The fourth Paris Conference on Education (PCE2025), held as a part of IAFOR’s European Conference Series and hosted at the Sorbonne University, takes place from June 10 to June 14.
Nermin Vehabovic, assistant professor of education in the Dr. Jo Watts Williams School of Education, presented at the fourth Paris Conference on Education (PCE2025), held as a part of IAFOR’s European Conference Series and hosted at the Sorbonne University. The conference takes place from June 10 to June 14 and brings together academics and scholars across national and disciplinary borders to encourage interdisciplinary discussion, facilitate intercultural awareness and promote international exchange.
Founded in 2009, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) is a non-profit, politically independent organization dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary dialogue, promoting intercultural understanding and encouraging international exchange through education and academic research. Based in Japan, IAFOR’s main administrative office is in Nagoya, while its research center is housed within the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP) at Osaka University.
In an individual paper session focused on teaching and learning, Nermin’s presentation, titled, “Abolitionist Teaching as Love, Justice, and Equity: Resisting Authoritarianism Through Praxis in Teacher Education During the Trump 2.0 Era,” captures how teacher candidates developed abolitionist teaching dispositions through community and global engagements.
Teacher candidates engaged in shared reading, drew on translanguaging and pursued various learning activities, disrupting deficit perspectives about refugee communities while strengthening their own commitments to critical love, justice and equity. Findings reveal that abolitionist teaching as care-centered approaches and everyday ways of acting upon the world, rooted in love, justice, and equity, enables both teacher candidates and multilingual families from refugee backgrounds to resist erasure and oppression.
This project highlights the urgent need for teacher education to push back against authoritarian policies and approaches to teaching and learning that suppress critical pedagogies, multilingualism, and culturally sustaining and historically responsive practices. By illuminating abolitionist teaching as everyday acts of resistance, this project underscores the transformative power of learning with and from minoritized and marginalized communities. It offers a model for teacher preparation that sustains democratic, inclusive and liberatory approaches in an era of democratic erosion in the United States and broader global contexts.
This project stems from work supported by prior funding from a faculty research grant awarded by the Center for Research on Global Engagement (CRGE) and two Community Partnerships Initiative (CPI) grants from the Kernodle Center for Civic Life.