“The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it’s educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless,” writes today’s guest in a piece from May titled Confronting the educational polycrisis.

Joining us from Brighton, UK Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He is the co-founder and Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation specialising in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. A former teacher of 12 years, James has an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I have been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed the very first video essay we ever made to a virtual arm of James’s Rethinking Education Conference back in 2022. This conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming!

“We have multiple crises on our hands,” James writes, “They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must.” And my hope today is that even if we can’t untangle the polycrisis today, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems.

https://drjamesmannion.substack.com/

https://makingchangestick.substack.com/

https://www.educationpa.org/

https://wssnow.org/

https://www.ucyottawa.com/invitation-to-the-rcen-book-club/

Confronting the Education Polycrisis w/ Dr. James Mannion

“We are a community affair. We’re Autistic, ADHD, OCD, PTSD, Tourettes, schizophrenic, bipolar, apraxic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic, non-speaking, and more. We’ve collectively experienced rare diseases, organ transplants, various cancers, many surgeries and therapies, and lots of ableism and SpEd. We’ve experienced #MedicalAbleism, #MedicalMisogyny, #MedicalRacism, #MedicalTrauma, and #MedicalGaslighting. We understand chronic pain, chronic illness, and the #NEISvoid “No End In Sight Void”. We know what it’s like to be disabled and different in our systems. We know what it is like to live with barriers and what it means to not fit in and have to forge our own community. Disabled and neurodivergent people are always edge cases, and edge cases are stress cases. We can help you design for the edges, because we live at the edges. We are the canaries. We are “the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.“

And that’s just the opening statement on Stimpunks.org [http://stimpunks.org/].

Stimpunks has been among HRP’s closest allies over the years, and I am so grateful to be joined by an amazing cross section of Stimpunks today -- Ryan Boren, Chelsea Adams, Norah Hobbs, and Helen Edgar, who also runs Autistic Realms – to speak to their roll your own, DIY, Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People.

Chelsea had to step away during recording so you’ll hear her voice just in the first half. This episode was a long time coming, and I hope you enjoy it. You can connect with Stimpunks and find all of the resources mentioned in this episode at Stimpunks.org [http://stimpunks.org/].

Mentioned in this episode:

Stimpunks Website [https://stimpunks.org/]

Community Discord [https://stimpunks.org/community/join/]

Mutual-Aid [https://stimpunks.org/aid/grant/]

Map of Monotropic Experiences [https://stimpunks.org/2024/10/21/map-of-monotropic-experiences/]

The Five Neurodivergent Love Languages/Locutions [https://stimpunks.org/2022/01/22/the-five-neurodivergent-love-languages-2/]

10 Obstacles to Neurodiversity Affirming Practice [https://stimpunks.org/2024/07/29/10-obstacles-to-neurodiversity-affirming-practice/]

DIY, Mutual Aid, and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People w/ Stimpunks

At the time of recording, New York Magazine had released an article titled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College: How ChatGPT has Unraveled the Entire Academic Project” [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html] which launched a thousand takes. The piece outlines an arms race, characterized as “a siege on education” between college professors, sneaking white-text Trojan horse prompts like “mention Dua Lipa” to confound the chatbots, and students, one of which is quoted as saying, “the ceiling has been blown off” cheating. One ethics professor elaborates to add that, “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” Which captures, in my opinion, the overall tone of the piece: college is an expensive and fixed game that students endure on their way to credentials and that institutions are powerless in a losing battle to stop. Education and learning have…little to do with it. But it’s also a chicken-egg issue where institutions of higher education are themselves contributing to the same attitudes they’re complaining about: if students copy-paste a prompt from Blackboard into the chatbot, copy-paste the output, and submit it all to be read and graded…by an AI…whose problem is that?

My favorite take on the topic of AI in education is a satire meant to be read in the bulldog diction of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Zizek: “That AI will be the death of learning and so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, and we are free! While the ‘learning’ happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want.

This is all to say that the conversation with my guest today, Texas educator Chanea Bond, was prompted by all of this, as she shared the New York Magazine piece with the challenge,  “Somebody invite me on your podcast to talk about this article!” and three weeks later…here we are. I’m hoping today to get Chanea’s insight on the impact of AI in education and so much more facing teachers, students, and schools in 2025.

EduTopia - Why I'm Banning Student AI Use This Year [https://www.edutopia.org/article/banning-student-ai-use-chanea-bond/] by Chanea Bond

Reclaiming Teaching & Learning in an Age of AI w/ Chanea Bond

For as much as schools are a necessary collaboration of communities and families, we haven’t spent much time, if any at all, on this podcast focused on parenting itself. Well that changes today, as I’m joined by Steve Shapiro and Nancy Shapiro-Rapport, siblings, and co-founders of Our Family Culture.

Our Family Culture is a platform dedicated to helping families build strong, intentional cultures rooted in shared values, traditions, and meaningful connections. Through stories, guides, and community support, it empowers families to create lasting legacies centered on purpose and togetherness.

https://ourfamilyculture.org/

Founder’s Discount: FOUNDER

Parenting with Purpose w/ Steven Shapiro & Nancy Shapiro-Rapport

Our conversation today is with educator, author, and Director of National Faculty at PBLWorks, Ryan Sprott, about one of the most contentious topics in education today, that is Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation: A Memoir and Primer for Pedagogical Transformation, which is also the title of his self-published book. In this conversation we be talk about his experience teaching an inquiry approach to teaching contentious topics. In part time project-based inquiry, his students in Texas, of all places, engaged with some of the most difficult open-ended, wicked questions around, as Ryan refers to them, “A question to open hearts and minds”–

What is the purpose of a border and what has shaped your answer to this question? 

How can we improve energy policy and what has shaped your answer to this question? 

And what is the purpose of school and what has shaped your answer to this question? 

Students visited the Texas border with Mexico, worked with immigrant aid organizations and hosted dialogue with Border Patrol agents. They visited Texas oil fields to speak with oilmen on the ground, engaged in interviews, documented their experiences in field journals, created collaborative community art projects, and so much more. You’ll hear student testimonials about how they came away transformed forever by the experience. 

Ryan Sprott @ PBLWorks [https://www.pblworks.org/author/ryan-sprott]

Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation (Amazon) [https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Contentious-Topics-Divided-Nation/dp/B0DGRPB45J]

Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation w/ Ryan Sprott

I’m joined today by Dr Chloe Keegan. Chloe Keegan is Lecturer of Early Childhood Education in the Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education in Maynooth University, Ireland.

Dr Keegan is an early childhood expert with over a decade of experience as an educator, researcher, and policy advocate. Her work focuses on children's rights and power, play and participation, and influencing practice and policy in early education. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, developing an innovative method using GoPro cameras to involve children as co-researchers in studying power dynamics. Her research also explores the impact of play bans on children’s well-being, moral development, the influence of stereotypical media on children’s views of sex, gender, and race, and participatory art-based methods in children’s research and video-based reflective practices.

Connect w/ Dr Keegan on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloe-keegan/]

Full thesis: It's Like a Baby Jail [https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/19041/1/Revised%20PhD%20Thesis%20Chloe%20Keegan%20June%2030th%202024.pdf]



"It's Like a Baby Jail!" Power & Early Childhood Education w/ Dr. Chloë Keegan

https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/conference


“True light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.”

― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms (as read by Zoe Bee)


In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here, and no simple answers to be found, only the Quest for Connection. 


In 2025, we’re responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue: bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together.


Our virtual Conference to Restore Humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd. To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we’ve cut the ticket price to just $50. You can learn more about Conference to Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conference


Nebula Nostalgia by FSM Team feat. < e s c p > | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html

https://escp-music.bandcamp.com

Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com

Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/




Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Conference to Restore Humanity! Quest for Connection 2025 Trailer 

My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children’s books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you’ll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia.

Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.

Most of Nika’s projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the “Museum of Care”, a nomadic ‘anti’ institute,  and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. “Playgrounds are vital public spaces,” she writes, “—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They’re also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.”

https://museum.care/playgrounds-notes-from-the-curator/ 

Anthropology For Kids [https://a4kids.org/]

https://museum.care/ 

Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to Collaboration [https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/programm/2024/radical-playgrounds]

Cities Made Differently (MIT Press) [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549332/cities-made-differently/]

David Graeber Institute [https://davidgraeber.institute/]

Beyond Anthropology For Kids w/ Nika Dubrovsky

This is the latest in our “spotlight series”, the first of 2025, where we reach out to schools who are engaged in awesome work, and talk to teachers, school leaders, and students about it to shine a light, inspire, and influence others to do the same. As with all learning, process is the point, not perfection, and there’s so much to learn from these schools as we reimagine education in our communities.

Empower[Ed] is a personalized, competency-based education program designed to give high school juniors and seniors control over their learning. We integrate core academic subjects with real-world, community-embedded projects and Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses. Students primarily work independently, demonstrating mastery through projects that align with their passions and career interests. Empower[Ed] fosters learner agency, helping students build critical skills like problem-solving, time management, and collaboration, while crafting personalized learning paths that prepare them for success beyond high school. It’s a flexible, self-directed learning experience aimed at making education more relevant and engaging. 

Empower[Ed] School Page [https://sites.google.com/bismarckschools.org/empowered/home]

Empower[Ed] Community Impact [https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e3b710bebae74233bbf74f2a418146c5] ArcGIS

Showcase: Spotlight on Bismarck Public Schools' Empower[Ed]

With the help of Teacher-Powered Schools, Socol-Moran Partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, we’ve completed the lineup for our 4th annual virtual Conference to Restore Humanity for July 21-23, focused this year on the Quest for Connection. Tickets are just $50 and you can find out more info at humanrestorationproject.org/conference [http://humanrestorationproject.org/conference]

We’re excited to have members of the team from Story Xperiential with us for today’s episode, which was recorded way back in 2024. Developed by veterans from Pixar and Khan Academy, Story Xperiential brings the art of professional storytelling into the classroom, giving students the tools to craft and share their own stories using the same creative process as major studios.

The program is structured to fit into school schedules, offering a two-part curriculum: Storytelling Essentials, where students develop a story outline into a story reel, and Mastering Storytelling, where they expand their work into a full narrative. Through self-paced lessons, hands-on projects, and a moderated peer feedback system, students not only learn the technical aspects of storytelling but also gain confidence in their creative abilities.

One unique aspect of Story Xperiential is how it can be integrated into every subject area, aligning with interdisciplinary content standards -- bringing together social studies and ELA, for example, or STEM and fine arts -- while also fostering skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and visual communication. 

In this episode, we’ll explore how Story Xperiential is being implemented in schools, hear about the impact it’s having on students, and discuss how storytelling can be a powerful tool for learning and self-expression.

You’re gonna be hearing a few voices in this conversation. HRP director Chris McNutt is hosting this one, who you’re probably used to hearing on this show, and he’ll be talking to a few people on the StoryX team:

Dennis Henderson VP of Education and Strategy

Chief Technical Officer, Tony DeRose

And Chief Learning Officer, Brit Cruise

You can learn more and sign your students up at https://www.storyxperiential.com/ [https://www.storyxperiential.com/home-1]

From Pixar to the Classroom: Teaching Storytelling w/ Story Xperiential

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!

humrespro

Shows