In-Person: TOWARD LIBERATION by Jamilah Pitts

Please join us in welcoming Jamilah Pitts to celebrate the release of Toward Liberation: Education Practices Rooted in Activism, Healing, and Love. For this event, Jamilah will be joined in conversation by Erica Meiners.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

An essential guide for frontline educators to address systemic racial oppression, repair harm, and foster safe, liberatory learning spaces for their students

For educators and readers of Bettina Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive, with a foreword by Leigh Patel, author of No Study Without Struggle

Toward Liberation is the timely and practical guide that pioneers new pathways for educators to repair harm and foster transformative learning spaces. This road map for liberatory pedagogy is replete with resources, tools, and strategies drawn from Jamilah Pitts’s experiences as a young Black girl, a Black student, a teacher, a former school leader, and a consultant with schools across the country.

Educators will want to mark up and keep their copy of Toward Liberation at their desks for easy reference. In its pages, they will find

Real-life examples and student writing from Pitts’s classroom
Explorative questions for teachers to consider in their equity work
Constructive charts that map out manifestations of harm
Activities to engage students in liberated learning
Healing and self-care strategies for teachers—particularly Black women educators

Pitts infuses her writing with an extensive knowledge base of the education system, honed over years as a teacher, a coach, a dean, an assistant principal, and a national education consultant. The tenets of this book—rooted in truthtelling, activism, healing, wellness, self-care, and, ultimately, love—both inform and are inspired by the healing work Pitts does with educators to this day. In doing this work, she helps to reimagine the role of the critical teacher.

Toward Liberation equips teachers with the tools they need to carve a path toward liberatory educational practices, ensuring that students are afforded the full range of their humanity and their experience, in and out of the classroom.
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Jamilah Pitts is an educator, a social entrepreneur, a writer, and a yoga teacher whose work centers the liberation, healing, and holistic development of communities of color. She has worked and served in various roles and spaces to promote racial justice and healing. She is the founder and CEO of Jamilah Pitts Consulting and also the founder of She, Imprints. Jamilah has served as a teacher, a coach, a dean, and an assistant principal. She has worked in domestic and international educational spaces, including Massachusetts, New York, the Dominican Republic, China, and India.

Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016), a co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom (Haymarket Press 2018); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and the co-authored Abolition. Feminism. Now.(Haymarket 2022). A Distinguished Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers - including Humbolt University, Trent University, CUNY Graduate Center, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, Erica has published articles in a wide range of publications including In These Times, Social Text, Radical Teacher, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Advocate, Boston Review. Their work has been recognized by awards including the 2015 Henry Trueba Award from the American Education Research Association, a 2016 Soros Justice Fellowship, and other support from the Illinois Humanities Council, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and US Department of Education. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and they teach classes in education, gender and sexuality studies, and justice studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, including people during and after incarceration, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, and the Education for Liberation Network, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.