The Practice of the Commons and the Ethics of Sharing—Aspiring Toward Abolitionist Pedagogy Through Faculty Collaboration

The aim of this essay is to show the importance of faculty collaboration in combating structural educational inequities and how it can help to radically reimagine pedagogy and higher education in the pandemic and beyond. Abolitionist teaching and pedagogy can begin with peer exchange--a teaching commons--that can support faculty before they even step into their classrooms. The authors present a practice of intellectual commons that is dynamic--a product of the uncertain, changing work conditions that faculty faces in endemic times, and an effort to imagine a future, where teaching in the university is not a siloed exercise, but rather a practice is done in communality. The authors see a dialogical exchange of equity-minded pedagogies, victories, and failures, as creating an abolitionist commons.