Hey there, Nick here at Human Restoration Project. We took the longest break in our podcast’s history last month, and I hope you were able to take a break, too. We’re back for biweekly releases through the summer starting today with Dr. Sarah Benson. Sarah is Associate Professor in Inclusion and Disabilities at the University of Birmingham campus in Dubai where she teaches students from around the world as Head of Subject group for the School of education and lecturer for inclusion and special needs programs.

"Inclusion" has become a word everyone nods along to but almost no one defines the same way, And since so much of special education has historically been about sorting and labeling kids in relation to an imaginary average. I was so curious to ask Sarah, what does genuine inclusion require of us, and of schools, and what would it mean to restore the humanity of a special education system that was built to put kids into buckets?

Sarah and I also talked a bit about HRP Australia, which is a real thing you can check out at humanrestorationproject.au [http://humanrestorationproject.au/]. HRP Australia is headed by Vaughan Cleary, former Learning and Teaching Head and Senior Deputy Principal at Assumption College in Kilmore, Victoria, and I’ll be headed down there at the end of this month to visit schools and experience Australian education firsthand.

Also a quick reminder that we’re reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as We Know it for our HRP Summer Book Club, and there’s still time to join us. You can learn more at humanrestorationproject.org/book-club [http://humanrestorationproject.org/book-club].

Episode notes:

HRP Australia [https://humanrestorationproject.au/]

HRP Summer Book Club - Pedagogies of Collapse [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/conference]

‘I’m Determined’ [https://imdetermined.org/] at James Madison University

Restoring Humanity to "Special Education": Global Perspectives on Inclusion w/ Dr. Sarah K Benson

This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us.  Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!

I’m back this week with another narrated piece from our upcoming Progressive Education Primer. If you like this format and want to have more narrated essay content, or if you can’t stand it, leave a comment on YouTube or Discord to let us know. This one is written by our Executive Director, Chris McNutt, titled Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real.

HRP Book Club [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club]

Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access [https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350400528]

Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real, Chris McNutt [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/teaching-in-the-wreckage-of-the-real]

Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com

Teaching in the Wreckage of the Real: A Narration

Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings.

This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us.  Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!

The HRP team has been on the road for 3 of the last 4 weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership, and I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI-Shirley. At the time of recording, I’m headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency. This is all to say I don’t have an epic 90 minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week, but what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, it’s called We Are Worldbuilders. See you in two weeks!

HRP Book Club [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club]

Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access [https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350400528]

We Are Worldbuilders, Nick Covington [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/writing/we-are-worldbuilders]

Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com

We Are Worldbuilders: A Narration

This conversation started 2 years ago, when I ran into Kelly McMahon at a summer conference. Kelly’s a kindergarten teacher at Hoover Community School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I was curious about what that label “community school” means in practice for teachers, students, and the community served by this new model for the area.

I’ve since learned that just because your kids attend Ames Community School District, for example, that doesn’t mean they attend a “community school.” Kelly put me in touch with Dave Greenberg and Angelia Ebner, senior policy analysts and community schools program specialists at the National Education Association, who have helped build and support thousands of community schools, as Angelia described it, from “coast to coast and border to border.”

And no exploration of the community schools model could be complete without including the story of Sustainable Community Schools in Chicago.  Just last year, Major Brandon Johnson announced a near doubling of the number of community schools in the city, bringing the number to 36.

I spoke with foundational community organizer, advocate, and elected Chicago Public Schools Board Member, Jitu Brown, about how organizing for Sustainable Community Schools defused the push by elected officials for school closures, privatization, and charter-ization of Chicago Public Schools.  For Jitu, the title of School Board member may be new, but he is Chicago born and raised, and he’s been organizing around education and all of its related issues since the 90s.

While there were just hundreds of community schools in the United States 15 years ago, today there are over 5,000 and growing in nearly every state in the nation. A consistent refrain from every person I spoke with for this episode was that community schools are the future of public education and the alternative to narratives about “failing public schools” that favor privatization as a solution.

NEA - What are community schools? [https://www.nea.org/student-success/great-public-schools/community-schools]

NEA - 5 Steps to Kickstarting Community Schools in Your District [https://www.nea.org/build-community-schools]

NEA Community School Measurement Guidance Tool  [https://www.canva.com/design/DAG5uanz9aA/DWbX9jv4fliefstG9XMNeQ/edit]

Chicago Sustainable Community Schools  [https://www.ctulocal1.org/movement/scs/]

Eve Ewing - Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo27506579.html]

You can read out directly to Angelia & Dave @ NEA:

aebner@nea.org | DGreenberg@nea.org

The Future of Public Education is a Community School feat. Kelly McMahon, Jitu Brown, Angelia Ebner, and Dave Greenberg

Montessori schools are some of the few that wear their pedagogy on their signage: Cottontail Creek Montessori School. Montessori Children’s House. Acappella Montessori. (just to name a few of the dozen or so in Iowa). While the majority are private schools, there’s a growing number of public Montessori schools and programs as well. I think because of these two factors, being largely private and one of the only public-facing pedagogies around, you don’t necessarily have to be acquainted with the Montessori method to develop an opinion about it.

We recorded this in two sessions, one with Andrew Faulstich – Director of Education at Oneness Family School and co-founder of Developing Education – and Dr Ayize Sabater, school founder, co-founder of the Black Montessori Education Fund, and former Executive Director of Association Montessori International-USA. And a second session with Kelly Jonelis, Montessori Adolescent Program Director, Math Specialist, and Co-Founder of Developing Education.

In this episode you’ll hear the journeys that brought them to Montessori education, what Montessori is and is not, and what otherwise “mainstream” education can learn from the ideas and practices first developed by Dr. Maria Montessori over 100 years ago.

Recommended Reading & Media List:

The Montessori Child: A Parent's Guide to Raising Capable Children with Creative Minds and Compassionate Hearts - Simone Davies & Junnifa Uzodike

Erica Maretti - The Best Weapon for Peace

Montessori - The Child and Adolescence

Montessori - Psychogeometry

Montessori - Citizen of the World

Montessori Potential - Paula Preschlack

Diverse Families, Desirable Schools - Mira Debs

Montessori - From Childhood to Adolescence

Montessori - Education and Peace

Breaking the Paradigm Podcast w/ Andrew Faulstitch [https://breakingtheparadigm.org/podcast]

Breaking the Paradigm: You ARE Good at Math with Kelly Jonelis [https://breakingtheparadigm.org/p/you-are-good-at-math-encouraging]

Dr. Ayize Sabater - WPFW 89.3 DC #YouMustLearn, Thursdays 6pm - wpfwfm.org [http://wpfwfm.org/] #YouMustLearn

The Promise (and Persistent Myths) of Montessori Education w/ Andrew Faulstich, Dr. Ayize Sabater, and Kelly Jonelis

This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us.  Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club [https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club] to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!

Spring Break has officially sprung for so many schools across the country. Whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a student, or a combination of any of the above, we hope you have a well-deserved and restful break. We’ll be taking a break this week too and be back on April 18th with a deep dive into Montessori education with an incredible team of Montessori educators, Andrew Faulstitch, Dr. Ayize Sabater, and Kelly Jonelis. Here’s a quick preview, and see you back here in two weeks for the full episode.

HRP Book Club Sign-Up: https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/book-club

Read Pedagogies of Collapse for free through Open Access on Bloomsbury [https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350400528]

Spring Break 2026: HRP Summer Book Club & Montessori Mythbusting

There’s a quote from the great conservationist John Muir that goes, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." My guest today, Gary Stager, has been working in education since before I was born, and I turn 40 this summer, so the sense that you get talking to Gary about teaching and learning is that when you try to pick out anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Gary has been prolific as an author and educator, and as the line in his official bio reads, “When Jean Piaget wanted to better understand how children learn mathematics, he hired Seymour Papert. When Dr. Papert wanted to create a high-tech alternative learning environment for incarcerated at-risk teens, he hired Gary Stager.” This work was the basis for Gary’s doctoral dissertation in Science and Mathematics Education. He’s worked across several continents, collaborated on a project that won a Grammy Award, and led seminars and taught students in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

In this conversation, Gary shares the defining experiences of his education as a student and how those shaped his values as a teacher, we talk about today’s pedagogical authoritarianism and its contrast to Reggio Emilia, his optimism about the reclaiming the role of technology in education, and, ultimately, reclaiming the art of teaching.

If you’ve ever heard Gary speak you know he’s a compelling storyteller, and I found myself in this conversation like a kid at storytime, awed at the wealth of energy, wisdom, and experience he brings to our collective endeavor. This could have easily been a 3 hour episode, and part of keeping the runtime down was editing out a lot of my active listening interjections to keep up the flow of Gary’s stories.

Reanimating the Art of Teaching w/ Gary Stager

Tomorrow, I’ll be trading Iowa for a couple days in Los Angeles, where the HRP team will be presenting for the third year at LearningInspirEd’s Student Power Summit. It’s in LA this year in partnership with Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. The founder, Father Greg Boyle, is quoted on the Homeboy homepage saying, “We imagine a world without prisons, and then we try to create that world,”. And I’m really looking forward to meeting and talking with the people there to learn more about how Homeboy works. A bit of a facetious question that sticks in my head is, in the high-stakes data-driven world of schooling, what piece of content or curriculum did these guys miss that would’ve made the difference? And more seriously, what is it about the environment at Homeboy Industries that schools can learn from? I’ll have more on that when I get back.

But until we build that world wi thout prisons, there will need to be programs for incarcerated people and people in transition from prison to public life, too.

That’s where this conversation with Jennifer Berkshire came about. Of course you know Jennifer from her years of hosting the Have You Heard? Podcast with her co-host Jack Schneider, and their coauthored books The Wolf At The Schoolhouse Door and The Education Wars. But for the past couple of years, Jennifer has also been teaching journalism and education policy in the Boston College Prison Education Program at MCI-Shirley, a medium security prison for men in central Massachusetts. Recording isn’t allowed in the prison facility, but in 2025 Jennifer spoke with some of the men in her program who had been released from MCI-Shirley and were finishing their degrees on the Boston College campus, and she gave me permission to use those clips here.

As you can hear, the program was a life-changing experience for these men, and it’s been life-changing for Jennifer too.

This conversation with Jennifer was one of the most eye-opening I’ve had in a long time, and it’s always such a pleasure to talk with her. I’ve included links to several pieces of media we talk about in this episode, podcasts and articles created by inmates, books written by prison educators, and more, so check out the show notes for those links as well.

John Lennon - The Tragedy of True Crime [https://johnjlennon.net/]

Ear Hustle [https://www.earhustlesq.com/]Podcast: “The daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration”

Have You Heard #202 - College Inside, College Outside [https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/202-college-inside-college-outside?si=57e009dce6604793a1f7dfab4769b011&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing]

Article - BC Prison Education Program Shatters Stigmas and Builds Better Futures [https://bcheights.com/217734/features/bc-prison-education-program-shatters-stigmas-and-builds-better-futures/]

Article - In prison, I embraced the SEL skills I should have learned in grade school [https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/05/12/in-prison-i-embraced-the-sel-skills-i-should-have-learned-in-grade-school/]

What Prison Can Teach Us About School w/ Jennifer Berkshire

Whether it was during her nearly two decades as a middle school humanities teacher or as diversity coordinator or grade-level team leader, my guest today kept returning to the same question: why does school so often feel like the opposite of learning?

Lauren Porosoff’s answer isn't a new program or a new curriculum, instead she offers a holistic way of thinking about how systems are connected to outcomes. And Lauren joins me today to talk about compensatory programs: the wellness kits, the diversity posters, the one-off professional development workshops that schools layer one on top of the other to signal that they value belonging, creativity, or student wellbeing, without ever changing the underlying framework for how students and teachers actually spend their time. In this episode, we talk about why schools reach for these fixes, why they backfire, and why they may be especially vulnerable to attack precisely because they're so superficial.

Lauren's website is theteachernerd.com [http://theteachernerd.com/], and her book (one of many!), Teach for Authentic Engagement, is available from ASCD.

Jailbreak Your PD  [https://kappanonline.org/jailbreak-professional-development-pd-educators-porosoff/]

The Trouble with Compensatory Programs [https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-trouble-with-compensatory-programs]

The Grammar of Inclusive Instructional Design [https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-grammar-of-inclusive-instructional-design]

Teach for Authentic Engagement [https://www.ascd.org/books/teach-for-authentic-engagement?variant=123045]

Making School Meaningful w/ Lauren Porosoff

In a 2021 interview, Michael Sandel, author of the book The Tyranny of Merit argues that if merit can be understood as competence, a good thing to be clear, “The principle of meritocracy, simply put, says that if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings.” But as we grapple with meritocracy, or systems built around the idea that those who get ahead are deserving, he says, “What makes merit a kind of tyranny is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful.” How are we supposed to understand the great problems of our time: United States’ incredible wealth and income disparities, child poverty, life expectancy gaps, infant mortality, student debt, or even incarceration rates through a lens of meritocracy? Sandel offers, “To rethink meritocracy requires, among other things, rethinking the mission and purpose of higher education.” But what about education inequality and the construction of affluent white suburban public schools as “Good Schools”, where the social and economic advantages of their proximity to wealth compound upward into higher property taxes, more funding, smaller class sizes, more course offerings, higher test scores and higher graduation rates?

And that’s a lens my guest today, Yong Zhao, Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies & Educational Psychology at the University of Kansas, wants to expand into redefining the purpose of K-12 education more broadly, from meritocracy to human interdependence.

He’s co-authored an open-access piece for the ECNU Review of Education by that name that you can search yourself or find in the show notes, and it’s the focus of our conversation today. “[Meritocracy’s] focus on ranking individuals according to flawed metrics fosters unhealthy competition, overlooks diverse human talents, fails to account for unequal starting points, and ultimately hundred both individual fulfillment AND societal progress,” they write, “We propose an alternative framework, the Human Interdependence Paradigm, which….emphasizes cultivating unique individual greatness, realizing [it] through applying it to solve meaningful real world problems for others, [and] fostering a sense of purpose and mutual reliance. The Human Interdependence Paradigm [for education] aims to create learning environments that promote collaboration, social intelligence, and ultimately, a more equitable and flourishing society.”

You can email Prof. Zhao @ yongzhao.uo@gmail.com

From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20965311251351988]

The Dark Side of Meritocracy, Noema Mag [https://www.noemamag.com/the-dark-side-of-meritocracy/]

From Meritocracy to Human Interdependence: Redefining the Purpose of Education w/ Yong Zhao

Since 2018, the Human Restoration Project Podcast has reimaged education through critical, progressive, human-centered learning! 

Across nearly 200 episodes, and counting, we've explored every topic in education: ungrading and alternative assessment, interdisciplinary play-based and project-based learning, SEL, education reforms and systemic school change in society with students, teachers, leaders, researchers, and advocates around the world. 

Join us on our mission to restore humanity to education, together!

Nick @ HRP

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