
We Want to Do More Than Survive
by Bettina L. Love
Education as rebellion, not compliance.
For you if
you're an educator working with Black kids in a system that was never designed for them to thrive
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Love dismantles the polite language of “achievement gaps” and replaces it with the unapologetic fire of abolitionist teaching. She calls for joy, rage, and rebellion in classrooms still haunted by racism and systemic neglect. It’s not about surviving the system — it’s about remaking it from the roots up.
Where This Book Lives
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Most Likely to Succeed(2015)
dir. Greg Whiteley
The best case for project-based learning, with caveats.
A year inside High Tech High, a San Diego charter school built entirely around project-based learning instead of standardized instruction, following two classes of ninth graders.
Why it’s here: Makes the most vivid case in documentary form for project-based learning over the standard model — but its history of how American schooling got this way has been disputed by actual education historians, and its producers have their own stake in the reform it's arguing for. Worth watching with that critique alongside it, not instead of it.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus
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Not a few bad men. A system that works.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me
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History class—now with honesty.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Impro for Storytellers
Keith Johnstone

Make it up. Mean it anyway.
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Teaching to Transgress
bell hooks

Break the rules. Bring the kids.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
Stamped (for Kids)
Jason Reynolds & Ibram X. Kendi

Unlearning racism, one page at a time.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire

Classroom meets liberation front.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Losers Club
Andrew Clements

He loves reading. He hates reading club. He starts his own.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster

A bored boy drives through a tollbooth. The other side is worth it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
