Another Education Is Possible

Dr. Mark Leier, in many ways, grew up at Simon Fraser University. From visiting the campus as a child to later teaching there, he has consistently sought to introduce democratic pedagogical methods into education. In this episode, he joins guest host Ermioni Vlachidou to reflect on his journey through different stages of being an educator and discusses how both he and his classes have evolved over the years.

On this week's episode, Dr Harper Keenan joins co-hosts Emmy and Jordan to discuss trans pedagogies and non-prescriptive curriculums. While these terms might be on the newer side of things in educational discourses, queer and trans people are not. Their educational experiences tell a multitude of stories that have all too often been invisiblized in schools. While attending to the relentless forces of repression, Harper shows the possibilities of building classrooms and other educational spaces that affirm queer and trans students.

Sanctuary in school can be a way of thinking about how to protect immigrant students. As Dr. Chandler Miranda shows in this episode, making schools into sanctuaries requires shifts in the very foundations of schooling. This means reframing what knowledges are centered, how teachers think with their students (particularly marginalized students) from an asset-based perspective, and altering common sense elements of schooling like classroom layouts and assessment structures. Moreover, this shift rethinks the notion of sanctuary itself. Sanctuary is here not static and isolating but rather a mobile and active building of space that forges constellations of care that resist anti-immigrant forces.

In this episode, Chandler takes us through the history of one such network of schools, the Internationals Network for Public schools. She also guides us through everyday life in one of their schools. Throughout, she explores how this school community contends with and continues its work in this heightened moment of repression.

Continuing our series of short, conceptual episodes, Dr. Monisha Bajaj joins the podcast to describe what peace education looks like, its limits, and how educators might engage in it.

Dr. Noah Romero thinks with skaters, punk rockers, and unschoolers. Guided by indigenous knowledges, he conjures collective forms of decolonial education. Dr. Romero joins co-hosts Jordan and Sam to discuss what these diverse topics have to do with one another and how decolonial anarchist pedagogies might offer possibilities for public school teachers.

Within radical education, solidarity is a popular topic. What does it actually look like? How is it taught, learned, studied, and practiced? In this episode, hosts Jordan and Y chat with Dr. Shatara and Dr. Saleh to explore educational solidarity with and for Palestine and Palestinians.

In her recent book, Indebted Mobilities, Dr. Susan Thomas explores migrant students' material and affective encounters with debt in U.S. universities. She joins the podcast to explore the ways that higher education institutions specifically and empire more broadly aim to produce indebted migrant subjects. This wide ranging conversation also emphasizes how students negotiate and resist. That is, even as they are surveilled and disciplined, immigrant students forge educations as part of an internationalist form of solidarity.

Dr. Cath Goulding has been a constant presence in our Education, Genocide, Liberation course. She joins the podcast to share intimate and haunting stories of education within the concentration camps in which the U.S. incarcerated more than 120,000 people. In this conversation with hosts "Bosco" and "Sarah," Cath weaves narratives of her mother being born in one of these camps with an urgent call to teach this history capaciously. The episode also engages Cath's experiences visiting these camps to explore the possibilities born of place-based education and public pedagogy.

In our first episode in a series of short, conceptual explorations of education's role in the world, Dr. Abby Emerson joins us to discuss how education acts as a form of critical whiteness, how it can be anti-racist, and how abolition exceeds these framings to offer world-making possibilities.

In the season two premiere, Dr. Dani Friedrich returns to the podcast to explore education in relation to collective traumatic past. Dani takes us through education leading up to and during the Argentinian dictatorship. He also details the curriculum shift that led to Argentinian schools teaching about the dictatorship. Moving outside of schools, we also discuss different sites of public pedagogy and collective memory. The episode explores the educational conditions that make dictatorships possible and education's limits in reckoning with it.