Bettina L. Love

Bettina L. Love is an American author and scholar of education whose work focuses on abolitionist teaching, racial justice, and transformative schooling practices. She holds the William F. Russell Professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University, a role she assumed after serving as the Georgia Athletic Association Endowed Professor in Education in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Love earned a B.S. in Liberal Studies and an M.Ed. in Elementary Education from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from Georgia State University.

Love is the author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom (2019), in which she argues for a pedagogy committed to intersectional racial justice and the radical restructuring of U.S. education. She has also written Hip Hop’s Li’l Sistas Speak: Negotiating Hip Hop Identities and Politics in the New South (2012) and Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal, a New York Times bestseller. Love co‑founded the Abolitionist Teaching Network and created GET FREE, a hip-hop civics curriculum, and her scholarship has appeared in journals such as Educational Researcher, *Urban Education