How to Cite a Dream: The Utility of Love, Care, and Community in a Social Work Classroom

Introduction: Combahee Taught Us

We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters, and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.
– Combahee River Collective ¹

I, Loren

I began organizing when I was sixteen years old, super introverted, neurodivergent, and often confused about my place within movement spaces where my gifts seemed underappreciated and undervalued. I would never be the person giving the riveting speech or becoming a local celebrity influencer or group leader. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective’s Statement at twenty-one years old in a women and gender studies class as an undergraduate at Wellesley College and my life was forever changed. The words of Barbara Smith, Demita Frazier, and Beverly Smith grew within me. I was slowly coming to realize that my strengths — deep listening, visioning, writing, archiving, and caring for others — were qualities I valued. Four decades earlier but just a few miles from where I was changing, three Black women gathered on university campuses determined to believe in their radical dream and use it to transform the world. They gave me the language and the courage to drastically change my orientation to research, writing, and organizing, now hinging on the axis of “a healthy love for ourselves.” ² Through their words and political actions, I learned how to better love who I am, be proud of where I come from, care about who I teach, increase participation in what I study, and be intentional in building community. With this new orientation, I found roles as a community organizer, mentor, professor, artist, social worker, and researcher. I am constantly refining how to love and care for my community in radical ways.

As someone who spent the past fifteen years coming to realize that I am a scholar-creative, I cringe at the neglect of soft and spiritual skills in my political and formal education. ³ Throughout my life I discovered that fundamental concepts like love and care were either unaddressed or discouraged, whether in campaigns, research projects and dissertations, or classes. In my MSW program and in the top doctoral program in the country for participatory action research, professors never explicitly taught us how to build community, trust, or rapport. Instead, they threw us into role plays, phone banking, fieldwork, organizing, and canvassing, expecting us to learn on the fly (or already know) the foundational skills behind this work. This was the case even in programs rooted in radical approaches to navigating community organizations and social systems. I had to find alternative spaces, texts, and mentorship to gain these skills. Over the years I pieced together lessons I had learned, collaging knowledge from peers, elders, Black feminists of the past and present, and folks I had the pleasure of meeting through the written word, like Combahee.

I now understand that my greatest personal and professional accomplishments were rooted in dreaming/designing love, care, and community. This triumvirate, I believe, provides an essential skill set for any social worker or community worker deeply committed to freedom, liberation, and abolition. This is why my first undertaking as a tenure-track, junior scholar was to co-create a class that explored this unique approach to community practice with a clinician whom I care about deeply, my colleague Arianne Napier-White.

I, Arianne

Like Loren, I share the commitment to interrogating my relationship with love, care, and community. Through my academic social work experiences, I was also discouraged from exploring the concepts of love and care. I vividly recall drafting ideas for my MSW thesis to examine the impact of racism on love and loving between Black queer women. My thesis advisor told me that an interrogation of love and Black women’s relationship to loving was not an academically rigorous endeavor. Unfortunately, I internalized this message for several years until my professional experience became too loud to ignore. As an emergency department social worker and palliative care social worker in trauma 1 centers and large public hospital systems, I witnessed love and care in the contexts of trauma, tragedy, and grief. I learned what is possible when one leads with an ethic of love and care. This deeply informs my pedagogical practice.

We, Together

Together, we developed a course called Love, Care, and Community Practice from Black and Indigenous Perspectives. We taught this course for two years with a total of forty-four students in the master’s program at the Smith School for Social Work (Smith SSW). Smith SSW is a historically white and predominantly queer small liberal arts program known for its dedication to clinical practice. ⁴ Our syllabus, citing exclusively Black and Indigenous scholars, was structured to prepare future social workers to support our collective movements and bridge the gap of critical voices and perspectives in most MSW curricula. Community building was embedded into every assignment and exercise.

We find it helpful to acknowledge that pedagogical partnering, like all community and relationship-based work, is challenging. It required significant time, planning, preparation, collective thinking, constant dialogue, and co-facilitation, much more than a traditional course. But this extra time and attention led to a stronger experience for our students and for us as educators. The outcome was a true testament to the fact that love, care, and community are our greatest projects of freedom.

The literature that follows maps the course, from its inspiration around the praxis of the Combahee River Collective, to its multiple sources of creation, to its existence in practice. We explore how freedom dreaming has been tethered to popular education for decades and directly informs our contemporary interventions of liberatory, abolitionist, decolonial, and irresistible pedagogies in the classroom. Next, we bring readers into conversation with Black and Indigenous scholars, practitioners, artists, and organizers engaging with the concepts of love, care, and community. ⁵ Then, we describe how we reimagined course assignments to become artifacts of ‘artivism’, or tools for visioning, cooperating, and translating to diverse audiences in and outside of the academy. Finally, we detail how we recommit daily to building an abolitionist classroom for a profession and institution that is not yet there by honing our practices of love, care work, and community building. Combining liberatory, decolonial, abolitionist, and irresistible pedagogies, we invite our students to define their politics and theories of change and to develop skills to materialize social justice as social workers and as people.

Literature Review Remixed

This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.
– Ella Baker ⁶

Some of our most forward-thinking movement strategists have understood that formal and informal classroom spaces are essential to freedom dreaming. ⁷ For instance, in the 1950s, Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins worked with the Highlander Research and Education Center (formerly the Highlander Folk School) in Tennessee to create Citizenship Schools across the rural south. What started as an adult literacy program for folks to learn how to write their names and read the state constitution so that they could register to vote became a hub for political education, community building, and activism. ⁸ In 1964, Charles Cobb and Ella Baker, leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), established Freedom Schools as part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project to allow Black children and high school-aged youth opportunities to learn culturally relevant history and develop political consciousness, which led to projects such as school boycotts, newspapers, conferences, and local organizing. ⁹ In 1969, the Black Panther Party established its first Liberation Schools spearheaded by Ericka Huggins. These schools engaged Black youth ages five to seventeen in political advocacy within an anti-oppressive conceptual framework. ¹⁰ From the formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974, members gathered in their own informal classroom spaces, dismayed by the teaching and the hierarchies encountered in feminist spaces. Combahee members did everything collectively: they wrote their visionary statement, cooked, baked, read, pontificated, planned marches, and formed coalitions that worked across intersectional identities together. ¹¹ Apart from these models in practice, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire offered a foundational concept of liberation pedagogy in his seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed based on years of teaching literacy to analphabetic, largely adult farmers in Brazil. A masterful literacy educator, Freire taught three hundred sugar cane farmers how to read in only forty-five days. ¹² Liberation pedagogy is a radically democratic approach to teaching that invites both students and teachers to collaborate to design freedom and direction in the classroom together. ¹³ It treats students as co-creators of knowledge who learn alongside the teacher and have a say in what they learn. In teaching literacy, history, culture, and how to dream, each of these critical pedagogy models gave its students and teachers glimpses of freedom.

Contemporary educational theorists who have taken lessons from movement leaders offer additional models to deepen our orientation toward liberatory, decolonial, abolitionist, and irresistible pedagogies. Building on Freire’s concept of liberation pedagogy, Matthew Kincaid operationalizes what it means to provide liberation through education. He writes, “Education at its core should expand students’ freedom. Freedom teaching is about examining a system that both historically and presently provides a vastly different array of choices and opportunities for students across lines of difference.” ¹⁴ Bettina Love, another contemporary educator, advocates for an abolitionist teaching framework that refuses to take a normalized carceral stance towards students and instead uses an intersectional racial justice pedagogical approach to civics education, community coalition building, and critical theory that extends beyond the classroom. Undoubtedly, these pedagogical orientations and practices facilitate individual and collective change and afford students the freedom to dream and create otherwise. Love writes, “These dreams are not whimsical, unattainable daydreams, they are critical and imaginative dreams of collective resistance.” ¹⁵ For Kincaid, Love, Freire, Erica Huggins, Charles Cobb and Ella Baker, Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins, the ultimate goal of teaching is freedom. As organizers, educators, and theorists, they each understand that the praxis of liberation and abolition allows students to engage in thought exercises and practices that equip them to contribute to social transformation.

Decolonial and irresistible pedagogies build on these concepts and the project of advancing freedom in and beyond classroom spaces from a Black and Indigenous feminist lens. Decolonial pedagogy interrogates our ways of knowing and challenges how people have been ordered and managed, historically and in the present. Moreover, decolonial pedagogy requires engagement from instructors and students alike to understand and deconstruct power and its many manifestations. Autumn Asher BlackDeer argues for a decolonial pedagogy defined by an Indigenous feminist framework. In explaining what this means, and citing Little Bear 2000, ¹⁶ Goodkind et al. 2021, ¹⁷ Aikau et al. 2015, ¹⁸ Tuhiwai Smith 2012, ¹⁹ Mack and Na’puti 2021, ²⁰ she writes,

An Indigenous decolonial feminist framework exposes ideas of a “relational worldview, complexity and intersectionality, and a grounded approach.” It embodies the values of “sovereignty and liberation, rage and refusal, and self-determination.” It is moved to praxis by actions that involve “empowerment praxis, critical reflexivity, positionality, allyship, and solidarity.” ²¹

BlackDeer’s model moves us further into usable praxis by offering core values and practices needed to embody and employ Indigenous feminism in classroom spaces.

 An irresistible pedagogy is a revolutionary concept rooted in Black feminist praxis and drawn from Toni Cade Bambara as Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores in her essay on Bambara’s writing and teaching. ²² Bambara writes,

I’m a very seductive teacher, persuasive, infectious, overwhelming, irresistible…  Let’s face it, the teacher-student relationship we’ve been trained in is very colonial in nature… To rise above that, to insist of myself and of them that we refashion that relationship along progressive lines demanded a great deal of courage, imagination, energy, and will. ²³

Irresistible pedagogy at its core resists the premise that the learning process must engage in the epistemic violence of institutional academic spaces premised on white patriarchal exclusivity of knowledge. ²⁴ This radical vision of classrooms inviting in lived experience, curiosity, and imagination is also queer. It connects pleasure and power, pushing us toward creative visions of new, unsanctioned, and limitless Black feminist futures.

BlackDeer, Sullivan, and Bambara push us to incorporate Indigenous and Black feminist ethics and praxis into our pedagogy. Decolonial and irresistible teaching philosophies allow us to focus on processes rather than products and ensure that students feel cared for and changed by the curriculum. In the following section, we describe how we put these four pedagogies into practice through our intentional stance towards citational justice. 

Citational Justice as Ceremony: Creating a Syllabus

Citation is ceremony, and a bibliography is an altar—a literary libation invoking the ancestors of the word, honoring those who make it possible for the text to emerge.
– Savannah Shange ²⁵

When we began drafting the syllabus for this course, we found it vital to deeply interrogate our working definitions of love, care, and community through our own personal and professional contexts. Following the wisdom of Savannah Shange, we strung together citations with spiritual reverence to create ceremonies and altars out of the major themes of our course: love, care, and community. We drew wisdom from trade press authors, journalists, organizers, and artists to intimately illustrate how these texts influenced our working definitions for each concept and to ground our pedagogical goals.

1. Love

Embarking on this project, we wanted to understand the major components of love and explore its dimensionality in the classroom. Engaging in a love practice is a crucial part of an overall commitment and approach to social transformation that requires intentional, daily, and step-by-step action to learn and shift. In her love trilogy—All About Love: New Visions, Salvation: Black People in Love, and Communion: The Female Search for Love—as in her other works, bell hooks reminds us that a radical definition of love moves us closer to freedom. She writes, “The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.” ²⁶

Darnell Moore also radically changed our approaches to research and teaching. He writes,

For some reason, relationship formation, collective care, and love continue to be unacknowledged, under-theorized, and understood as less than radical potentials. Collective care and radical love are strategies: they shape our political orientations, and they bring life to our organizing approaches. The way we treat people; our willingness or unwillingness to engage others; our care; our love is as crucial and political as anything else. ²⁷

Moore wants Black love to be understood as a vital strategy for collective engagement. The practice of leading with love has influenced how we were in relationship with each other. One of our favorite authors Kiese Laymon takes us deeper into what love as strategy means. Laymon writes, “Repair what you helped break, my grandma taught me. Restore what responsibly loved you, I learned from Gunn… and revise, revise, revise with your family and friends. Collective freedom is impossible without interpersonal repair.” ²⁸

Our study of hooks, Moore, and Laymon confirms that the true work of radical love is an ability to practice ongoing processes of repair and a willingness to commit to constant revision. We take inspiration from Kiese Laymon’s call to “revise, revise, revise” and encourage our students to seek out revision in assignments, in relationships, and in our classroom as a laboratory. Revision gives us an opportunity to unlearn practices that prevent us from being stronger community practitioners and care workers.

2. Care

When Audre Lorde was dying of a breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver, she wrote the powerful words, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ²⁹ She came to this realization through the painful experience of cancer and the decision to take unpaid leave from her job as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, raising money and support from family and friends for homeopathic medical care in Switzerland and later in the U.S. Virgin Islands where she received end-of-life care. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha echoes Lorde’s sentiments in her writing on care webs:

In the face of systems that want us dead, sick, and disabled people have been finding ways to care for ourselves. We’ve been doing it for a long time, usually on no money, and we’re really good at it. Sometimes we call them care webs or collectives, sometimes we call them “my friend that helps me out sometimes,” and sometimes we don’t call them anything at all—care webs are just life, just what you do. ³⁰

Disabled communities of color have long modeled care webs as mutual aid and life-sustaining support. Melissa Harris-Perry offers another helpful framing:

Squad care is a way of understanding our needs as humans that acknowledges how we lean on one another, and that we are not alone in the world, but rather enmeshed in webs of mutual and symbiotic relationships. Squad care reminds us there is no shame in reaching for each other and insists the imperative rests not with the individual, but with the community. Our job is to have each other’s back. ³¹

One of the things Lorde, Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Harris-Perry’s writings may teach us is that care is about sharing risks. When teaching about care we asked students to think with intention about what it might look like to act from a place of love and care both in the classroom and as social workers. This question allowed them to reimagine the care they may provide in their profession through a more radical lens. Through classroom discussion and small groups, we asked students to conceptualize care using a Black feminist lens and mutual aid framework. Early in one discussion a student asked, “Can you receive mutual aid from people who are not in your community? Is that really mutual aid?” ³² Students in our classroom wrestled with the necessity of intimacy being a prerequisite for receiving mutual aid and, as we understand it, to truly receive care. This led us to have many discussions about the risks and costs of only receiving mutual aid from those with similar standings of power and privilege. One student even said that for them “it’s important who we decide to give us care.” ³³ While conceptualizing care as one of our most vital resources to give and receive, many noted in their own unique ways the potential for rebalancing resources and risks to create and strengthen communal resources.

Care is also an issue in professional training and in how students treat each other. Our students, multiracial, gender-expansive, and spiritually-diverse, modeled care consistently throughout our courses in nuanced ways. They entered our classroom space with complicated group dynamics related to colorism, xenophobia, and complex interpersonal relationships. Despite these dynamics, students used the co-created community agreements to engage honestly with group dynamics and, through this, chose to preserve and protect our classroom space by acting from a place of care.

3. Community

Community is an idea that feels welcoming and accessible to many in and outside of movement spaces. As a class we explored the layers and complexities of being in community—our community and the communities to which we belonged outside of the classroom. This discussion provided the foundation for discussing community safety, the traditional role of social workers in disrupting that safety and exacting harm, and the challenge of engaging the profession in more radical and liberatory ways. Mia Birdsong conveys our guiding principle: “We can’t build safety without also building community… All the horrors we face today will only be solved if we understand that we are all in this together. We are most moved toward action by our relationship with others.” ³⁴ So what does this mean for social workers and how do they learn the skills to get there?

To explore possibilities, students engaged in opening and closing grounding exercises, as well as a group activity. The activity began with an exploration of five questions as outlined by Charlene Carruthers: “Who am I? Who are my people? What do we want? What are we building? Are we ready to win?” ³⁵ Using these prompts, they moved into a process of imagining four major systems — education, housing, food, and transportation — through the lens of communal care. They engaged in a round-robin, traveling in rotating small groups and spending ten minutes in each station ideating about expansive expressions of freedom for each category. They then wrote down each dream on an individual piece of origami paper, folded them up in paper cranes, strung them on thread, and hung them around campus. This activity allowed them to map out concrete realities, practices, and changes while engaging in a reimagining activity that allowed them to play and dream. Esther Seo, one of the student facilitators of the paper crane activity, ended the class session describing this as “the terrifying work of dreaming big and enjoying the childlike wonder of what it feels like to wish and hope for more for all of us.” ³⁶

Mariame Kaba posits that community should be the soundtrack in our head if we are committed to shared and collective liberation. ³⁷ As Birdsong, Carruthers, and Kaba show, community is an embodiment of connection with others rooted in respect, humanity, witnessing, and service.

Assignments: Artifacts of Artivism

The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.
― bell hooks ³⁸

To achieve our unique course objectives, we threw all traditional assignments out the window. Each major assignment in Love, Care, and Community Praxis invites students to create and/or participate in what Asunción Bernárdez Rodal calls “artivism.” ³⁹

1. Statement

The first assignment follows the model of the Combahee River Collective’s statement. We invite each student to creatively write a biography and mission statement defining how they hope to uphold their personal and professional values in their social work career.

2. Facilitation Agenda

Next, we ask students to work in groups to create a facilitation agenda for a 45-minute class on the assigned readings adaptable to a community practice setting. The goal of this exercise is to create a problem-posing classroom that allows students to be experts and to facilitate their peers in the exploration of a selected topic. Being able to co-facilitate effectively is important for relationship building, consensus building, popular education, and conflict mediation. This is one of the ways we engaged in reciprocal learning and alternated between being teachers and learners over the term.

3. Zine

As social workers, we are often tasked with making information accessible to a wide range of constituents. To practice this skill, we asked students to co-create a zine. Zines offer a valuable alternative model for public knowledge sharing. We required that the content be accessible to someone outside of graduate school and tested this by having students share their zines (and mission statements) with a friend or family member. We also gave students the option to house their zines in a digital repository accessible to the community, as long as the co-authors agreed.

4. Reflection Podcast

Finally, in lieu of a final paper, our students worked in pairs or trios to cohost a thirty to sixty-minute podcast on a course session topic of their choosing. The requirements for the podcast included:

1. A creative reflection citing at least 3 course materials
2. A critical exploration of one of the topics: love, care, or community
3. The chosen topic’s application and/or relationship to the field of social work
4. Future implications for social work community praxis

We asked students to be equal parts comprehensive and creative. An objective of this assignment was, pending group members’ consent, to share it as a learning tool for other practitioners and community members.

How to Abolish Social Work in a Social Work Classroom

Abolitionist teaching is the practice of working in solidarity with communities of color while drawing on the imagination, creativity, refusal, (re)membering, visionary thinking, healing, rebellious spirit, boldness, determination, and subversiveness of abolitionists to eradicate injustice in and outside of schools.
– Bettina Love ⁴⁰

Our teaching philosophy reflects our commitment to abolish systems that do not center our students and their future clients’ humanity within or beyond the classroom. We explore how we can be complicit and reproduce oppression through the use and misuse of our power as well as the complexities of our positionality at our institution with our students. We grapple with the risk of actively undermining traditional social work education by teaching our students how to think critically about their social work role and identity. We develop a critique of social work and carceral systems, offer tools to reimagine how to proceed toward liberation, and encourage our students to decenter themselves and instead “elevate community voices, community practices, and community problem solving,” particularly for Black and Indigenous communities. ⁴¹

We strive to incorporate experiential learning grounded in theory and praxis across various pedagogical spaces, and we engage in this practice in the classroom. While this is our goal, the reality is that we are attempting to be abolitionists in a profession and institution that are both circumspect about abolitionist praxis. We fail constantly, yet every day we return because we are committed to our attempts to divest from a white supremacist colonized system. Central to these attempts are our enactments of Black feminist commitments, among them Bettina Love’s definition of abolitionist teaching. 

Healing Together

As instructors we teach with a commitment to the future, for ourselves and our students. We taught ten classes over five weeks to create a loving and trusting community. To co-create a beloved community, ⁴² we began and ended each session with a grounding exercise to foster curiosity and a “spiritual ecosystem.” ⁴³ It allowed the classroom space to become holy and created the conditions to explore complicated topics. Grounding exercises allowed us to release what we went through before class and be present in the sacred work of interrogating the world as it is and imagining another. Some techniques we used included meditation, breathwork, music, and poetry. We drew from Alexis Pauline Gumbs who writes that taking collective breaths offers a shared and tangible resource for processing. ⁴⁴ We also used breath as a guide, ending each class with a “breathe out” exercise where students offer short reflections in the form of one-word responses to the day, or simple collective breaths, to close out the ritual of our time together.

Carceral Refusal

Drawing again on Bettina Love, we take a unique approach to assessment and grading. Grounded in our commitments to radical love and care, we engage students from a strengths-based perspective. On the first day of class we tell them we are invested in everyone passing. We write “love notes” to them in response to each of their assignments. We see these “love notes” as a pedagogical tool as we detail what they did well, what we learned from them, what they missed (whether conceptually or in a requirement of the rubric) and strategies to revise and resubmit for a stronger score. Leading with love has a tendency to disarm our students. The protective guards they normally carry, the contempt they may feel for our profession and its failings slowly dissipate and transform when they feel seen and cared for. In this course our enactments of love and care empowered students to reflect on how they might resist carceral logics as social workers. In one of the final podcasts Milo Giovanniello said,

One commitment I have personally is to never report people to the state and to encourage other mandated reporters that I meet, that I’m in community with, to also refuse that. Refusing that potential of additional harm happening from the state means we can actually look at is there harm happening, is my client worried about something in their life and, like, what does it look like for me to really support them in that? What might it look like to interrupt the harm that’s happening? ⁴⁵

In our teaching practice and observations of students we have found that a healthy politic of refusal can open new pathways toward care, community, and connection.

Playing With Subversiveness

We see ourselves not as infallible experts but as participants engaged in reciprocal learning and problem-posing dialogue with our students. One of the ways we level the playing field is by inviting students into the evaluation process. At the end of each class we do a “plus/delta” exercise allowing students to name what fell short and what was generative. Whenever possible and relevant, we incorporate students’ suggestions and revise classroom lessons, activities, assignments, and evaluations to better fit the students’ varied learning styles and goals. This approach leaves room for flexibility within the syllabus and allows for our classrooms to be democratic and participatory. Students are more engaged in reading, discussions, and knowledge production when they have the option to help select and determine the class flow, course texts, final projects, and paper topics. When exercises and activities fail, we make space to discuss the intended result, the actual result, and why the exercise did not meet the expected outcomes.

This practice also honors our humanity as younger Black women instructors. Teaching about love, care, and community praxis at a historically white institution makes us hypervisible. A class that centers the stories and experiences of Black and Indigenous communities is both publicly celebrated and heavily surveilled and scrutinized. We are proud that even in our vulnerable place in academia we stretch ourselves to radically meet students’ needs and practice our principles.

Engaging in Visionary Thinking

From our very first class we begin with the understanding that the social work profession relies on inequity to sustain itself and therefore can never actually achieve the liberation it claims to seek. ⁴⁶ We highlight the ways social work practices have reinforced mechanisms of oppression and harm historically and in the present. We lean into the expansiveness of teaching mezzo and macro practice, ⁴⁷ to engage in “transformative knowledge production” that disrupts the academy and teaches our students how to stay whole while operating in and beyond these systems. ⁴⁸ We acknowledge that justice may look like the abolition of the profession in which we are working and they are training. Through pair-share activities, free writing, graffiti walls, and classroom discussions, we ask students to explore what might replace our discipline and practice. Just a few of our favorite examples include abolishing the system of mandated reporting, to unlimited communal care days as standard in all benefits packages, to building a solidarity economy. We are always amazed at the possibilities that our students dream up, play with, and practice to create a new world. Perhaps the greatest metric of success for us will be when our students teach this work outside of a formal academic institution to and with community members. We are comfortable with working ourselves out of a job. We want love to radically transform and for care and risk to be shared. We want communities to be healthy, connected, and revitalized. If this class, built from our wildest dreams, brings us closer to these possibilities, we are happy.

Conclusion: How to Cite a Dream by Crafting a Constellation 

Good love. Healthy choices. Second chances. We need it now. We needed it then.
– Kiese Laymon, 2020

In September 2023, Robyn Douglas asked Twitter how to cite a dream in APA style. Though a simple question on the surface, it got Black and feminist scholars buzzing about the utility of dreamwork and ancestral calls. Our course, Love, Care, and Community Praxis from Black and Indigenous Perspectives, has been a manifestation of our dreams. We traced our dreams through their sources, coming up with a syllabus informed by liberation pedagogy in its various manifestations and theorizations. In our classroom, we applied abolitionist, decolonial, and irresistible pedagogical frameworks. Our students told us the experience was eye-opening and impactful. They appreciated our attunement to their needs and our willingness to change, to defy white supremacist bounds of time, to admit our mistakes and missteps publicly, and to treat them with deep respect and as holders of knowledge. Many expressed deep gratitude for a classroom where they could bring their whole selves because it changed how they learned. Our class modeled a way for our students to embody their values in the classroom and in their future practice.

Our approach to co-teaching has not only queered our classroom and challenged our institution’s status quo, it also challenged the status quo of social work programs. We stand on the shoulders of radical educator giants who taught before, doing the hard but not impossible work of building a dream. We wrote this article to cite our collective dream work. We wrote this article to not get written out of the archive or the scholarly record. We wrote this article to cite the genius of our students who fully embraced a flipped classroom, teaching their peers how to fold paper cranes, write contemplatively, play with embodied movement, and engage in intergroup dialogues on justice-centered concepts of community, care, grief, and radical love.

To instructors hoping to make their own bit of classroom magic, we wrote this article for you. We offer this spell for you to dream such spaces in your classrooms. Our commitments to developing “a healthy love for ourselves,” our study of theory, and our artful approaches to praxis have led to the most healing classroom spaces that we have ever known. In a profession built around meeting the basic needs of individuals, families, and communities, the principle of leading with love is not always, or often, present. Yet we find that it is sacrosanct in the work of building a new world in the vision of Combahee, a transnational movement towards anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobia. We have endless gratitude to the Combahee River Collective for being the first and lasting bridge towards the soft skills we have grown together. Regardless of where this course lives, we will continue to teach, study, and practice with a love and care ethic centering Black and Indigenous folks and providing endless opportunities for “good love, healthy choices, and second chances” for our community and ourselves. ⁴⁹ Abundant access to each is our truest metric of freedom. Tracing this constellation of our dreams as we create this freedom will be, as Combahee wrote, our “definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.” ⁵⁰

ENDNOTES

1. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 42 no. 3 ([1978] 2014): 273.[↑]
2. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement.”[↑]
3. Darnell L. Moore, “Black Radical Love: A Practice,” Public Integrity 20, no. 4 (2018): 326; ebonyjanice moore, All the Black Girls Are Activists: A Fourth Wave Womanist Pursuit of Dreams as Radical Resistance (Row House Publishing, 2023), 23-25.[↑]
4. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Crystal E. Peoples, “Historically White Colleges and Universities: The Unbearable Whiteness of (Most) Colleges and Universities in America,” American Behavioral Scientist 66, no. 11 (2022): 2.[↑]
5. Kelechi C. Wright, Kortney Angela Carr, and Becci A. Akin. “The Whitewashing of Social Work History: How Dismantling Racism in Social Work Education Begins With an Equitable History of the Profession,” Advances in Social Work 21, no. 2/3 (2021): 274-276; University nuhelot’įnethaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, “Honouring Sacred Relationships: Wise Practices in Indigenous Social Work,” Alberta College of Social Workers (2019), https://acsw.in1touch.org/uploaded/web/RPT_IndigenousSocialWorkPracticeFramework_Final_20190219.pdf.[↑]
6. Ella Baker cited in Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 238.[↑]
7. Robin DG. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2022), IX-XII.[↑]
8. Stephen Lazar, “Septima Clark Organizing for Positive Freedom,” Souls 9, no. 3 (2007): 245-247.[↑]
9. Charles M Payne, “Mississippi’s Freedom Schools in the 1960s,” in A Simple Justice: The Challenge of Small Schools, ed. William Ayers, Michael Klonsky, and Gabrielle Lyon (Teachers College Press, 2000): 5-7.[↑]
10. Robert P. Robinson, “Stealin’ the Meetin’: Black Education History & the Black Panthers’ Oakland Community School” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2020), 109-110, CUNY Academic Works, https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/3707/.[↑]
11. Marian Jones, “If Black Women Were Free: An Oral History of the Combahee River Collective,” The Nation, October 29, 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/combahee-river-collective-oral-history/.[↑]
12. Richard Oxman, “Securing Sweetness For Sugarcane Souls: A Tribute To Paulo Freire,” Counter Currents, April 26, 2017, https://countercurrents.org/2017/04/securing-sweetness-for-sugarcane-souls-a-tribute-to-paulo-freire/.[↑]
13. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin Classics, [1967] 2020), 71-72.[↑]
14. Matthew Kincaid, Freedom Teaching: Overcoming Racism in Education to Create Classrooms Where All Students Succeed (John Wiley & Sons, 2024), 11-12.[↑]
15. Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Beacon Press, 2019), 101.[↑]
16. Leroy Little Bear, “Jagged Worldviews Colliding,” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (University of British Columbia Press, 2000), 77.[↑]
17. Sara Goodkind et al., “Critical Feminisms: Principles and Practices for Feminist Inquiry in Social Work,” Affilia 36, no. 4 (2021): 482.[↑]
18. Hokulani K Aikau et al., “Indigenous Feminisms Roundtable,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36, no. 3 (2015): 89.[↑]
19. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (Zed Books, 2012), 175-182.[↑]
20. Ashley Noel Mack and Tiara R. Na’Puti, “ ‘Our Bodies Are Not Terra Nullius’: Building a Decolonial Feminist Resistance to Gendered Violence,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 3 (2019): 355.[↑]
21. Autumn Asher BlackDeer, “Unsettling Feminism in Social Work: Toward an Indigenous Decolonial Feminism,” Affilia 38, no. 4 (2023): 621.[↑]
22. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, “Pedagogies of the ‘Irresistible’: Imaginative Elsewheres of Black Feminist Learning,” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 20, no. 20 (2022): 2-3.[↑]
23. Toni Cade Bambara cited in Claudia Tate ed., Black Women Writers at Work (Haymarket Books, 2023), 36.[↑]
24. Sullivan, “Pedagogies of the ‘Irresistible,’” 2.[↑]
25. Savannah Shange, “Citation as Ceremony: #SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation,” Cultural Anthropology 37, no. 2 (2022): 194.[↑]
26. bell hooks, “Love as the Practice of Freedom,” in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 2006), 298.[↑]
27. Moore, “Black Radical Love,” 327-328.[↑]
28. Kiese Laymon, “What we owe and are owed,” Vox, May 17, 2021, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22419450/kiese-laymon-justice-fairness-black-america.[↑]
29. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays, (Ixia Press, [1988] 2017), 97.[↑]
30. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access,” in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), 19-20.[↑]
31. Melissa Harris-Perry, “How #SquadCare Saved My Life,” Elle, July 24, 2017, https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a46797/squad-care-melissa-harris-perry/.[↑]
32. Alejandra Nassar, personal communication, July 2023.[↑]
33. Aaliyah Bell, personal communication, July 2023.[↑]
34. Mia Birdsong, How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community (Hachette UK, 2020), 220.[↑]
35. Charlene Carruthers, Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements (Beacon Press, 2018), 92.[↑]
36. Esther Seo, personal communication, July 31, 2023.[↑]
37. Mariame Kaba, “Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other People,” interviewed by Eve Ewing, Adi Magazine, Fall 2019, https://adimagazine.com/articles/mariame-kaba-everything-worthwhile-is-done-with-other-people/.[↑]
38. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994), 12.[↑]
39. Asunción Bernárdez Rodal et al., “From Action Art to Artivism on Instagram: Relocation and Instantaneity for a New Geography of Protest,” Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies 11, no. 1 (2019): 24.[↑]
40. Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (Beacon Press, 2019), 2.[↑]
41. Leah A. Jacobs et al., “Defund the Police: Moving Towards an Anti-Carceral Social Work,” Journal of Progressive Human Services 32, no. 1 (2020), 53.[↑]
42. George Brosi and bell hooks, “The Beloved Community: A Conversation Between bell hooks and George Brosi,” Appalachian Heritage 40, no. 4 (2012): 76.[↑]
43. Alexis Pauline Gumbs cited in adrienne maree brown, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (AK Press, 2021), 41.[↑]
44. Alexis Pauline Gumbs cited in adrienne maree brown, Holding Change, 38-41.[↑]
45. Milo Giovanniello, full circle podcast assignment submitted to authors, August 15, 2023.[↑]
46. Michael Reisch (2019) cited in Sonsteng-Person et al., “A New World Cannot Be Built Alone: An Abolitionist Framework for Collective Action in Social Work,” Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work 1, no. 1 (2023), 11.[↑]
47. Mezzo social work involves small and medium-sized groups, such as neighborhoods, schools, or other local organizations, whereas Macro social work is a broad field that involves working to change large-scale issues that affect communities, cultures, and entire groups of people. See “Macro Social Work: An Overview”, Lesley University, accessed October 14, 2024, https://lesley.edu/article/macro-social-work-an-overview.[↑]
48. Lori D Patton, “Disrupting Postsecondary Prose: Toward a Critical Race Theory of Higher Education,” Urban Education 51, no. 3 (2016): 335.[↑]
49. Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America  (Scribner, 2020), 33.[↑]
50. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 279.[↑]