Kermit O — Writer • Educator • Dreamer

Introducing Earthseed: An Abolitionist Framework for Community Education and Organizing

Abolition, Education & Research, Politics & Activism, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, Sustainability & RegenerationAbolition, Black pedagogy, Earthseed Framework, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Green pedagogy, Red Black and Green Ecology, Red pedagogy

The Earthseed Framework uses place-based participatory-action research, land-based learning, and collective narrative to examine issues of land, food, and environmental justice, through an explicit racial and socioeconomic lens. What proceeds below is the the initial sketch for such the framework and the rationale behind it: to resist the physical and ideological enclosures which dilute the ... Read More

Moving Toward a Red, Black, and Green Ecology

Abolition, Education & Research, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, Sustainability & RegenerationBlack pedagogy, education for liberation, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Green pedagogy, Red pedagogy

In discussing various Red and Black pedagogies of resistance some common themes emerge. Where education is anchored to the practical experience of living, it rejects the alienation of learning and labor. Centering Black and Indigenous health, safety, and wellness — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — in recognition of our common humanity, rejects enclosures of the ... Read More

Green Pedagogies: The (Re)turn to Land-Based Learning

Abolition, Education & Research, Politics & Activism, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, Sustainability & RegenerationDecolonization, education for sustainability, Environmental Education, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Green Pedagogies

Land pedagogy is rooted in indigeneity, that is, the deep historical relationship to place. Whether in Africa, North America, or anywhere else in the world where people’s relationship to one’s environment was harmonious, the nature-culture dichotomy does not take hold. In various places throughout Northern and Western Europe, on the other hand, where the relationship ... Read More

The Dangerous Self-Delusions of Self-Directed Education

Education & Research, Politics & Activism, Society & Cultureschool abolition, self-directed education, symbolic gestures

In our “free” society, schooling became a replacement for the development of material and social skills young people once learned in community, through apprenticeship, through experience with the natural world. In order to maintain schooling as an institution, these young people’s needs are provided for by parents, by the state, other external agents, and further ... Read More

Black Pedagogies: From Emancipation to Self-Determination

Abolition, Education & Research, Politics & Activism, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, Sustainability & RegenerationBlack Education, Black pedagogy, Black Radical Tradition, Enclosure, Freedom Dreaming, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Fugitivity, Marronage

The most radical incarnation of fugitivity in this case would be the total rejection of the school. Higher school dropout rates amongst Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth are most often pathologized, as character flaws or cultural deficits, but within the context of schooling as domination, dropping out of school amounts to an act of refusal ... Read More

Red Pedagogies: From Decolonization to Resurgence

Abolition, Education & Research, Politics & Activism, Race & Racism, Sustainability & Regenerationcommunity education, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, indigenous education, Red pedagogy

Within Red pedagogies there is no separation between education and activism, because if education is to reproduce the means of life, the ways of thriving in right relationship to people and land, it must contend with the forces and relations — settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism — which deny those very possibilities. Red pedagogies form ... Read More

Struggles Against Enclosure: Black and Indigenous Pedagogies of Resistance

Abolition, Education & Research, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, Sustainability & RegenerationBlack pedagogy, Cultural Appropriation, education for sustainability, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Green pedagogy, place-based education, Red pedagogy

For both Black and Indigenous people, there have been tensions between the cultural and the political, manufactured by State and Capital in order to disrupt our collective lifeways and to continue the project of settler colonial capitalist exploitation and domination. From these tensions emerge practices of cultural recognition as an end in itself, as with ... Read More

Needs, Barriers, and the Enclosure of Life

Abolition, Education & Research, Philosophy & Religion, Psychology, Society & CultureAbraham Maslow, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Hierarchy of Needs

While the hierarchy of needs purports to represent a “theory of human motivation”, it also implicitly reveals the mediators — both barriers and facilitators — between people and their fundamental needs, most prominently: 1) the state, which claims ownership or control of land under false premises of democratic appointment and collective good, and 2) capital, ... Read More

The Archive, the Ledger, and the Enclosure of Experience

Abolition, Education & Research, Race & Racism, Society & Culture, TechnologyBig Data, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, selfish ledger, social media, Surveillance

The Archive and its silences are reproduced in schools through history curricula wherein Black people are perpetual victims with brief flashes of intelligence, resilience, or moral standing, and only where these things are amenable to the state and capital. Those lacunae wherein we exercise our freedom, agency, and authentic self-expression — remain hidden beneath the ... Read More

EdTech, Big Data, and Surveillance

Abolition, Education & Research, TechnologyBig Data, Educational Technology, Enclosure, From the Schoolhouse to the Field, Surveillance

We have been manipulated into complicity in our own surveillance, trading not just our own safety, security, and sovereignty, but that of nearly everyone else in the world, for conveniences we have otherwise never known. Most of us barely grasp the unprecedented power we have vested in this network, such as to position these companies ... Read More