Cultivating Community Cultural Wealth and Armed Love: Freedom School as a Vanguard

Abstract

We present a conceptual exploration of armed love as a component of liberatory pedagogy. We ground our work in community cultural wealth theory (CCW) that centers social capital often found in non-dominant communities under pressure. We argue that recognizing and working against exploitation using the community's social, cultural, and historical assets are central to liberatory pedagogy. Explicating the connections between armed love and CCW is a novel contribution to the field, as it has not been done before and it highlights how asset-based pedagogies that are grounded in love can act as a protective factor for students in a racist society.