Dr. Errick L. Greene is Superintendent of Jackson (MS) Public Schools. My conversation with him on 11 August 2020 afforded the rich opportunity to produce three episodes in one: a look at some of the complications of starting the school year in the time of COVID-19; select reflections on public leadership in Mississippi at a moment of increasing awareness of systemic racism in the U.S.; and a masterclass in team leadership. Beginning his second quarter-century in education, Dr. Greene held leadership roles in Washington, DC and Tulsa, Oklahoma before becoming JPS Superintendent in 2018. Check out today’s show for the ways a supportive community can bring kids along.

And collaborative approaches to make any kind of leading better for everyone. Here’s that 8-minute segment, developed with fresh animation by Roy Chambers. Grateful to my Patreon supporters for making this possible! (Learn more about supporting Point of Learning through Patreon at the bottom of the page.)

8 Keys to Team Leadership

Plus a soundtrack featuring Gil Scott Chapman. As the kids say, it’s everything.

TRANSCRIPT

Check the description section of the YouTube video edition for subdivisions of the episode, in case you’d like to rewatch or share a particular segment.

YouTube Edition

Here’s the video letter to the JPS community that we discuss during the episode. Dr. Greene sent it the week after George Floyd was murdered.

Letter to JPS

Internationally acclaimed artist Gil Scott Chapman returns to Point of Learning to lend some Mississippi-inflected keys to today’s mix. The soundscape he created derives from Mose Allison, a blues pianist and composer born in Tippo, Mississippi in 1927.

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Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures—including the cultures of progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. In our conversation in early June 2020, we discuss some of the ideas that have earned him nearly 8 million TED Talk views and a spot in Prospect magazine's 2019 list of Top 50 Thinkers in the world, focusing on concepts from his two New York Times-bestselling books, The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff).

2-Minute Episode Trailer

If you’d like to share with friends who are more inclined to YouTube than podcasts, here’s the full video companion:

YouTube Edition

Thanks as always to Shayfer James for music. In addition to standard intro (“Weight of the World”) and outro (“Villainous Thing”) instrumentals, Shayfer’s songs “Filthy Habit” and “Carnival in Harlem” appear in this episode.

Episode Transcript

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Jonathan Haidt resources

Click text links for websites with a lode of materials related to each of Jonathan Haidt’s books The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind, and The Coddling of the American Mind (co-authored by Greg Lukianoff).

For the trailer as well as the video companion for this episode, I used a graph about teen depression that was featured in a nature.com News & Views Forum piece (2/10/20) by Jonathan Haidt and Nick Allen on the effects of digital technology on mental health. If you’d like to study that more closely and in context, here’s the link to the page with downloadable PDF.

Jonathan Haidt is a favorite of the TED stage, having given four talks to date: “The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives,” “Religion, Evolution, and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendence,” “How Common Threats Can Make Common (Political) Ground,” and “Can a Divided America Heal?”

In today’s show, we discuss the relationship between unstructured free play for kids and the development of skills essential for democracy, like deciding what to do and working out disagreements without a referee. The Coddling of the American Mind makes a strong argument against over-structuring kids’ free time. To learn more about countering the culture of overprotection, check out letgrow.org.

Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and learn from each other: Heterodox Academy, Open Mind Platform, and Ethical Systems.

For fans of social psychology, cultural psychology, moral psychology, evolutionary psychology, positive psychology, ethics, morality, and politics, Jonathan Haidt has published over 100 academic articles. (Also includes links to Haidt’s articles for popular periodicals like The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.)

In his essay On Liberty, philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) argues for viewpoint diversity and free speech in ways that feel quite relevant today. Professor Haidt teamed up with co-editor Richard Reeves and artist David Cicirelli to create a condensed, illustrated version of one section of Mill’s essay that is available for free download. Appropriate for juniors and seniors in high school on up to you and me.

Master teacher Michelle Gigante has been guiding people toward energetic openings through a blend of yoga, breathing, and mindfulness techniques for nearly 25 years. The founder and director of Shakti Yoga in Buffalo, Michelle has an extensive background in theatre and dance, which contributes to her ability to execute classes with clarity and precision, improvising sequences that are creative and playful. I have appreciated her classes since becoming a member of the Shakti community when I returned to Buffalo in 2018. Deeply versed in healing modalities from yoga to Reiki to Qigong, Michelle is not generally, however, a fan of communications technologies, so when she decided to start offering centering sessions over Facebook Live and yoga sessions via Zoom, I sensed the opportunity for a wonderful conversation about how and why to learn to care for the self during a global health crisis.

To provide a glimpse of one of Michelle’s online sessions, I cut a short video from one of her 60-minute Zoom sessions that includes three typical segments: a breathing exercise, child’s pose, and a gentle shake derived from Qigong. Check it out, and get in where you fit in. If you’re not drawing a paycheck these days, Michelle welcomes you as her guest. If you are, there are plenty of options to donate to this good work. For more information about current offerings and more, visit shaktibuffalo.com.

Shakti Zoom Sampler (11 min)

Because Michelle has students (and fans) in many time zones, I offered to edit a few hour-long sessions of different styles so that yogis could practice on their own schedules. A typical chair-based practice, Shakti flow, and gentle flow are available in the PRACTICE section of the home page for Michelle’s YouTube Channel.

Shakti Ma Michelle YouTube Channel

It’s an honor that the podcast gets quoted and cited sometimes, and also that some folk like to read along. Here’s what we said:

Episode Transcript

SOUNDTRACK

Ravi Padmanabha is a composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist who has performed at Shakti throughout the years, and accompanied many of Michelle’s classes. He studies and plays a wide range of music, from jazz to Indian to experimental styles from many parts of the globe. Ravi has studied with many Indian masters, including Pandit Samar Saha, Pandit Sharda Sahai, and Pankaj Misra. Featured on many recordings, Ravi has led various musical projects such as My Nada Brahma, the Bul-Bul Tarang Gang, and more recently the Transindental Karmacist and Americana Raga. His collaborators include: Steve Baczkowski, Tom Chess, Alex Glenfield, William Parker, William Cole, Junni Booth, Robert Dick, Daniel Carter, Cooper Moore, Arrignton DeDionyso, and Paul Flarherty. To purchase his Meditations Vol. 1 featured on this episode, here’s the Bandcamp page.

Shayfer James is the disquietingly talented songwriter whose music has opened and ended every episode of this podcast since the pilot episode in 2017. You can connect with his fans from around the globe via his Instagram account @shayferjamesmusic. During lockdown in his Jersey City apartment, he composed the song “With Love, from Quarantine,” which he granted me special permission to present as a hidden track at the end of this episode. If you like it, visit this Bandcamp page to view lyrics or purchase a download. 100% of sales will be donated to Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which provides financial assistance to legions of career musicians and music industry workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

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Point of Learning is for anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. Important ideas carefully curated. Available about every other month in podcast audio, often with a YouTube companion edition. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll reach out whenever a new episode or bonus item is ready!

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Jonathan Zimmerman is one of the foremost education historians working today. His work examines how education practices and policies have developed over time, and the myths that often cloud our understanding of teaching and learning. We sat down in his office in the Penn Graduate School of Education building in late February to discuss the teaching of controversial issues in U.S. schools. I believe that learning how to talk about difficult topics where reasonable people may disagree is one of the most important skills for citizens to develop. As the headlines on any given day will confirm, it’s also one of the things Americans are terrible at. Zimmerman’s 2017 book The Case for Contention (co-authored with Emily Robertson) explores why.

Quick preview of what is at stake: 1.) Teachers’ free speech rights are radically limited. 2.) During the Trump Administration, “What is a fact?” is the most important political question. 3.) Teaching how to understand controversial issues is not indoctrination. 4.) We can’t avoid important claims because they evoke reactions.

Check out the YouTube trailer. Trust me, you’ve got two minutes for this!

YouTube Trailer (1m 47s)

Professor Zimmerman and I spoke on 2/25/20, before social distancing related to COVID-19 was recommended.

Episode Transcript

Soundtrack

I usually ask guests what kind of music they might like incorporated into the underscoring of the episode. Jon Zimmerman was very specific: “America” by Simon and Garfunkel. Buffalo-based guitarist Drew Azzinaro agreed to help me out with some instrumental takes on the tune. This show includes samples of one cut with him solo and a couple versions where I played along on fiddle.

Related Materials

Civil discourse is a passionate interest, and it’s one of the areas where I frequently support schools in my consulting work.

1.) Sometimes when you’re trying to establish sound lines of reasoning, it’s helpful to consider fallacies, patterns of reasoning liable to lead to error. That can be a way in for strengthening critical thinking skills.

Teach kids how (not what) to think.

2.) As Dr. Zimmerman says in the show, it’s not that parents don’t want citizenship skills taught by schools; it’s just that citizenship is not most parents’ top priority. As a result, schools aren’t set up to engage students as citizens. Here are some of my thoughts about reversing that. (This blog post was translated for inclusion in the 2016 Teachers Exam of France.)

Engage students as citizens.

If you’d like to chat about engaging your students more deeply as citizens, or if you have any other questions related to professional development, coaching, or customized research for your organization, drop me a line!

Contact Peter Horn

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On today’s show, the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project. For over 30 years, this unique teacher-led professional development program has cultivated multicultural teaching and learning across the globe and around the U.S. On this episode, we hear the voices of four SEED folk: veteran facilitators and National SEED Staff members Dr. Willa Cofield and Nancy Rucker Livingston, as well as SEED founder Dr. Peggy McIntosh, and Emily Style, who co-directed SEED for its first 25 years. By asking SEED leaders to examine their own school and life experiences while they study classic and contemporary scholarship, the National SEED Project has equipped teachers in 42 U.S. states and 15 other countries to challenge inequitable systems and establish more inclusive classrooms for more than three million students. (Image: my dandelion doodle, inspired by the National SEED Project logo.)

YouTube Trailer (3 min.)

Episode Transcript

FEATURED GUESTS

Dr. WILLA COFIELD joined SEED in 1989. She has written that the civil rights movement awakened in her a new feeling of personal power and a determination to work for change. She vowed “always to be involved in the effort to liberate the hearts and minds of oppressed people.”

NANCY RUCKER LIVINGSTON joined SEED in 1994, which she compared to “coming home”: “SEED has provided a way for me to stand upon the shoulders of my elders to continue their work of creating a more just and equitable world.” 

Dr. PEGGY McINTOSH founded what became the National SEED Project in 1986. An activist, scholar, and feminist, she has said, “We are all part of what we are trying to change.” Her book On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning: Selected Essays 1981-2019 is now available from Routledge. Click the button to visit the show page of my full episode with her.

Unpacking White Privilege with Peggy McIntosh

EMILY STYLE co-directed the National SEED Project from 1987 to 2012. Describing SEED work as both nourishing and challenging, Emily has provided memorable language for some philosophical tenets of the program, such as “Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students.” Click the button to visit the show page of my full episode with her.

Windows and Mirrors with Emily Style

Additional Show Notes

As usual, Shayfer James has graciously provided intro and outro music. In addition, instrumental versions of songs from his album Haunted Things are featured throughout this episode. For more information about his music and performance schedule, visit shayferjames.com. And click the second half of this sentence to find Strength of Soul by SEED-trained equity practitioner Naomi Raquel Enright.

DISCLAIMER: This episode is my partial (but enthusiastic) introduction to a complex, long-established program. For official information about the National SEED Project, including information about New Leaders Week trainings, visit the site below.

National SEED Project

Never miss an episode!

Point of Learning is for anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. Important ideas carefully curated. Available about every other month in podcast audio, often with a YouTube companion edition. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll reach out whenever a new episode or bonus item is ready!

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Can you spare a dime? If you’re interested in supporting this work, click the button below. Point of Learning has partnered with Patreon to keep support simple, with membership tiers beginning at just $3/month—about 10 cents per day.

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Forty-four seasons in, Shakespeare in Delaware Park is one of Buffalo, New York’s great public art traditions. As a little kid, some of my first memories of my hometown were family outings seeing old plays in this beautiful green space. As fortune had it, I returned this summer as a performer, joining an outstanding cadre of designers, actors, musicians, directors, managers, and interns to work on a fresh, fun production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. This episode showcases contributions from some people who make magic happen. (Cartoon LLL characters by intern Edie Gregg, who can be found on tumblr @jgvfhl.)

YouTube Version

Episode Transcript

Shakespeare in Delaware Park XLIV

SAUL ELKIN, Artistic Director

LISA LUDWIG, Managing Director

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

STEVE VAUGHAN, Director

SCOTT RICHARDSON, Technical Director

DAVID DWYER, Scenic Designer

ALLEY GRIFFIN, Props Charge

JENNA DAMBERGER, Costume Designer

BRENNA PRATHER, Assistant Costume Designer

KATIE PERICAK, Wardrobe

EMMA SCHIMMINGER, Lighting Designer

RANDY ANDROPOLIS & JAY WOLLIN, Composers & Co-Sound Designers

TERRI VAUGHAN, Choreographer

TYLER FURNISS, Live Sound

CHRIS BALLARD, Sound Setup

NATALIE MORROW, Stage Manager

CALI SMITH, Assistant Stage Manager

BAILEY WILSON, Assistant Stage Manager

JAY WOLLIN, KEITH GALANTOWICZ & JOHN LANDIS, Musicians

GRETCHEN MARTINO, Dance Captain

CAST

BEN CALDWELL, King Ferdinand

REBECCA ELKIN, Princess of France

DARRYL SEMIRA* Lord Berowne

MARISSA BIONDOLILLO, Lady Rosaline

LUCAS LLOYD, Lord Longaville

GRETCHEN MARTINO, Lady Maria

DAVID WYSOCKI, Lord Dumaine

JAMIE NABLO, Lady Katherine

NATHANIAL W. C. HIGGINS, Boyet

TOM LOUGHLIN* Don Adriano de Armado

MELISSA LEVENTHAL, Jaquenetta

LARRY SMITH, Holofernes

CHARLES WAHL, Moth

NICHOLAS LAMA, Constable Dull

PETER HORN, Costard

*Member, Actors' Equity Association

SPECIAL THANKS TO …

TYLER FURNISS for mastering Love’s Labour’s Lost music

TOM MAKAR for supplemental Shaxpere music & theme remix

LARRY ROWSWELL & RYAN KAMINSKI for production photos used in YouTube version

MICHAEL FRANK Jr. for permission to use Hoyt Lake artography in YouTube version

Never miss an episode!

Point of Learning is for anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. Important ideas carefully curated. Available about every other month in podcast audio, often with a YouTube companion edition. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll reach out whenever a new episode or bonus item is ready!

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Emily Jane Style is a relational scholar. She appreciates the intellectual dimension of ideas, but also knows that ideas matter relationally, because there are real flesh-and-blood people in any given room, people with real and complex life stories involved in any given discourse. My favorite tribute to Emily’s work comes from Christina Patterson Brown, an educator and activist who studied with her in 1991, and nearly three decades later thanked Emily for modeling “what woke and intersectional work looked like before there was an internet.”

On today’s show we discuss three of the most important concepts Emily taught me when we overlapped as colleagues: come to terms with the large slice of human experience that you don’t know you don’t know; remember that 50% of the curriculum walks in the room with your students; and make sure you’re providing a balance of “windows” and “mirrors” in the texts you ask your students to engage with. We do some school talk on this show, but I believe these ideas have a place in everybody’s toolkit. [Photo credit: Brenda Flyswithhawks. Emily is holding a print of Carmen Lomas Garza’s painting "Earache Treatment," which functions both as window and mirror for Style.]

Episode Transcript

Featured Musician

Jason Grant is a dear friend and former colleague who also happened to be a participant with me in the first SEED cohort that Emily led at Westfield High School.

Additional Resources

Emily’s 1988 essay “Curriculum as Window & Mirror” has been so influential that the Wellesley Centers for Women threw a 30th birthday party for it on October 4th, 2018.

Curriculum as Window & Mirror (1988)

I’ve used it so often that I adapted it into a one-page handout to use with groups of teachers in various settings.

Check your curriculum for windows and mirrors.

Emily first wrote about what she calls “DKDK” (what you don’t know and don’t know that you don’t know) in an article called “In Our Own Hands: Diversity Literacy” for Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 64-84. The piece is quite accessible, with good exercises.

In Our Own Hands: Diversity Literacy (1995)

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Point of Learning is for anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. Important ideas carefully curated. Available about every other month in podcast audio, often with a YouTube companion edition. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll reach out whenever a new episode or bonus item is ready!

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The U.S. cultivates a belief in meritocracy: People get what they deserve. Whatever we have, we earned. The problem, of course, is that it’s not true. In this episode, I talk with with Dr. Peggy McIntosh, the scholar who has done more than anyone else in the past 30 years to advance the concept of privilege as crucial for understanding and dismantling our pervasive myth of meritocracy. Whether you are skeptical of privilege or you endorse it as a way to describe part of our social reality, the notion of unearned advantages and disadvantages based on aspects of identity—like race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, appearance, religion, and physical ability—is part of our national conversation these days, so it’s worth slowing down a minute and thinking about what privilege is and is not.

Episode Transcript

Special note on episode music: To complement the badassery of Peggy McIntosh, I asked Shayfer James for permission to use instrumental versions of tracks from his fierce new album Hope and a Hand Grenade. Check it out on shayferjames.com, as well as details for the upcoming performance of The Ninth Hour, a fresh take on Beowulf by Shayfer and Kate Douglas, at the Met Cloisters on June 28th.

Related Materials

There are two classic versions of Peggy’s article on White privilege, which may be found online only on The National SEED Project website. The first, published in 1988, is called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies.” [Note on capitalization of racial categories.]

Longer Version

The shorter version was published in 1989 as “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Both versions appear with Peggy’s 2010 “Some Notes for Facilitators,” which is also well worth your time.

Shorter Version

Peggy’s new book, On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning is published by Routledge.

Peggy's New Book

As mentioned in the episode, The National SEED Project will be featured in its own episode later this summer.

The National SEED Project

The Combahee River Collective Statement (April 1977), mentioned in the episode, was not easy to find for a long time!

Combahee River Collective Statement

Never miss an episode!

Point of Learning is for anyone curious about what and how and why we learn. Important ideas carefully curated. Available about every other month in podcast audio, often with a YouTube companion edition. Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll reach out whenever a new episode or bonus item is ready!

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According to the April 8, 2019 edition of The Nation, U.S. college students who graduated in 2017 averaged $28,700 in student loan debt. According to this podcast, Cuban college students averaged 0. But that’s just the beginning of what we can learn from Cuba! Episode features highlights of my conversation with Yanna Cruzata Quintero, a sidebar on the jaw-dropping Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, and lots of good music.

YouTube version

Next to this trail map near Trinidad, stocks once used for enslaved persons have been preserved. Cubans own their history in ways North Americans may find surprising.

Transcript

Supplementary Materials

To me, one of the inherent triumphs of the Literacy Campaign of 1961 is providing an important means for 100,000 kids to understand themselves as citizens with something to contribute. Because most of us are not ready to organize a program to teach 700,000 people to read in less than a year, here are some smaller steps to take with kids in school.

Engage Students as Citizens

A hero of mine long before I knew he wrote a book on exactly what came to captivate me during my recent trip to Cuba, Jonathan Kozol discusses Children of the Revolution: A Yankee Teacher in the Cuban Schools with the legendary Studs Terkel in 1978.

Studs Terkel Radio Archive 11/10/78

Epic Theatre Ensemble is dedicated to fostering dialogue about current civic, social, and ethical issues. Epic is at once an off-Broadway theatre company that premieres professional productions and an arts education powerhouse with an array of award-winning programs for students—in school, after school, and during the summer. It’s a collaborative of teaching artists and students who believe that participation in theatre is essential to a healthy democracy, and that this kind of engaging theatre experience should be a hallmark of U.S. education for all students. This episode features highlights of my conversation with Melissa Friedman, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Epic Theatre Ensemble, as well as some examples of the amazing work Epic does to engage students as citizens. (Photo by Ron Russell.)

YouTube Version

Transcript

Supplementary Materials

One episode can hardly do justice to the scope of Epic’s work with young people, let alone the different kinds of shows they mount throughout the year. The Epic website will not only inform you about coming attractions, but also much of the organization’s history that we didn’t have room for.

Epic Theatre Ensemble

This month’s episode features clips from Laundry City, an original work commissioned by New York Appleseed and Teachers College, Columbia University that was written and performed by Epic students. Dealing with segregated schools in NYC, the title plays on the stark metaphor of keeping white and colored clothes separate. The full performance runs about 30 minutes, followed by student-led discussion with the audience. Featuring Olivia Dunbar, Jeremiah Green Jr., Salma Hassan, Davion Osbourne, and Nakkia Smalls.

Laundry City