Nothing Never Happens

Our December 2020 podcast features Professor Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.

Part 1: On Nurturing Student Agency

Part 2: On Dismantling Oppression

Dr. Bali is the author of many articles and blogs that push the boundaries of pedagogical theory and praxis, and in particular online teaching and learning. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy and editorial board member of Teaching in Higher Education, Online Learning Journal, Learning, Media and Technology, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education and the Journal of Pedagogic Development.

Lucia and Tina met Maha at the Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020 conference last summer; she served as their former International Director. Check out her blog and also her work at virtuallyconnecting.org and Equity Unbound, both of which she helped to found and facilitate.

Closing music: “Plateau’s Republic” by Akrasis: Max Bowen (raps/guitar) and Mark McKee (beats/trumpet), 2013. Available on Bandcamp.

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Our November 2020 podcast features Dr. Jan Willis, acclaimed teacher of religion and author of the lauded memoir Dreaming Me: An African American Buddhist Journey. We talk to her about how engaged Buddhism shapes her pedagogy, the models of teaching that have influenced her, what transformative responses to racist violence look like, and much more.

Jan Willis is the Professor Emerita of Religion at Wesleyan University, where in 2003 she was awarded the Wesleyan University Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching for her “ability to make learning a shared process” and “open [the] eyes [of students] to a culture far different from our own.” And full disclosure: for the past several years Jan has been a colleague of Tina’s as a Visiting Professor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia.

Jan grew up during segregation in Docene, Alabama, a coal mining town outside of Birmingham. The black Baptist church, the Civil Rights Movement, the presence of the Ku Klux Klan, along with a supportive family and teachers all formed the backdrop of her early years. Scholarships took her to Cornell University, where she studied philosophy (B.A. and M.A.), and in her junior year and after found her way to India and Nepal, where she met her mentor, Lama Thubten Yeshe. That experience led Jan to continue studies with Lama Yeshe and also earn her doctorate in Indic and Buddhist Studies at Columbia University.

Jan has won academic and popular acclaim for her teaching. She was listed by Newsweek and Ebony Magazine and other publications as an influential religious leader. In December 2000 Time Magazine named her one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” Jan is a renowned teacher of over 40 years of experience. When Tina tells colleagues at other institutions that Jan is teaching at Agnes Scott, they are wildly jealous. At Agnes Scott she has taught “Women and Buddhism,” “Socially Engaged Buddhism,” and “Race and Racism through a Buddhist Lens,” the latter course with an overflowing classroom of students and local community members. Jan continues to teach nationally and internationally at Buddhist retreat centers, including the Garrison Institute, Tibet House U.S., and Spirit Rock in Marin County, where in October 2019 Jan and Angela Davis were in conversation as the keynote event of the gathering of the Buddhist Sangha of Black African Descent.

Jan is a prolific writer. Her critically lauded memoir, Dreaming Me: An African American Baptist-Buddhist Journey (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001) to a book of her collected essays, Dharma Matters: Women, Race and Tantra (Wisdom Publications, 2019). In his forward to these essays, Charles Johnson calls Jan “an intellectual and spiritual pioneer.”

As Jan quotes the Buddha announcing to his followers, “’Come and see! Do not be led by reports or tradition or hearsay. Be not led by the authority of religious texts, nor by mere logic or inference, nor by considering appearances, nor by delight in speculative opinions, nor by seeming possibilities, nor by the idea, ‘This is our teacher.’” With this pedagogical mantra Jan challenges her students “to come and see” for themselves.

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Our October 2020 podcast features fearless and visionary co-directors of Project South, Emery Wright and Steph Guillod. Founded in 1986 as the Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide and based in Atlanta, GA, Project South is firmly rooted in the dynamism and creativity of the Black freedom tradition. It is a center for political education, grassroots organizing, legal and rights support, and movement support and solidarity.

Steph and Emery tell us about the history of Project South, how they came to their work, and how the work of grassroots education and movement building intersect in the organization. We hear about some of the current areas of focus for Project South, including a youth organizer-training program being held remotely at the time of recording and community-based free COVID-19 testing. From here, we deepen our conversation about methods and theoriest of community organizing and radical pedagogy. We talk about what it means to establish — and to keep — trust in the context of raced, gendered, classed power that cross-cuts movement organizations.

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Our September podcast features Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris, whose voices in the field of hybrid and digital pedagogy have been beyond clutch for many of us thrown into this field by the pandemic context. In Act 1, we talk to Jesse and Sean about how they came to the work of critical pedagogy, …

Continue reading "No Tricks: Critical Pedagogy for Hybrid Teaching"

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The post Out on the Line, Act 2: Between Charter Unions and Charter Abolition appeared first on Nothing Never Happens.

In Act 1 we talk to teacher-organizers Martha Baumgarten and Renee Ridolfi about their pathway to becoming teachers and how they ended up at Acero Charter Schools in Chicago. Commenting on the broad problems with charters and with the broader privatization of education, they reflect on what they have learned about practices of anti-racist solidarity …

Continue reading "Out On the Line: On Charter School Unionization and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike"

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Our July 2020 features the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strikers, who are fighting for a cost of living adjustment (#COLA), and for higher education that is premised not on wealth-hoarding and austerity, but on critical praxis toward transformative justice.

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We delve deeper into the status of critical pedagogy in hybrid and online teaching. The transition to remote modalities raises many issues: surveillance of students and teachers, the reproduction of capital for private tech corporations, issues of course adaptation, and the accessibility of online formats. What does a concept like “radical hope” actually mean in …

Continue reading "Stories for Better Futures: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 2"

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Tina and Lucia talk to Kevin Gannon in June 2020, on the heels of a spring term in which we saw a mass pandemic-fueled shift to online teaching. Kevin describes the experiences and histories that led him to the field of critical pedagogy and introduces his hot-off-the-press book Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. He talks us …

Continue reading "Hope in Pandemic Times: A Conversation with Kevin Gannon, Act 1"

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