or in other spaces. A friend of mine and I facilitated an inquiry to an action group on school abolition for a couple of years. That helped to think through what this work looks like, and what kind of moving away from punishment can look like on a day-to-day basis as a teacher. 

Can you talk a little bit about how these ideas are practiced or how did you bring these practices into your classrooms? 

I think of school abolition as what we’re fighting for in the long term, and then abolitionist teaching as some of the daily practices. In some ways, those daily practices come from an analysis of how punishment operates, and in some ways they’re similar to other critical pedagogies such as social justice pedagogies. There is overlap thinking about and trying to build relationships both with students and also have students build relationships with each other. So that if and when conflict arises, we can kind of still humanize each other through the conflict but also learn how to address conflict in the classroom. Thinking about and trying to address conflict in a way that both accounts for harm and addresses the harm that was caused but also doesn’t immediately turn to punishment. Like I mentioned, I think a lot about grading and how I am transparent about my grades. With the Teaching and Learning Center, I’ve been doing a lot of workshops on “un-grading,” and trying different practices. At CUNY, I still have to give a grade and that’s not a choice I have as an adjunct, but one approach is having conversations with students about the assignments and grading. As an example, when students ask if they have to revise a certain assignment to improve their grade, I try to reframe it and ask them if that benefits their learning? So, I don’t use a complete un-grading model yet, but a big chunk of my grade is participation grade, and I am not the one assigning that grade. I have them grade themselves, which is kind of an un-grading reflection model. 

You talked about your dissertation briefly in the beginning, can you please expand on it? 

My dissertation broadly is a history of the New York Collective of Radical Educators  (NYCoRE) and specifically looks at the strategies the group used and the way they participated in the anti-war movement after 9-11, Occupy Wall Street and the 2020 uprisings/movement for abolition. Through oral history and qualitative focus group interviews with NYCoRE members who were involved in each of those movements, I am writing a narrative history of the group’s participation as well as planning to do an analysis of themes around how the group used specific strategies to participate in social movements, and the tensions and possibilities that emerge from those decisions. Thinking through how the past is connected to the future, and how freedom is imagined, I try to understand what my work means for our current moment and how we envision the alternative educational spaces that we’re fighting for. 

Can you tell us about your role and experience at the Humanities Alliance? 

I was a fellow at Hostos Community College from 2021-2023. I started my PhD coming with a lot of experience working in the New York City Department of Education. I was interested in learning about who the key players are and how to navigate the system. One of my interests in both Humanities Alliance and the Teaching and Learning Center Fellowships were to learn about the CUNY bureaucracy and system. Now that I’m at CUNY, it has been interesting for me to understand how CUNY as a bureaucracy and another large institution with another very large union operates. I’ve worked at Queens College, Hunter College, and shortly at the School of Labor and Urban Studies. Through the Humanities Alliance, and being affiliated with Hostos, which is a community college, I had the opportunity to learn and understand another institution in this system. Kris Burrel, the faculty coordinator at Hostos, organized a lot of meetings with people who hold various roles at Hostos. Through those meetings, I was able to get a deeper understanding of how the institution works and its culture, and I think for anyone who is interested in large systemic change, these are important factors to understand. Another reason that I was interested in learning about community colleges was that most of my students when I was a high school teacher ended up going to a community college, not Hostos but mainly Kingsborough and Borough of Manhattan Community College, and sometimes the City Tech (New York City College of Technology). Also, as someone in education, I know that I will be talking about pedagogy for the rest of my life. So, getting an exposure to what those conversations are like at a community college was really interesting. I worked with their Center for Teaching and Learning during my second year of the fellowship and learned how their CTL works. They have one representative from each major disciplinary area, and that was interesting in terms of seeing how pedagogy is discussed across disciplines. 

Your work is at the intersection of activism, education, and pedagogy. Considering that, what’s your career plan in the future after graduation? 

In an ideal world, I would work as a professor in a school of education. I don’t want to leave New York City, and that significantly limits my options. I’m not the most outspoken organizer in the city, but I’m not soft spoken about my politics which I think could have an impact on the jobs that are available to me. That’s a choice that I’m okay making given my positionality, particularly as a white person and given that I have a community and resources available to me that allows me to make that choice. I understand why others might not make that choice. But all of that is to say, I’m planning to apply for jobs if they exist, but I’m not necessarily expecting to get them. There are a lot of other spaces in education that one can be in. I still have my license as a teacher, and I can go back to teaching high school potentially. Although that’s a whole choice that I have mixed feelings about too. But I think every institution has its issues and is problematic. And it’s just kind of a choice about which issues do you want to deal with. Academia has one set of issues and working in a public high school would be another. I’m interested in continuing my research, but not for the sake of doing research itself, but more so research in service of social movements. If I have an opportunity to do that, then I would continue research in that sense, but doing organizing work and teaching in some capacity is what I find myself most drawn to.  

This interview was conducted by Mehrnaz Moghaddam, Humanities Alliance Communication Fellow.