We Want To Do More Than Survive Book

Why Bettina Love's Book Changed How I Think About Teaching

I was teaching at a high school in Atlanta back in 2019 when I first picked up We Want To Do More Than Survive by Bettina L. Love. I was burned out, disillusioned, and honestly just going through the motions. The book didn't cheerlead or offer some quick fix. It hit different because it named exactly what was happening in my classroom without needing me to articulate it myself. The full title is We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Work of Liberatory Literacy. Love draws on Critical Race Theory, Black feminist thought, and prison abolition frameworks to argue that education systems were never designed to liberate Black and Brown students. They were designed to sort, track, and contain. Her thesis is that teachers need to adopt abolitionist pedagogies rather than trying to reform broken institutions from within. I remember sitting in my classroom after reading the chapter on carceral logic in schools, just staring at my attendance sheet. Every student who was frequently absent or detained was already on some kind of radar for the administration. The school-to-prison pipeline isn't a metaphor in places like mine. It's a documented process with specific checkpoints. Love names those checkpoints and shows how they connect.

What Abolitionist Teaching Actually Looks Like

One thing beginners get wrong is thinking abolitionist teaching means throwing out all structure or letting kids do whatever they want. That's not it. It means fundamentally rethinking why you're doing what you're doing. When I shifted my approach after reading Love, I started asking: who benefits from this assignment? Who does this policy protect? Who gets punished when it doesn't work? The book walks through several frameworks. The most useful one for me was the concept of "liberatory literacy" – teaching students to read the world critically while also giving them tools to change it. This isn't just analysis for analysis's sake. Love insists on praxis, which is the combination of reflection and action. In practice this meant unit projects where students identified real problems in their community and designed interventions rather than writing five-paragraph essays about social issues from a distance. Here's the part nobody tells you: this approach takes more planning upfront. A traditional essay unit runs itself after day two. A liberatory literacy unit requires you to build partnerships with community organizations, design authentic assessment criteria, and manage student autonomy in ways that feel uncomfortable if you're used to strict control. I spent roughly three times as long preparing my first abolitionist unit. The payoff came in student engagement, but the preparation was genuinely heavy.

The Downside Nobody Talks About

I need to be straight with you. This framework has real limitations. Students who are dealing with immediate survival needs – housing instability, food insecurity, caring for siblings – may not have the bandwidth for project-based abolitionist work during the school day. Love acknowledges this tension but doesn't fully resolve it. In my experience, the most vulnerable students often need the most support within the system, not less structure. Administrators also push back hard. When students are doing community-based projects instead of standardized test prep, your funding metrics suffer. I had a principal tell me directly that our department needed to show improvement on state assessments within a year or face restructuring. That pressure is real. Abolitionist teaching works best when you have institutional backing, which most of us don't. Another practical problem: this approach assumes you have relationships with community organizations already. Building those from scratch takes time and trust. I ended up partnering with a local youth organizing group that had been working in our neighborhood for years. They showed up consistently. Without that kind of infrastructure, your students end up doing community work that feels extractive rather than transformative.

How to Actually Use This Book in Your Practice

Start by reading the first three chapters slowly. Love writes densely. I reread the chapter on bell hooks because she builds directly on that tradition. Then pick one small shift rather than overhauling everything at once. I started by replacing one essay per unit with a community audit assignment where students mapped resources and gaps in their own neighborhoods. The book includes reflection prompts and discussion questions that work well for professional learning communities. If your school doesn't have one, find other teachers online. The Black Futures Network and several subreddits have active educators using these frameworks. Getting feedback from people actually implementing this stuff matters because solo implementation tends to drift toward the comfortable version rather than the radical version. For the actual text, you can find it through Verso Books, Amazon, or independent bookstores. I'd recommend the paperback edition since it's lighter and easier to annotate. The PDF version exists through some academic channels but I wouldn't rely on pirated copies since Love's work deserves proper compensation.

When This Framework Doesn't Fit

If you teach in a highly standardized environment where curriculum is scripted and pacing guides leave no room for flexibility, this book will frustrate you. I've seen colleagues read it and feel angry because the gap between the vision and their daily reality felt unbridgeable. That's a legitimate response. In those situations, the more practical move might be focusing on smaller acts of resistance within the constraints you have rather than committing to full abolitionist pedagogy. There's also a risk of saviorism if you're not careful. Love warns against this explicitly. The key question is whether your students are leading the work or whether you're projecting your own political agenda onto them. I learned this the hard way when my first community project assignment felt more like a service-learning requirement than genuine student-directed research. I rewrote it after getting honest feedback from my students about what they actually cared about. The book runs about 240 pages and moves at a steady pace. It's not a quick read but it's accessible if you're willing to sit with the theoretical references. Love cites Freire, Marceau, and various Black feminists throughout. If you're new to that lineage, having a companion reader on Critical Race Theory in Education would help fill gaps. I found Christopher Emdin's work on hip hop pedagogy to be a useful adjacent read.