FreshEd

Today we air the third episode of Flux, a FreshEd series where graduate students turn their research interests into narrative-based podcasts. This episode is by Mari Casellato, a recent graduate of Teachers College, Columbia University.

Mari takes us on a journey through time, revealing the potential of youth participation in environmental education in Brazil (and beyond). You might be thinking Brazil – where the Amazon was on fire just last year and the current Bolsonaro government has been routinely criticized for doing too little to prepare for the climate crisis. But back in the 1990s and early 2000s, Brazil spearheaded this idea of environmental education, which brought together a diversity of voices through national conferences and was seen as a political act. Mari was personally involved in this history.

freshedpodcast.com/flux-casellato

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Today’s episode was created, written, produced, and edited by Mari Casellato.

Johannah Fahey was the executive producer and Brett Lashua and Will Brehm were the producers.

Voices:

Narrator: Mariana Casellato

History narrator: Tiago Luna

English version of Joao: Alcides Ferreira

English version of Mariana: Renata Penalva

English version of Isis: Aline Godoy

Youth voices: Ajani Stella and Kayley Chery

Music in this episode (used with permission):

Cacuriá – Mawaca

“Temas tradicionais de cacuriá”

Maranhão – Brazil/Arrangement: Mawaca

Special guest: Tião Carvalho (Voice, cavaquinho and caixa)

Lá na Mata da Amazônia - Seu Antonio and Grupo Cupuaçu

Other music came from the Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue): Eggs and Powder and Alum Drum Solo; and Soundstripe (www.soundstripe.com) Baiao Baiao, Coco Coco, and Sambita Sambita, all by Hola Hola.

Sound effects retrieved from Freesound.org: Sea sound effect by HowNotToSail and Forest sound scape by jonasrocha.

Former UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali speech at Rio 92 audio retrieved from the UN Audiovisual Library: The Earth Summit.

Special thanks to Rachel Trajber and Marcos Sorrentino for their generosity and continued work; to Clóvis, for continuing to be a reference; and to João, for the energy. To Projeto Cala-boca já morreu and all of its participants for so many years of partnership, with special remarks to Grácia for all the inspiration, to Mariana, for the insights, to Tiago, for the great voice, and, to Isis for all the support and companionship now and over the years. To Danilo Fernandes, Ajani Stella, Kayley Chery, Renata Penalva, Alcides Ferreira, Aline Godoy, Daniel Corsi, Carla Hirata, and Caio Mamede for agreeing to lend their voices for this project and for all the support. Finally, to Mawaca, to Tião Carvalho, to Neila Campos Mendes and her family, and to Grupo Cupuaçu for allowing us to use their amazing songs “Cacuriá” and “Lá na Mata da Amazônia” that gave so much life to this project.

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Learn more about Flux: freshedpodcast.com/flux/about/

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Next week we will air another episode of Flux, our series where graduate students turn their research interests into narrative-based podcasts. In fact, it’ll be the last episode of Flux for the year before we launch the application period for the next round of fellows.

Next week’s episode will be about environmental education in Brazil. Environmental education is different from education for sustainable development, the common phrasing used by UNESCO and others today. So, in preparation for the Flux episode, I’m going to replay an interview about education for sustainable development. It’ll be good background for next week’s episode.

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Climate change and its effects aren’t some future possibilities waiting to happen unless we take action today. No. The effect of climate change is already occurring. Today. Right now. Around the world, people have been displaced, fell ill, or died because of the globe’s changing climate. These effects are uneven: Some countries and classes of people are more affected by global warming than others. Still, the United Nations estimates that catastrophic consequences from climate change are only a decade away. That’s the year 2029. [Editor’s note: The IPCC report is from 2018 and gave a 12-year prediction, so it should read 2030, not 2029.]

What is the role of education policy in an era of detrimental climate change?

My guest today is Marcia McKenzie, a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Saskatchewan and director of the Sustainability Education Research Institute. She recently has been awarded a grant to research UN policy programs in relation to climate change education and in June will release a report for the United Nations that reviews country progress on climate change education and education for sustainable development.

In our conversation, we talk about what countries are doing or not doing in terms of education and sustainability, and we reflect on some of the existential questions that climate change brings to the fore.

https://freshedpodcast.com/mckenzie/

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Today I’m going to play an old episode that has taken on new meaning now that we’ve aired Yardain Amron’s Flux episode, “Education is not the silver bullet.” If you don’t remember or haven’t listened, Yardain brought together multiple stories of student activism in India and Puerto Rico to paint a picture of how the privatization and marketization of higher education is a violent act.

Back in 2017, I interviewed David Harvey, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. In that episode, our 100th, Harvey gave a Marxist interpretation of higher education. He touched on student debt, living through contradictions of capitalism, and resistance movements internal to our neoliberal system. Much of what he said provides excellent background to Yardain’s episode. It’s also nice to think that Yardain is studying Geography and Harvey is a Rockstar in the field. They make for an excellent pair of FreshEd episodes.

So here it is, David Harvey on Freshed from December 2017.

https://freshedpodcast.com/davidharvey/

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Today Yardain Amron joins me to talk about his FreshEd Flux episode, which aired last week. I recommend you listen to his Flux episode before listening to this interview. It’ll make a lot more sense!

https://freshedpodcast.com/flux-amron/

In our conversation today, we talk about his process of creating podcasts and telling stories. He says he dwells on contradictions that often go unnoticed. Yardain also talks about the connections and tensions between his approach to storytelling as a journalist and his approach to academics as a master’s student. He worked through some of these tensions developing his Flux episode, which brought together many different stories into a coherent narrative connected to theory.

Yardain Amron is a freelance journalist and master’s student at the University of British Colombia.

www.freshedpodcast.com/amron/

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Today we air the second episode of Flux, a FreshEd series where graduate students turn their research interests into narrative-based podcasts.

In this episode Yardain Amron crafts a narrative that shows complex theories in action. He doesn’t simply tell his listeners what these ideas are or name them explicitly. He takes us to disparate places–from universities in India and Puerto Rico to Occupy Wall Street–and makes a connection between them by embedding stories within stories.

Through this nested narrative, he shows us how the streets are schools by exploring spaces of activism as educative sites, while leading us to the core idea at the heart of this episode: the relationship between debt and violence.

Yardain Amron is a freelance journalist and master’s student in Geography at the University of British Columbia.

freshedpodcast.com/flux-amron

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Today’s episode was created, written, produced, and edited by Yardain Amron. Johannah Fahey was the executive producer and Brett Lashua and Will Brehm were the producers. Flux theme music was composed by Joseph Minadeo of Pattern Based music.

Music in this episode came from Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue):

Tiny Bottles

ShadowPlay

The Bus at Dawn

Kvelden Trapp

David Graeber clip from "Debt: The First 5000 Years — Extended Interview" by Uprising with Sonali.

Special thanks to Eleni Schirmer, Jose Laguarta, Banojyotsna Lahiri, Alessandra Rosa, and the many other student- and scholar-activists across the globe whose experiences and expertise, if not voices, underpin this story.

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Learn more about Flux: freshedpodcast.com/flux/about/

Twitter: @FreshEdpodcast

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Email: [email protected]

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Today we explore the language of instruction in refugee education. Although learning in a home language is important, often it’s impossible for refugee children. Such tensions have important implications for refugee futures which are often unknowable.

My guests are Celia Reddick and Sarah Dryden-Peterson who have recently co-written a new book chapter entitled “Refugee Education and Medium of Instruction: Tensions in Theory, Policy, and Practice.” Celia Reddick is a PhD Candidate in Education at Harvard where Sarah Dryden-Peterson is an Associate Professor and Director of REACH.

www.freshedpodcast.com/reddick-dryden-peterson/

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Today we look at some of the tensions implementing Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

My guest is Antonia Wulff who has closely followed the development, adoption, and implementation of the SDGs for nearly a decade. She even edited an open-access book about it, which was published last year. That book is Grading Goal Four: Tensions, Threats, and Opportunities in the Sustainable Development Goal on Quality Education. In our conversation today, she details some of the tensions in the SDGs, from its lack of an accountability framework to limited financing to problems balancing a broad and inclusive conception of quality with one that is narrow and based on global learning metrics.

Antonia Wulff is the Director of Research, Policy and Advocacy at Education International (EI), the global federation of teacher unions. She coordinated EI's advocacy and engagement in the intergovernmental negotiations on Agenda 2030.

www.freshedpodcast.com/wulff/

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Today we take stock of the first human rights guiding principles for education, known as the Abidjan Principles. Adopted in 2019, these principles provide guidelines for State obligations to provide quality public education and the role of the private sector in education.

My guest is Frank Adamson, Assistant Professor at California State University, Sacramento. Together with Sylvain Aubry, Mireille de Koning, and Delphine Dorsi, he’s recently co-edited the open-access book, Realizing the Abidjan Principles on the Right to Education: Human Rights, Public Education, and the Role of Private Actors in Education.

www.freshedpodcast.com/adamson/

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Today we look at the way in which dissertations in the early 20th Century produced and governed the emerging field of education and how these new knowledges moved across the world. Our focus is on Teachers College, Colombia University.

My guest is Daniel Friedrich, an Associate Professor of Curriculum and Director of the Doctoral Program in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Together with Nancy Bradt, he recently published in the latest issues of Comparative Education Review “The Dissertation and the Archive: Governing a field through the production of a genre.”

www.freshedpodcast.com/friedrich/

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Elite schools help reproduce the capitalist class. The sons and daughters of the wealthy go to elite schools to gain networks and receive education that helps maintain their social status in the future.

My guest today, Karen Lillie, has looked at this process in an elite school in Switzerland that enrolls children from around the world. She finds that students are in the process of becoming part of the transnational class while also maintaining their national identities in interesting ways.

Karen Lillie recently finished her PhD at University College London, focused on the processes of transnational class formation. Starting in October, she will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Her latest article is “Multi-sited understandings: complicating the role of elite schools in transnational class formation,” which was published by the British Journal of Sociology of Education.

www.freshedpodcast.com/lillie/

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