Toward the end of school counseling: visionary possibilities for counselors to build and practice abolition in education

Abstract

ABSTRACT The abolitionist call to remove police from schools includes eliminating all forms of carcerality, such as school counseling, a field traditionally predicated on an alliance with the carceral state. We ask: How might counselors in schools build and practice abolition? How might we tease counseling as care work apart from its policing origins within the carceral containment of schools? How can we engage the contradictions and tensions? With an unwavering commitment to abolition, we transcend the carceral boundaries limiting our professional imaginations to vision an abolitionist approach to counseling in K-12 schools and school counselor education. In this article, we draw from the principles and practices of abolitionist organizing to vision radically life-affirming counseling processes in alignment with the movement for abolition, prioritizing those most intimately familiar with carcerality. Alongside each process, we offer experiments from our own abolitionist praxes to illustrate the tensions and possibilities of building and practicing abolition as counselors in education.