In this episode, I sit down with Gerald Campano to explore a deceptively simple question: what is literacy actually for? We move beyond the idea of reading and writing as neutral technical skills and examine how literacy is deeply tied to identity, power, culture, and justice. Gerald challenges the assumption that literacy is merely about decoding text. Instead, he frames it as a social and political practice that shapes who is heard, who is valued, and who gets to participate fully in civic life.

We discuss how schools often narrow literacy into standardized measures that flatten students’ cultural and linguistic resources. Gerald argues that students bring rich knowledge from their homes and communities, and that effective literacy education must honor those experiences rather than erase them. He shares examples of community-based and participatory approaches to teaching that reposition students as knowledge producers rather than passive recipients.

What stayed with me most is the idea that literacy is about reading the world as much as reading the word. When students learn to critically interpret their surroundings, their histories, and the systems that shape their lives, education becomes humanizing rather than sorting. This conversation pushes us to reconsider what counts as success in literacy education and who ultimately benefits from how we define it.

Chapters :

00:00 – Introduction

02:14 – What Is Literacy, Really?

07:32 – Literacy as Social and Political Practice

12:05 – Schools, Standardization, and Narrow Definitions

18:47 – Students as Knowledge Producers

24:10 – Community-Based Literacy

30:36 – Identity, Culture, and Language

37:22 – Reading the World

43:15 – Justice and Educational Equity

49:40 – Rethinking Success in Literacy Education

In this episode, I sit down with Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned education reformer Carl Wieman to explore one fundamental question: what does it actually mean to think like a scientist? We begin with his origin story at MIT, where he discovered that real physics happened not in the classroom, but in the research lab. That experience shaped his entire career. What struck me most was his observation that students who excel in coursework often struggle to “do physics” in authentic contexts. That puzzle led him to treat learning itself as a scientific problem.

Carl shares his research identifying 29 core decisions that experts across science and engineering consistently make when solving real problems. These decisions, which range from evaluating evidence to reflecting on assumptions, appear across disciplines. This reframes science not as memorizing equations, but as developing judgment under uncertainty. We discuss deliberate practice, why music teachers and athletic coaches often train expertise better than traditional instructors, and how active learning can replace passive lectures. His argument is clear: education should cultivate ways of thinking, not just the accumulation of facts.

We also explore science as a social enterprise. Carl argues that what counts as “good science” is ultimately defined by communities of experts, and that public trust depends on understanding science as a process for establishing knowledge, not just a set of conclusions. If the future of science education shifts from memorization toward reflection, problem-solving, and structured decision-making, we might not only produce better scientists but better thinkers across every field.

Chapters

00:00 – Introduction

01:23 – Finding Physics in the Research Lab

03:42 – Learning the Instructor vs. Learning the Subject

07:16 – Riding the Wave of Laser Technology

12:00 – Why Education Became the Real Question

16:04 – Memorization vs. Thinking Like a Scientist

18:33 – The 29 Decisions of Expert Problem Solvers

26:27 – Reflection and Thinking About Thinking

29:28 – Deliberate Practice and the Nature of Expertise

37:00 – Science as a Social Enterprise

42:49 – Trust, Experts, and Public Perception

48:04 – Depth Over Breadth in Science Education

50:00 – Resistance to Change in Teaching Culture

54:15 – The Social Contract of Science

58:37 – The Future of Science Education

In this conversation, I sit down with Anne Pomerantz, Professor of Practice in Educational Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, to rethink what language actually is. We begin with her multilingual upbringing and how growing up in a household filled with Yiddish, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and English shaped her curiosity about how language works. From there, we move into a powerful critique of how language is typically taught in schools. Instead of treating language as something alive and constantly evolving, we often reduce it to prescriptive rules, right and wrong answers, and hierarchies that privilege certain forms of speech over others.

We explore how language becomes a regulating force in society, shaping identity and reinforcing power structures. Why is pronunciation so emotionally loaded? Why do we assume some forms of speech are “better” than others? And what happens when we shift from a prescriptive mindset to one rooted in noticing, inquiry, and reflection? Anne shares how collaborative meaning-making works in real time, how conversations synchronize our bodies and minds, and how communication is always multimodal, involving gesture, tone, rhythm, and technology alongside words.

The episode ultimately turns toward uncertainty. What would education look like if we created spaces not for mastery of the right answer, but for curiosity and reflection? Anne argues that one of the most powerful things we can teach students is how to notice language in the world and ask deeper questions about it. Meaning is never fixed. It is constructed, revised, and reshaped through interaction. And when we learn to see language that way, we begin to live more attentively, more richly, and with greater openness to difference.

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and Multilingual Origins
03:00 – From Classics to Applied Linguistics
07:00 – Prescriptive vs Descriptive Views of Language
12:00 – Swearing, Play, and Inquiry as Gateways to Language
16:00 – Language, Hierarchy, and Social Power
20:00 – Multimodality: Gesture, Voice, and Technology
24:00 – Zoom, Synchrony, and the Physics of Conversation
30:00 – What Makes a Good Conversation?
36:00 – Classroom Hierarchy and Inquiry Spaces
41:00 – Living with Uncertainty in Education
45:00 – Pronunciation, Identity, and Emotional Stakes
50:00 – Meaning as Emergent and Iterative
54:00 – Noticing Language in the Wild

In this conversation, I sit down with Caroline Winterer, a historian of early America and the history of ideas at Stanford University, to rethink what history actually is. We begin with a simple but profound shift: history is not something that lives outside of us in textbooks. It lives within us. The past flows through our cognition, shaping how we see time, progress, identity, and even ourselves. We talk about how historians construct narratives, why events are never self-evident, and how every historical frame is an interpretive lens rather than a neutral structure.

From there, we explore the idea of progress. Caroline explains how progress itself is an invention of the Enlightenment, a relatively recent way of organizing time that differs from earlier decline narratives or cyclical views of history. We wrestle with whether humanity is truly moving forward, whether history repeats itself, and whether there are any real “laws” of history at all. What emerges is a powerful idea: the structures we place on the past deeply shape how we imagine the future.

The conversation ultimately turns inward. We reflect on uncertainty, on the discomfort of not knowing where things are going, and on how historical thinking can actually expand rather than shrink our imagination. Instead of treating the past as a treasure chest of fixed answers, Caroline invites us to see it as a dark cave we explore together with small flashlights. History becomes not a memorization of facts, but a creative, collaborative act of meaning-making. In a world that craves certainty, this episode is an invitation to sit with uncertainty and let it deepen our understanding of ourselves and our place in time.

Chapters:00:00 – Introduction and Falling in Love with History
04:00 – What Is History and Why Study It?
09:00 – Math, Artifacts, and the History of Everything
13:00 – Can We Ever Truly Understand the Past?
16:00 – Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Naming Time Periods
22:00 – Time Zones, Calendars, and the Human Construction of Reality
27:00 – The Invention of Progress
31:00 – Are There Laws of History?
36:00 – Events, Narratives, and Historical Truth
41:00 – Teaching History as Creative Exploration
45:00 – Does History Repeat Itself?
49:00 – Imagination, Politics, and Framing the Past
53:00 – Uncertainty, Meaning, and Living Without a Script

In this episode, I sit down with Andrea Kane, a longtime educator and district leader who has worked at nearly every level of K–12 education, from substitute teacher to superintendent and now professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania. We trace her journey from banking into elementary classrooms, and then into school and district leadership. Along the way, we unpack what actually changes when your perspective shifts from serving one group of students to overseeing entire ecosystems of schools. She explains what principals really do, how curriculum, instruction, and assessment form an interconnected loop, and what it means to lead within a system that must balance autonomy with accountability.

We also explore the tension between philosophical ideas about the purpose of education and the concrete realities of standards, testing, and evaluation. What does it mean to teach “to the test,” and is that always a bad thing? Where do autonomy and creativity fit inside state-mandated standards? We talk about culturally responsive teaching, district-wide strategy, and the challenge of scaling good ideas across 125 schools with very different communities and needs. Andrea reflects on how control in leadership is often an illusion, and how effective systems leave room for teacher innovation while still holding clear expectations for student outcomes.

Finally, we discuss the gap between theory and practice. What can practitioners learn from research, and what do academics often misunderstand about implementation? Andrea shares why not every research-backed idea works in every community, and why discernment is one of the most important skills an educational leader can develop. This conversation moves beyond abstract debates about education and into the real complexities of building, sustaining, and improving schools at scale.

00:00 – Introduction and Career Origins
03:00 – From Banking to the Classroom
06:00 – Moving from Teacher to School Leadership
09:00 – The Role of a Principal: Instructional Leadership and Complexity
14:00 – Balancing Academic Benchmarks with Human Development
19:00 – Understanding Curriculum, Standards, and “Teaching to the Test”
25:00 – Autonomy in Schools and Teacher Innovation
29:00 – District-Level Leadership and System-Wide Strategy
33:00 – Common Core, Change Management, and Community Communication
36:00 – The Purpose of Education: Private Good, Public Good, or Stratification
41:00 – Standards, Values, and Where Interpretation Enters
46:00 – Autonomy, Control, and the Limits of Quantification
52:00 – Leadership, Culture, and Culturally Responsive Practice
57:00 – Theory vs Practice: What Academia and Schools Can Learn from Each Other
1:01:00 – Scaling Ideas and the Realities of Implementation

In this episode, I share the beginning of my story. Before the podcast, before the interviews, before the frameworks and ideas, there was simply a young person trying to understand the world. I reflect on the early experiences that shaped how I think, what confused me, and why certain questions would not leave me alone. This episode is not about achievements or milestones. It is about the internal shifts that slowly changed how I saw myself and the world around me.

I talk about moments of doubt, identity, pressure, and the quiet discomfort of feeling like something important was missing. I revisit how school felt from the inside, how expectations shaped my sense of worth, and how I slowly began to separate external success from internal meaning. Along the way, I share the influences, conversations, and turning points that pushed me toward deeper inquiry rather than easy answers.

This episode is an attempt to trace the emotional and intellectual roots of everything that followed. It is about curiosity as survival, questioning as growth, and the long path toward building something that feels aligned with who I am. If the podcast explores what education could be, this episode explores why I needed to ask that question in the first place.

00:00 – Introduction
03:00 – Early childhood reflections
08:00 – School, pressure, and identity
13:00 – First encounters with doubt
18:00 – External success versus internal meaning
23:00 – Moments that did not make sense
28:00 – The influence of family and expectations
33:00 – Searching for direction
38:00 – Turning points in mindset
44:00 – Questioning achievement culture
49:00 – The beginning of deeper curiosity
54:00 – Why I started building something new

In this episode, I sit down with Betsy Rymes to unpack something we all use constantly but rarely examine closely: language. We start with something deceptively simple, names, and quickly move into how naming, kinship terms, and everyday word choices carry intimacy, distance, power, and belonging. Betsy helps illuminate how language is never just a neutral tool. Every word carries layers of lived experience, social context, and cultural meaning that shape how we relate to one another.

We then dig into how language is taught in schools, and why so many people grow up feeling alienated from English class despite using language fluently every day. Betsy breaks down dominant language ideologies, especially the belief in a single “standard” form of English and the assumption that monolingualism is ideal. We talk about how these ideas get embedded into schooling systems, how they sort students into categories, and how they often confuse social power with linguistic quality.

Toward the end of the conversation, we explore what a more humane and honest language education could look like. One that treats multilingualism, slang, digital speech, and everyday talk as resources rather than problems. One that invites students to ask why language works the way it does instead of memorizing rules divorced from meaning. At its core, this episode is about reclaiming language as something deeply personal, social, and alive, not just something to be corrected.

⏱️ Chapters:

00:00 – Names, identity, and meaning
04:45 – Kinship terms and ways of relating
09:55 – Language as social experience
12:15 – Finding sociolinguistics
18:45 – Standard language ideology
23:00 – Why English class alienates learners
26:30 – Memorization versus understanding
33:00 – Language as a sorting mechanism
37:15 – Slang, digital speech, and fluency
41:00 – Critical language awareness
43:00 – Language learning in early childhood
47:00 – Tracking, inequality, and missed dialogue
52:00 – Education, philosophy, and meaning
56:30 – Language as connection

In this episode, I speak with Terry Moe about how political power shapes institutions and why bureaucracy plays such a central role in modern democracy. We begin with his work on the rise of the strongman presidency and how public frustration with democratic systems creates openings for leaders who promise simple solutions. From there, we explore how similar dynamics operate inside education, where large-scale systems are often expected to balance efficiency, accountability, and human development all at once.

Much of our conversation focuses on how institutions are actually designed. Terry explains why bureaucracies are not neutral structures, but political creations shaped by competing interests. Using concrete examples from education, we discuss how rules around hiring, layoffs, curriculum, and evaluation often prioritize adult interests over the needs of children. We also unpack why well-intentioned reforms frequently fail, not because people are malicious, but because power determines how policies are implemented and sometimes deliberately undermines them.

Toward the end, we step back to ask what this means for anyone who wants to improve education or public institutions more broadly. Terry argues that understanding bureaucracy is essential if we want reform to succeed, since ignoring power only leads to disappointment. This episode is a sober and illuminating look at how systems really work, why change is so difficult, and why democratic reform requires far more realism than idealism alone.

Chapters :

00:00 – Introduction
02:00 – Terry’s path into political science and education policy
05:00 – Why bureaucracy is never neutral
09:00 – Institutions as products of power and interests
13:00 – How democratic systems generate frustration
17:00 – Strongman politics and public disillusionment
21:00 – Why education systems are so hard to reform
25:00 – Adult interests versus student needs
29:00 – Rules, incentives, and unintended consequences
33:00 – Why good reforms fail in practice
37:00 – Unions, politics, and institutional resistance
41:00 – Accountability without capacity
45:00 – The limits of idealism in policy design
49:00 – What real reform would require
53:00 – Power, realism, and democratic responsibility

In this episode, I speak with Gretchen Brion-Meisels about what it really means to center young people in education. We begin by talking about her path into youth work and research, and how early experiences with students shaped her belief that education works best when young people are treated as partners rather than passive recipients. She explains why student voice is often misunderstood, reduced to surface-level feedback rather than genuine participation in decision-making.

We spend much of the conversation exploring youth adult partnerships and what happens when schools take the perspectives of young people seriously. Gretchen shares examples from participatory action research and school-based initiatives where students help define problems, shape solutions, and influence school culture. We talk about power, trust, and the discomfort adults sometimes feel when authority is shared, as well as how listening itself can become a form of care and belonging.

Toward the end, we reflect on what these ideas mean for school climate, equity, and well-being. Gretchen challenges the assumption that adults always know what is best and argues that sustainable change requires collaboration across generations. This episode is ultimately about reimagining education as a relational practice, one grounded in respect, curiosity, and the belief that young people already carry important knowledge about their own lives.

In this episode, I speak with Taylor Odle about how higher education in the United States became a system that promises opportunity while quietly reproducing inequality. We begin with his path from public policy and data science into education research, and why universities are such powerful and complex institutions to study. Taylor explains how metrics, rankings, and quantitative indicators shape policy decisions, while often failing to capture what we actually value about education.

Much of our conversation focuses on college access and the application process itself. We unpack how financial, social, and cultural capital quietly shape who gets in and who is filtered out, even at institutions that claim to be open access. We talk about community colleges, admissions fees, essays, letters of recommendation, and why the simple act of raising your hand and saying “I want to learn” is still burdened with unnecessary barriers. Taylor challenges the assumption that access has already been solved and explains why completion narratives often mask deeper inequities.

Toward the end, we step back to ask bigger questions about the purpose of college. We discuss credentialism, prestige, and the way education has come to function as a social signal rather than a space for intellectual growth. We also explore whether education should be understood as an individual investment or a collective good, and what it would mean to design a system that truly prioritizes learning over status. This episode is a deep reflection on who higher education serves, who it excludes, and what it might take to imagine something more equitable.