Human Restoration Project

Earlier this summer we released audio narrations of pieces from our upcoming progressive education primer, the opening essay, We Are Worldbuilders, and Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, that you can find on this podcast feed. But these two upcoming episodes are special.

The next episode after this one will be episode 200, and it’ll be a listener guided look back through our archives going way back to the before-times of 2018. If you want to share an episode that was particularly special or important to you, send the name of the episode with a description of what it meant to you to [email protected] and I’ll read your name and description on air and play highlights from that episode.

Today, we’re presenting original poems written  and read by Cassie Nastase, HRP’s Third Coast Learning Collaborative Coordinator, for that primer, and for which Cassie also created the incredible cover art collage. This first one is titled, To Learn is to Be, and you can find a link to it in the show notes.

You can find all of our writing, podcasts, and school-based work at Humanrestorationproject.org, and with that, I’ll let Cassie have the last word.

To Learn is to Be - poem by Cassie Nastase on HRP website

10 Piano Tracks (vol. 1) by Ethereal 88 | https://ethereal88.bandcamp.com

Royalty Free Music by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

"Appalachia has a history and culture worth preserving, and a future worth pursuing," reads The Big Idea on AFP's homepage. The Appalachian Futurism Project’s mission is to leverage educational, cultural, and economic resources to develop an ecosystem across the region where young people are part of imagining and co-designing the Appalachia of the future. And joining me to talk about are two of the people doing this work, Dustin Hensley and Hannah Askew of the Appalachian Futurism Project, based out of Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

Appalachianfuturismproject.org

AFP on Facebook

AFP on Instagram

In case you’re not familiar at all with the Katamari video game series. As the player, you navigate this ball that starts off small at first until everything in the environment sticks to you, and by the end of a level you have entire buildings, trees, cars, and all manner of flora and fauna stuck to you.  I have the sense that my guest today is a human katamari. Every experience and interaction sticks, and she’s made it the mission of her life to make sense of it all. Dr. Jane Shore is an author, artist, former education researcher, co-founder of Revolution School, and founder of School of Thought. But before any of those titles, Jane is first and foremost a meaning-maker, and her most recent book, People Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human, braids together decades of experience, conversations, models, and research to bear on a new way of organizing learning and schooling:

“People-Based Learning is all about the interplay between connecting, reflecting, and affecting, a dynamic spiral or open-end loop that helps us engage meaningfully with new people, ideas, and experiences,” she writes, “At its core, this approach encourages both exploration and introspection, ultimately leading to deeper understanding, deeper personal meaning, deeper memory, and collective growth.”

peoplebasedlearning.com

People Based Learning by Jane Shore

At some point every exasperated teacher has thrown up their hands and repeated some version of "these kids just aren't motivated." Yet schools respond to unmotivated kids with the same toolkit every single time — carrots and sticks, points and prizes, lunch detentions, indoor recess, and on and on. Viewed through the lens of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, we start to see how the daily experience of school conspires to frustrate and thwart almost everything we understand about motivation. And when that results in disengagement, we tend to blame the student instead of the environment. However, when these needs are met, achievement and well-being improves, and behavioral and emotional disengagement decreases. And it’s not just for students, teachers whose needs for autonomy are supported report greater self-efficacy, job satisfaction, vitality, and less exhaustion. It seems like a no-brainer: if you want your students to do better, feel better, and be more engaged, and if you want to be less exhausted, you’ll want to hear what my guest today has to say about self-determination theory and agentic engagement.

Dr. Erika Patall is an award-winning researcher and Professor of Education and Psychology and Associate Dean of Research in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Her areas of expertise include the nature and determinants and development of motivation, education practices that support motivation and achievement, and research synthesis methods.

I had the privilege of attending a workshop led by Dr. Patall at the Student Power Summit this past spring on Student Motivation and Engagement in Culturally Diverse Classrooms, and I immediately knew we would need to bring that conversation to our listeners.

Dr. Erika Patall @ USC

On Friday, July 31st, we hosted Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos for a Q&A about her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies of Collapse book club, where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implication for education. Here is the full unedited Q&A. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.

We all grew up playing games — I fondly remember playing Go Fish with my grandma and her next door neighbor, as a 90s kid who grew up with an NES, it felt like every console generation was a leap forward in graphics and game quality, and, regardless of who you’re cheering for, tomorrow’s World Cup final  will be watched by an estimated 2 billion people.

But even though at some point many of us stop playing games—even if we don’t stop paying attention to them—we hold onto the experiences, the feelings, and the lessons: what they taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And it’s because games play an important role in human development and tell us so much about societies and cultures at large, the relationship between play, games, and learning has always been a focus of our work. It’s also been the lifelong interest of my guest today, game designer, artist, author, and researcher, Dr. Mary Flanagan.

Mary Flanagan is the founder of Tiltfactor game studio, whose tabletop and digital games intentionally tackle a number of social issues. The tagline on the Tiltfactor homepage reads “Game design for social change” with the challenge, “Can you make a more just and equitable world with games? At Tiltfactor, we believe we can.” Mary has also authored several incredible books, including the pivotal Critical Play about radical game design, and coauthored, Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Given Mary Flanagan’s unique and consequential focus, I wanted to sit down with her to see what we can learn at the intersection of play and critical pedagogy.

Playing Oppression : The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

Critical Play: Radical Game Design

Critical.play on Instagram

http://tiltfactor.org/

https://resonym.com/

Hey there, Nick here at Human Restoration Project. We took the longest break in our podcast’s history last month, and I hope you were able to take a break, too. We’re back for biweekly releases through the summer starting today with Dr. Sarah Benson. Sarah is Associate Professor in Inclusion and Disabilities at the University of Birmingham campus in Dubai where she teaches students from around the world as Head of Subject group for the School of education and lecturer for inclusion and special needs programs.

"Inclusion" has become a word everyone nods along to but almost no one defines the same way, And since so much of special education has historically been about sorting and labeling kids in relation to an imaginary average. I was so curious to ask Sarah, what does genuine inclusion require of us, and of schools, and what would it mean to restore the humanity of a special education system that was built to put kids into buckets?

Sarah and I also talked a bit about HRP Australia, which is a real thing you can check out at humanrestorationproject.au. HRP Australia is headed by Vaughan Cleary, former Learning and Teaching Head and Senior Deputy Principal at Assumption College in Kilmore, Victoria, and I’ll be headed down there at the end of this month to visit schools and experience Australian education firsthand.

Also a quick reminder that we’re reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know it for our HRP Summer Book Club, and there’s still time to join us. You can learn more at humanrestorationproject.org/book-club.

Episode notes:

HRP Australia

HRP Summer Book Club - Pedagogies of Collapse

‘I’m Determined’ at James Madison University

This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us.  Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!

I’m back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming Progressive Education Primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you can’t stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know. This one is written by our Executive Director, Chris McNutt, titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real.

HRP Book Club

Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access

Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, Chris McNutt

Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com

Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings.

This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us.  Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!

The HRP team has been on the road for 3 of the last 4 weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership, and I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI-Shirley. At the time of recording, I’m headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency. This is all to say I don’t have an epic 90 minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week, but what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, it’s called We Are Worldbuilders. See you in two weeks!

HRP Book Club

Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access

We Are Worldbuilders, Nick Covington

Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com

This conversation started 2 years ago, when I ran into Kelly McMahon at a summer conference. Kelly’s a kindergarten teacher at Hoover Community School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I was curious about what that label “community school” means in practice for teachers, students, and the community served by this new model for the area.

I’ve since learned that just because your kids attend Ames Community School District, for example, that doesn’t mean they attend a “community school.” Kelly put me in touch with Dave Greenberg and Angelia Ebner, senior policy analysts and community schools program specialists at the National Education Association, who have helped build and support thousands of community schools, as Angelia described it, from “coast to coast and border to border.”

And no exploration of the community schools model could be complete without including the story of Sustainable Community Schools in Chicago.  Just last year, Major Brandon Johnson announced a near doubling of the number of community schools in the city, bringing the number to 36.

I spoke with foundational community organizer, advocate, and elected Chicago Public Schools Board Member, Jitu Brown, about how organizing for Sustainable Community Schools defused the push by elected officials for school closures, privatization, and charter-ization of Chicago Public Schools.  For Jitu, the title of School Board member may be new, but he is Chicago born and raised, and he’s been organizing around education and all of its related issues since the 90s.

While there were just hundreds of community schools in the United States 15 years ago, today there are over 5,000 and growing in nearly every state in the nation. A consistent refrain from every person I spoke with for this episode was that community schools are the future of public education and the alternative to narratives about “failing public schools” that favor privatization as a solution.

NEA - What are community schools?

NEA - 5 Steps to Kickstarting Community Schools in Your District

NEA Community School Measurement Guidance Tool 

Chicago Sustainable Community Schools 

Eve Ewing - Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side

You can read out directly to Angelia & Dave @ NEA:

[email protected] | [email protected]