Human Restoration Project

Stop me if you’ve heard these before:American public schools are failing,American students are falling behind their global peers,The future of American innovation, economic equality, and global competitiveness depends on schools today preparing students for the job market of tomorrow,School reform is only tool we have to fix these urgent issuesEach of these sentiments have become conventional wisdom at this point, and they’ve appeared in the platforms of both major American political parties if not explicitly, then through familiar buzzwords: school choice, competition, data-driven accountability, college and career readiness, STEM education, and gaps of all kinds: the skills gap, the achievement gap, and the employment gap, to name a few. And when your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails… But it may also be the case, despite the flaws of public education throughout the nation’s history, that American public schools became “failing schools” exactly when they needed to, to fit the needs of politicians and industry, and to fit schooling into the new economic order that came to dominate the last half century. At the global level, this narrative even fuels reactionary stories of civilizational struggle and the “decline of The West. As an Italian economist lamented for GIS Reports earlier this year, “There are only two ways Western educational systems can reverse the current trend and offer more appealing prospects: Allowing private schooling to flourish and Bringing about radical reforms in state schooling.”The most likely outcome, he predicts is a steady decline, writing, “the vicious spiral that links poor education to inequality, social tensions, more government intervention and, finally, low productivity and stuttering economic growth will likely dominate the future of many Western countries for years to come.”This last line captures what my guest today describes as The Fantasy Economy. Neil Kraus is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls. His most recent book, The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, describes in powerful detail how exactly our popular, bipartisan conventional wisdom about America’s “failing schools” and the decline of of the American student came to be: as the result of a deliberate project to shift the responsibility for economic precarity and inequality away from industry and policy and place it squarely on the shoulders of educators and schools. “Ultimately,” he writes, “ we must see the fantasy economy for what it is—a misleading, political campaign in the interests of corporations and the wealthy.”The Fantasy Economy

A “solutionary” has multiple definitions, one of which reads, “A person who identifies inhumane, unjust, and/or unsustainable societal systems and then develops solutions to transform them so that they do the most good and least harm for people, animals, and the environment.”Today we are joined by Zoe Weil who has dedicated her work to creating, spreading the word, and teaching what it means to be a solutionary. She has written eight books including her most recent book we’re talking about today, The Solutionary Way. She’s delivered multiple TEDx talks and keynotes around the world on educating to solve the world’s most pressing problems. And she’s the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education, which has been making serious strides in implementing the Solutionary Framework in schools around the country as well as in their own graduate program.Links:Solutionary Public Policy Webinar with Caitie Whelan and Zoe WeilThe Solutionary Way: Transform Your Life, Your Community, and the World for the Better by Zoe WeilThe Institute for Humane Education

Today we are joined by Angela Stockman. Angela is a veteran secondary English/Language Arts teacher, author, and professional learning facilitator. She has presented at state, national, and international levels and has led curriculum, assessment, and instructional design projects in over 100 school districts.She has written books and resources on writing instruction, including The Writing Workshop Teacher's Guide to Multimodal Composition, Creating Inclusive Writing Environments in the K-12 Classroom, and the recently released The Writing Teacher’s Guide to Pedagogical Documentation: Rethinking How We Assess Learners and Learning, which we're talking about today.Links:The Writing Workshop Teacher's Guide to Multimodal CompositionAngela Stockman's website

Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day in the next couple of weeks, if you haven’t already. It’s a magical and stressful time of year, so we wanted to release Dr Carla Shalaby’s 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a “back to school” special podcast. Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do: moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice. We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that will help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months. As Carla reminds us, "Being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person." If you prefer video, that’s up on our YouTube channel as well, just search for Human Restoration Project.Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an amazing school year! Let us know if you need anything.Link to YouTube video

My guest today is Dr. Susan Blum. Susan Blum is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of I Love Learning; I Hate School and My Word!, as well as the editor of Ungrading. Her new book, Schoolishness: Alienated Education, and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning is now out on Cornell University Press. It catalogs in great detail the characteristics of a “schoolish” education, that is, school as a self-contained institution with its own logic, grammar, and rules. One that, ultimately, sets students up for difficult re-entry into the rest of their lives in an unschoolish world. Susan draws upon examples of unschoolish learning from around the world and makes a powerful case for a necessary anthropological perspective that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar.“If we don't try, nothing will change,” she writes, “It's hard. Hell, it's probably impossible. Schoolishness is probably here to stay, but maybe not all of its elements are inevitable. Entrenched, yes. But inevitable? I don't think so.”Editor's Note: Susan would like to add a quick correction that her current DuoLingo streak is over 1,100 not 11,000. :)Susan Blum's WebsiteWorks mentioned this episode:Susan Hrach - Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect LearningDavid Lancy - The Anthropology of ChildhoodEdwin Hutchins - Cognition in the Wild

Today we are joined by Nawal Qarooni. Nawal is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor based in Jersey City, who founded and operates NQC Literacy, a consultancy firm serving PreK-8 school leaders and teachers in holistic literacy instruction, equity-driven practice, and family engagement. She also serves on several committees, including the National Council for Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias, evaluates manuscripts for Reese Witherspoon's LitUp program, and advises the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Advisory Board. Her recent book, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care is a deep dive into how educators can celebrate and elevate students’ families, while encouraging shared reflections and connections to what’s happening in schools.We talk about building a collective culture of care that invites in families to build a better education system that supports all learners. We're combining the lens of progressive education lens of the classroom to the greater support structures that raise children toward a better future.NQC LiteracyNourishing Caregiver Collaborations Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care by Nawal Qarooni (Routledge)

“Were we required to characterize this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practices the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”This is how Scottish historian & writer Thomas Carlyle characterized Great Britain’s mechanized, steam powered industrial era in 1829. These changes in the human relationship to production rippled through the world economy with profound social, political, & environmental implications. One loosely organized group, the Luddites, emerged early on to smash the new machines and resist mechanization of the mills.200 years after Carlyle’s “Age of Machinery”, we find ourselves sold a new Age, the Age of automation and AI, which promises another transformation in the way we live, work, AND learn, with similar social, political, and environmental consequences. At least, the AI-hype cycle is real. Sal Khan’s new book, for example, Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing) promises to be “required reading for everyone who cares about education.”But what should be the relationship of education, automation & artificial intelligence? Should there be one at all? How much power – not to mention student data – should educators cede to the new machine in the Age of AI? Or…should the answer be a 21st century Luddite revival and mass resistance to the vision of the future offered by Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft?That, I suspect, will be the argument of my guest today, Charles Logan, a Learning Sciences PhD Candidate at Northwestern University, writing earlier this year for the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Ultimately, the Luddites’ militancy and commitment to resistance might be a necessary entry point for how laborers—and teachers, students, and caregivers—can take an antagonistic stance toward AI and automation, and create a new ‘commons.’”Toward A Luddite PedagogyShould We Be More Like The Luddites?Inspiration from the Luddites: On Brian Merchant’s “Blood in the Machine”Learning About and Against Generative AI Through Mapping Generative AI’s Ecologies and Developing a Luddite PraxisRecord being placed on a record player.wav by HelterSkelter1114 -- https://freesound.org/s/409036/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0rope-making machinery running.wav by phonoflora -- https://freesound.org/s/201166/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

The story my guest will tell today is of her experience growing up and teaching in Memphis, Tennessee before finding a purpose-driven career change in - I am not joking - the heart of Transylvania. Emma Sisson is the School Director of The Mission School in Sighisoara, Romania. The work of The Mission, Romania is deeply rooted in the local community in Sighisoara and, as you’ll hear Emma describe it, homebase is an 80,000 sq ft abandoned Soviet textile mill where staff live, work, house a K-3 school, and provide family wrap-around services to Romani children and families. Romani, or Roma, are a historically enslaved and oppressed underclass in Europe, in Romania in particular, where they are often slandered as a lazy, thieving, “gypsy” underclass. In 2022 the European Union reported that 80% of Roma live in poverty, compared to the 17% EU average. 1 in 5 live in households with no running water. 1 in 3 have no indoor toilet. And fewer than half of Roma children attend early childhood education. The scathing report prompted the EU director of Fundamental Human Rights to ask, “Why do Roma across Europe still face shocking levels of deprivation, marginalization, and discrimination?”  Overcoming structural discrimination and prejudice against Roma people is a key part of The Mission’s mission. The Mission School also works to preserve Roma values and language in the context of education, expressed as a preference for family apprenticeships, experiential hands-on learning, and a rich oral tradition, that have historically put them at odds with the priorities of institutional school-based literacies.On the other side of the Atlantic, The Mission international is currently recovering from a devastating fire that destroyed their entire campus headquarters in Tijuana, Mexico that served over 500 at-risk youth, so if you’d like to learn more and donate to help support Emma’s work in Romania and rebuild the Tijuana campus, you can do that at themissioninc - that’s the mission eye-enn-see - dot org https://www.themissioninc.org/ You can reach Emma @ emma.barbara.sisson@gmail.comAmazon Book WishlistAmazon Supplies Wishlist

In this episode, Anna Saavedra and Morgan Polikoff explore the polarizing landscape of modern education found in their February 2024 report, "Searching for Common Ground.” The report reveals widespread support for public schools alongside significant partisan divides, particularly on topics like LGBTQ identities and racial inequality. From bipartisan consensus on some issues to stark disparities on others, this discussion highlights the complexities of education policymaking and the need for informed dialogue to navigate contentious topics and shape a more equitable future for education.Links:How Americans really feel about the teaching of controversial topics in schools @ USC TodayRead the full report online.