About

Dr. Bettina L. Love holds the William F. Russell Professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is an acclaimed author, known for her New York Times bestseller "Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal," which has earned her the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, and her book "We Want To Do More Than Survive," which has sold nearly 200,000 copies and is widely used in classrooms across the country. Her work focuses on education reform, race and ethnicity, gender and LGBTQ+ politics, urban schools, and teacher education. Dr. Love is a founding member of the task force behind the "In Her Hands" initiative, a program that distributed over $13 million in financial support to Black women across Georgia, and she has been recognized for her contributions to social justice and education through numerous awards, including the Kennedy Center Next 50 Leaders and the Black Girl Magic Award. As a highly sought public speaker, her expertise encompasses abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. Her insights have been featured in prominent media outlets such as NPR, PBS, The Daily Beast, Time, Education Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Social Science
• Aesthetics
• Communication
• Environmental ethics
• Media studies
• Public relations
• Literature
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Pedagogy
• Epistemology
• Art

Selected publications

• Cultivating Black Radical Love, Healing, and Joy:

  Demeter Press eBooks · 2025-08-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Thing”: Abolitionist Teaching in Practice

  Social research · 2025-12-01

  articleSenior author

  ABSTRACT: Teaching, learning, curriculum, and abolition are deeply entangled. Much of our understanding of abolition emerges from teaching spaces where curriculum becomes a method for liberation. These are sites where literacy is a means of acquiring knowledge for political power and freedom, where curriculum fosters self-determination and world-making, and where speculative fiction opens portals to abolitionist futures. This article explores the abolitionist teaching practices of a high school teacher in New Jersey who cofounded and teaches at a fugitive curricular space that challenges injustice, disrupts traditional schooling, and interrupts the “world-ending” public school system to engage in abolitionist world-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Illuminating the Call: Students Need Restful Dreams Full of Love

  Voices from the Middle · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Punished for Dreaming: The Case for Abolitionist Teaching and Educational Reparations

  2024-05-13 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this keynote conversation, Dr. Bettina Love tells the story of her generation, the Hip Hop generation - children of the '80s and '90s - who came of age when mass incarceration and educational policies put unmistakable, identical targets on the backs of Black children. Crime reform and education reform merged to label Black children as crack babies, Super Predators, and thugs, and told the nation they were nothing more than an achievement gap. Dr. Love's presentation vividly explains how the last four decades of educational reform laid the foundation for each book ban, CRT ban, and the never-ending goal of reformers to extract from Black education for their own gain. Her talk will end with a road map for repair, arguing for educational reparations with transformation for all children at its core.

  PublisherDOI

• Learning to Love

  2024-05-30 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  We do not speak enough about the resurrecting love of Black women educators. So often we are inundated with capitalism-induced images of pain, loss, and deprivation in education that we forget about the women who labored and continue to labor in love, despite suffocating conditions. In the spirit of our feminist foremother bell hooks (1999), we believe that love is multidimensional and necessitates a commitment to “care … trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge” (p. 94). While it is rare to find demonstrations of this type of love in the project of schooling, 1 which predicates itself on the harsh discipline of students (Meiners, 2011) and the mistreatment of teachers, Black women teachers continue to embody a pedagogical love. 2 The presence, wisdom, and love of Black women educators, although seldom recognized as “scholarly,” offer life-giving and generative insights into how to see and love Black children more fully. We praise the love of Black women educators by remembering those who showed us what it looks like to embody what hooks (2006) called a “love ethic.” Although the educators mentioned in this chapter may not use the term “love ethic” to describe how they approach their work, given the way they show up for their students and mentees despite being subjected to a “culture of domination” (hooks, 2006), it is fitting to suggest that they express an ethic of love. We present a constellation of Black methods (McKittrick, 2020) including a chant, reflections, and love stories not to romanticize the labor of Black women educators but to offer a nuanced perspective that recognizes the humanity of Black women educators and their distinct way of embodying love.

  PublisherDOI

• Sweet Honey in the Rock: Finding Healing and Wellness as Black Women Educators in Carceral Spaces

  Educational Studies · 2024-07-03

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• “A Brief Moment in the Sun”

  International Journal of Multicultural Education · 2024-04-29 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  White backlash is the immediate, violent response of some white people to the actual and perceived racial and educational progress of oppressed groups. In this paper, we take a historical detour to map this phenomenon, specifically in the history of K-12 Black education. We demonstrate that the current state of education is not an exceptional moment, but part of a long genealogy of anti-Black educational violence and white backlash. Yet, we suggest that operating from an understanding of the inevitability and imminence of white backlash offers necessary tools in the continued fight for liberatory Black educational futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Radical Doctrine: Abolitionist Education in Hard Times

  2023-09-15 · 3 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Don't Judge a Book by its Cover: An Ethnography about Achievement, Rap Music, Sexuality & Race

  Digital Archive @ GSU · 2022-05-10 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The purpose of this ethnographic study was to explore how youth consumption of rap music informed their ideas of gender, race, sexuality, and education at a local community center in Atlanta, Georgia. The participants in the study were comprised of three male and six female Black students from working class families, ranging in age from 13?17 years old. The data collection process included 60 formal interviews, 55 informal interviews, 27 focus group interviews, 103 participant observations, and document analyses of media materials. Atlas.ti: The Knowledge Workbench (2003) assisted with the organizing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting of the vast amount of data. Findings from the study revealed four major themes: (a) youth?s engagement with rap music fostered essentialized notions of Blackness, (b) teens believed that Blacks were intellectually inferior, (c) youth perceived their classroom teachers as racist and (d) youth responded to their teacher?s perceived racism by disassociating themselves from youth they believed to be academically inferior. The findings of this study addressed the need for candid dialogues about race in the classroom and educational policy that incorporates critical media literacy.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 16. Queering Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogies in the New South

  2022-10-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Damaris C. Dunn

  4 shared

• Corrie L. Davis

  3 shared

• Elizabeth Spaulding

  3 shared

• Brandelyn Tosolt

  Northern Kentucky University

  3 shared

• Qiana M. Cutts

  Mississippi State University

  2 shared

• Gholnecsar E. Muhammad

  University of Illinois Chicago

  2 shared

• Mark Anthony Neal

  Wheaton College - Illinois

  2 shared

• Alex Chisholm

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Teachers College, Columbia University

Awards & honors

• Stowe Prize for Literary Activism (2024)
• Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justic…
• Harriet Beecher Stowe Book Prize (2024)
• LA Times Book Prize Finalist (2023)
• RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ranking (position 55) (202…