The reach and impact of our food systems – that is, the complex, interconnected, and globalized web of institutions, resources, and processes that bring food from the farm, to the table, and into the waste stream – is universal: every single one of us has either worked in ourselves, or known people who work growing, raising, producing, processing, packing, transporting, preparing, or serving the food we all eat.

In the food we consume, we become connected to the conditions, the labor, and the people of the food system that produces it. Fully 1 in 10 American workers, over 17 million people, work in paid frontline food system jobs. And millions more work at home to plan, shop, prepare, and in many households, grow the food their children and families eat.

There are massive implications for schools as well, as they participate in the food system directly to bring literally billions of meals to children each year, and as labor in the food system impacts the families, children, and communities our schools serve.

My guests today are Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares, associate professors and co-authors of Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, available from University of California Press in September. Their book captures the grim realities faced by food workers alongside the opportunities for solidarity at every point in the system while amplifying the successes and challenges faced by movements to make food work, good work.

“As long as people are suffering to get food to our plates,” they write, “we need to center food workers in any vision for a just food system.”

Will Work for Food book from UC Press [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/will-work-for-food/paper]

Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain w/ Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern & Teresa M. Mares

Please note that Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and that this interview is not an endorsement of Morales as a candidate for office.

Before Howie Morales became Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, before he was ever a state senator, he was a teacher and a state-championship winning baseball coach in rural New Mexico. He also holds a Master’s in bilingual education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. So it’d be difficult, it seems, to understand what he’s accomplished in those elected positions except through the lens of his experience in the classroom. And he joins me to talk about that experience, how it informs his work and achievements in office, and the challenges New Mexico public school students, families, and teachers still face.

From the Classroom to the Capitol: A Conversation w/ New Mexico Lt. Gov. Howie Morales

In the opening pages of my guest’s book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the title of the book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: “We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to 'tame the turbulence'...educators have been caught in this turbulence; it permeates our profession and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child’s experience of school.”

Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.

And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered, experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two-decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like  What School Could Be, The Institution for International Education, and The Buck Institute. Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships and The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, who we spoke with about that work back in episode 159.

You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.org [https://zencastr.com/preview/episode/68b24e6c1a00b16b37940368]

Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership [https://www.corwin.com/books/taming-turbulence-ed-leadership-291724?srsltid=AfmBOoq4usON1WKOyXwtu3I2q_R74lFG6ZdTSQr5EV_PLn6doOGXRCf3#main-content] from Corwin

Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership w/ Jennifer D. Klein

“Any assessment of the potential of AI to contribute to education must begin with an accurate understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI,” my guests today write, “The most important reason to resist the use of AI in universities if that its outputs are fundamentally bullshit – indeed, strictly speaking, they are meaningless bullshit.”

That particular term of art may appear to be attention-seeking or dismissive of the issue of AI entirely, but it’s actually the root of a much deeper philosophical critique, like the late anthropologist David Graeber’s notion of “bullshit jobs”, but leveled at Generative AI and the way it distorts the purpose and function of teaching, learning, and education itself. My guests today are Robert Sparrow and Gene Flenady, professor and lecturer, respectively, in philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where they join me from, and they are collaborators on two recent articles: Bullshit universities: the future of automated education and Cut the bullshit: why Generative AI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors. As a heads up, we’re gonna be saying bullshit a LOT, sometimes in an academic context, sometimes not so much.

Bullshit universities: the future of automated education [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02340-8]

Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13562517.2025.2497263]

BS Universities: The Future of Automated Education w/ Rob Sparrow & Gene Flenady

Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who is now a licensed counselor that read, “The thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them... but the whole thing is gorgeous.” The author was of course my guest today, Maria Munro-Schuster, and the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom: How A Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students – And You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward:

“The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self-reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Munro-Schuster’s call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we are all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent.”

Order: The Empathetic Classroom (Teacher Created Materials) [https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/the-empathetic-classroom-how-a-mental-health-mindset-supports-your-students-and-you-ebook-153688?srsltid=AfmBOor8uINrWPYrLI-3jK0tycK66qsuvi_zbUgRls-y7W-Af6hyh4JJ]

Cultivating Mental Health Mindsets in The Empathetic Classroom w/ Maria Munro-Schuster

“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

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

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