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This book calls for re-examining traditional school counseling and moving toward embracing abolition within the profession.
School counseling can't reform its way to liberation. We need to create something new, something different. The authors argue that school counselors, who are regularly tasked with teaching students to assimilate to schooling with a hyper-focus on individual grit and decontextualized self-management skills, often use various methods of control, emphasized without question within the profession. This book provides an orientation to abolitionist school counseling and draws from lessons the authors have learned from school counselors practicing abolition across K-12 levels. Chapters cover the current state of policing and the school-to-prison nexus, surveillance, harm reduction, community care, mutual aid, liberatory futures, and more.
Abolition in School Counseling invites school counselors to probe the impossible and find ways to build liberation in schools today.
List of contents
Part I: Why Abolitionist School Counseling? 1. Moving from Traditional School Counseling to Abolitionist School Counseling
2. Why We Need Abolition in School Counseling
3. Abolitionist School Counseling is Practicing the World We Want and Need
Part II: ASSC Theory of Change in Action 4. Dismantle School Counseling & Change Everything
5. Build Communities of Care
6. Connect to Something Bigger
Part III: Building An Abolitionist School Counseling Approach 7. Rethinking the Logic of School Counseling
8. Practicing Counseling in Schools as Mutual Aid
9. Being an Abolitionist School Counselor in a School, District, or State that Does Not Support Abolitionist School Counseling
10. Conclusion
About the author
Riley Drake,
PhD, is an assistant professor of school counseling at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Her research explores how educators struggle alongside young people and community organizers for abolition.
Alicia Oglesby is the associate director of college counseling at Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh, PA. She is also a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, researching political education in independent schools.
