Season 5 closes with a tender and inquiry-centered conversation between Alcine, Shane, and the luminous Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz who shares that “Critical love is a profound and ethical commitment to the communities you’re serving… to the human flourishing of those young people in your classroom.” Dr. Sealey-Ruiz discusses her powerful Archeology of Self framework, quoted in Shane’s forthcoming book Pedagogies of Voice (PoV), making deep and seamless connections to Street Data and PoV. She invites us into the “Warrior Work” of solidarity, explaining how these respective bodies of work speak to each other, specifically how the 10 toxins in Pedagogies of Voice intersect with her racial literacy development framework. And the conversation ends with an emotional conversation about the 2024 election and the need to “name the suffering” as a condition for healing while also “hospicing grief to make room for something new to be birthed.” Don’t miss this final episode, which ties together so many threads of our Season 5!

For Further Learning: 

Tune in for another re-release! Shane and Alcine are back with this on-FIRE conversation with Cincinnati math educators Crystal Watson and Dr. Dawn Williams who remind us that “The sun does not ask permission to shine, and neither do I.” These Black women leaders take us on a journey to understanding the type of math pedagogy that will transform and empower future generations of learners. We learn from Dr. Dawn why it’s important for leaders to create a place called home for teachers and, in turn, for students. Crystal and Dawn model a culture of listening to students, always asking, “How will that one child feel…?” and engaging in learning alongside students, all in efforts to affirm to students that the classroom is “your space.” They also teach us how to have a student-centered Data Meeting, how to support teachers to practice active listening- even when it’s uncomfortable! They explain how anxiety specifically with math triggers fight or flight, diminished executive function, and distracting behaviors in the classroom, and how building authentic and trusting relationships can help teachers guide students through that anxiety. Finally, we celebrate the truth that Black educators are “everything” while acknowledging the emotional labor of being a Black woman educational leader.

For Further Learning: 

Come and join Alcine and Shane as they visit with British Columbia educators John Harris and Denise Augustine. We begin in the realm of story as Denise describes being situated “between generations” in her renowned Coast Salish family of carvers, artists, and leaders and John shares his experiences of growing up on the land and watching his father negotiate treaties as the official liaison for their community. Drawing on her legacy as the Superintendent of Indigenous Education for British Columbia, Denise provides powerful historical context for the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, which created space for residential school survivors to tell their stories and led to 94 distinct “calls to action” in 2015. She pulls this thread into the fabric of educational change, illuminating how BC is leading the way in reconciliation through a Tripartide Education Agreement and the more recent Declaration of the Right of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), which requires that school districts create Indigenous Education Councils that view First Nations as “governing bodies”, not just “special interest groups.” From this exploration of reconciliation in education, John takes us into his own family’s legacy of the “Sixties Scoop”, in which his father was taken from his grandparent’s home nearly a dozen times, all the way to his family’s recent visit to the Field Museum of Chicago, which holds over 4,000,000 cultural artifacts, many of which were purchased from Indigenous Nations in the Pacific Northwest. John describes the unsettling experience “as if someone went into your house and took everything.” They end their visit discussing the nuances of place-based versus land-based education and the ways that John has woven his upbringing and community cultural wealth into his pedagogy, which is depicted in the integrative case study which concludes Shane’s forthcoming book, Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency (Corwin, 2025). Speaking to student agency, John reminds us that “When we give youth opportunities to give back to their communities, they really shine.” Join us for this incredible and luminous conversation reinforcing relationality and reciprocity as core values from Indigenous knowledge systems that hold the potential to transform education everywhere.

For Further Learning:

In this re-released episode,  with Blackfoot scholar Dr. Sidney Stone Brown, Alcine and Shane are gifted many stories and teachings. We learn about the Native Self-Actualization model that Dr. Stone created and how she was told by her elders, “We’ve been looking for you” before she wrote her book. We dig into her original research into Abraham Maslow’s archives and discover the truth that Maslow’s concept was not originally a hierarchy, but that the corporations utilizing his work asked him to convert it into a pyramid to “motivate their employees”. We also explore the deep layers of what it means to heal, to come back to our wholeness, to understand time as circular rather than linear, and to situate listening as the ultimate act of transformation. Your heart will sing as you listen to Dr. Sidney Stone Brown.

For Further Learning:

In this touching episode, we center the voice of middle school student leader Karime Reyes who helped to spearhead a radical redesign of her school’s first week last August. In conversation with Peer Resource class teacher Tamar Sberlo, Karime brings insight and depth to what students really want in a classroom, what it means to belong, and how it felt to be part of a school transformation process. We also get a window into Tamar’s “low control” teaching style and the ways she strives to give learners choice and voice. Walk with us as we enter the world of MLK Jr Middle School in San Francisco and see the Street Data model come to life!

For Further Learning: 

Get ready for a re-release! Shane and Alcine dream with colleagues Matt Alexander and Jessica Huang, surfacing shared learning from a combined 80 plus years in education. Matt and Shane reminisce about the early years of teaching in San Francisco pre-No Child Left Behind and how they aspired toward a pedagogy of student voice. Jessica shares her experience working in international education in Asia where the West is “exporting stereotypes into neocolonial schools” and ways she is disrupting the Model Minority myth. These four leaders explore how the American Dream is a facade, lessons in democracy from the world of community organizing, and why leaders need a power analysis of their school communities. Finally, they consider what authentic accountability looks like and what it means to walk toward becoming elders in the movement for educational justice, and preview a project they are working on to “radically dream” together with educators across US + Canada.

For Further Learning:

Get to know transformational teacher leaders Marlo Bagsik and Nina Finci in this beautiful conversation and new episode! Co-hosts Shane and Alcine explore with their guests what it means to “choose the margins” of our classrooms as they hear about Marlo and Nina’s development of a districtwide Humanizing instructional framework. Together, they unpack how to create the conditions for belonging as a core domain of Student Agency for students at the margins. And they conclude with a poignant moment of witnessing Marlo’s experience of collaborating with Shane, Sawsan, and Crystal to develop Pedagogies of Voice: Street Data and the Path to Student Agency, the sequel to Street Data which will be on the shelves the first week of August!

For Further Learning: 

Today’s episode is a re-release with high school students Ari and Harshan and it is life-giving! These fearless leaders, along with 50 of their peers, have been using Street Data to shape school transformation projects on issues ranging from disrupting bullying through Indigenous, restorative practices to centering students’ mental health in schooling to reimagining assessment practices. In this episode, Shane and Alcine get to hear about Ari and Harshan’s names, the identities that matter to them, and the changes they seek at their schools. The episode ends with an exploration of the kinds of classrooms and conversations young people need in this complex, volatile moment we are living through. Don’t miss this wonderful dialogue!

For Further Learning: 

Join us for this opening episode of Season 5 as we dive into the instructional core with THE Zaretta Hammond, who needs no introduction! Get to know Zaretta as she enters her self-described “Maker Phase” of life. In this season, Alcine and Shane are exploring the question, What needs to be true—at various levels of the system—to awaken and center student voice and agency? Zaretta cracks open this conversation by challenging all of us to couple “equity work” with “instructional equity”, beginning with a deep focus on literacy to interrupt what she has deemed cognitive redlining. Listen as Zaretta unpacks a pedagogy of possibility in which educators leverage neuroscience to make learning “sticky” and help students get smarter and sharper about the core skills they need to thrive. Zaretta offers so many insights on where we need to pay attention as educators, starting with a reminder that curriculum is not a magic wand that will generate learning and belonging is a precondition for cognitive capacity-building, not the end goal. She grounds us in the truth that learning is messy, predicated on making and thinking strategically about mistakes, and that students need both care and push. And she gives us a powerful vision of classrooms rooted in the kinds of “studio habits” that artists have, in which students are cognitively apprenticed into the vital skills and habits of learning required for the global societies in which they live.

For Further Learning:

Today's episode is a re-release from Season 4! From West Philly to Stanford University to becoming a field-shifting scholar, Dr. GLB is here to drop the mic for Street Data Pod’s Season 4. We learn about Little Gloria and her largely positive educational experience growing up in Philadelphia before attending a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). We get the inside scoop on her groundbreaking research as a post-doc at Stanford, including what happened when she flipped the dominant, deficit-based research paradigms and asked, “What’s right with Black kids?” From there, GLB enlightens us around the core tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy, which starts with a set of beliefs about children and families (not practices!) and a willingness to interrogate knowledge. Finally, we talk about the transformative value of focusing on the “big ideas” of one’s discipline versus the millions of little facts that suck the life out of so much curriculum. To continue our exploration of pedagogies of student voice, GLB takes us to Matamoros, México where a science teacher with few resources in an “underperforming” region breathes life into his content by believing in the brilliance of his students and building an experiential learning simulation. Don’t miss this phenomenal episode!

For Further Learning: