Nothing Never Happens

As calls to decolonize education multiply across contexts and institutions, we must push this issue beyond optics and return to the question: what does commitment to decolonization demand? What risks and struggles? What experiments and solidarities?

Leigh Patel guides us as we embark on a deep dive into these urgent questions as they ramify across scales. Refusing to partition study from struggle, Patel exposes the settler colonial processes that continue to shape higher education, even as she lifts up radical projects of education otherwise.

Leigh Patel is Professor of Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy in the University of Pittsburgh School of Education. Her most recent book is No Study without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education.

Amid the newest wave of attacks on public education and inclusive learning, there are stories of hope and resistance. In this episode we talk with a high school social studies teacher at the front of the fight for antiracist, liberatory K-12 classrooms. Anthony Downer teaches Africana Studies, social studies, and civics at Frederick Douglass High School in the Atlanta Public School system. We talk to Anthony about how he and his students are working together to create a trauma-informed, healing-centric classroom.

More about our guest: Anthony Downer teaches Africana Studies, social studies, and civics at Frederick Douglass High School in the Atlanta Public School system. He attended public schools in Gwinett County, Georgia, attained a BA in Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Master's of Art in Teaching in social studies education at Georgia State University.

Anthony is a co-founder and vice president of Georgia Educators for Equity and Justice, the founder and Vice President of the Liberation Learning Lab, and the host of his podcast “Wat Dat Wednesday: Conversations on Education and Liberation” on Educational Entities. Find it on Youtube and Instagram Live: @thenawfstar. 

The common workplace issues of low pay, toxic environment, understaffing, corporate greed, wage theft, union busting, and high turnover also exist in institutions of higher education. Undergraduate students typically earn low wages at campus jobs. In this podcast we explore the concept that students are workers, due just wages and benefits and voice. Beginning in 2016, undergraduate students at Grinnell College in Iowa have worked to form the first union of undergraduate student workers, the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW). Union leaders, senior Keir Hichens and sophomore Malcolm Galpern Levin, are with us to give us the history of the movement, along with details of their organizing strategies. The union’s description is as “the only independent undergraduate labor union in the country, UGSDW fights for fair pay and benefits for workers at UGSDW.” Keir and Malcolm describe the context, the organizing process, the setbacks, the networks and coalitions, the victories, and the future expansion of the union. Students at Grinnell are discovering what collective power can do. As they work for transparency and accountability from their supervisors and the administration, they also address issues of food insecurity on campus. Keir and Malcolm provide insights on the value of undergraduate labor organizing to their own lives, to campus culture, and to the labor movement broadly.

What happens to grassroots movements when they get access to normative power? How does one resist capture? What traditions, theories, and cautionary tales should we reference?

Professor and critic Roderick Ferguson, author of We Demand: The University and Student Protests, among many other works on social movements and the politics of institutional dissent, joins us to discuss these themes, and much more, in our May 2022 episode.

This interview is for all who know that tough moral or political bind: between intellection and administration; between creative risk and bureaucratic necessity; between holding a radical critique of power and resisting cooptation in everyday life.

Credits

Music by Aviva and the Flying Penguins, Paul Myhrie, Aliyah Harris, and Akrasis (aka Mark McKee + Max Bowen)

Logo design by Emily Vinick

Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Get ready for a master class in Theater of the Oppressed! This month we welcome playwright, director, and author Adrian Jackson. Adrian is best known his role as the founder and longtime artistic director London-based theater and arts company Cardboard Citizens, which is dedicated to working with and for people who have experienced homelessness and poverty. Come for the raucous theater games, stay for the organic wisdom and transformative potential that they unlock.

Co-hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

Outro music by Akrasis (Max Bowen raps; Mark McKee beats)

How should we collectively defend classrooms from the neoliberal assault on democratic praxis and critical pedagogies? What histories, traditions, and alliances should shape our tactics?

Renowned critical pedagogue and prolific theorist Ira Shor, Professor Emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center, joins us to discuss these questions--and to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Nothing Never Happens.

Ira Shor has produced several foundational works in the practice of critical pedagogy. Some of his books include Culture Wars, Critical Education and Everyday Life, Empowering Education, When Students Have Power, and, with Paulo Freire, A Pedagogy for Liberation. Ira has supported this podcast since he agreed to be our first-ever guest back in March 2017.

Music by Aviva and the Flying Penguins, Paul Myhrie, Aliyah Harris, and Akrasis (aka Mark McKee + Max Bowen).

Logo design by Emily Vinick.

Co-hosted and co-produced by Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether.

What does it look like for pedagogy to begin with the stories, hopes, and critiques that are already present in the classroom? How has this approach to education been practiced in movements for social transformation? What are its demands on teachers and learners?

In our January 2022 episode, teacher and author Stephen Preskill joins us to talk these questions and much more. Topics include balancing discrete political paradigms with democratic methods, the difference between integrative democratic practices and one-off pedagogical "tricks," and Preskill's new book Teaching in Black and White: Myles Horton and the Highlander Center's Vision for Social Justice.

What are the implicit "agreements" structuring our teaching and learning practices? How might we create new agreements for educational justice and collective healing? Professor Emerita Laura Rendón talks college access, contemplative teaching, and practices for survival and connection in our December 2021 episode.

Music credit: "Water's Edge" by Aliyah Harris

Photo credit: @jrkorpa at Unsplash

How is public higher education implicated with settler colonial dispossession and genocide? What are methods to visualize, teach, and encourage continual investigation and intervention into these continually unfolding histories? Project team leaders behind Polk Prize-winning Land Grab University research project and database join us to talk these questions and more in our November 2021 episode of Nothing Never Happens.

Speakers: Tristan Ahtone (Kiowa), Margaret Pearce (Citizen Band Potowatomi), Bobby Lee.

Hosts: Tina Pippin and Lucia Hulsether

How can we align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other movements for indigenous liberation? Scholar, teacher, and poet Dina Omar joins us to follow this question into the many others it opens up -- from decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence.

We urge listeners to read and adopt the commitments outlined in the open letter "Palestine and Praxis," which our guest co-authored and which is linked below.

Open letter: https://palestineandpraxis.weebly.com/

Outro music is "Hemlock" by Akrasis. Find their amazing catalog here.

Episode photo by Corleone Brown on Unsplash.