On Friday, July 31st, we hosted Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos for a Q&A about her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It [https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350400528]. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies of Collapse book club, where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implication for education. Here is the full unedited Q&A. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.





Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It w/ Dr. GInie Servant-Miklos

We all grew up playing games — I fondly remember playing Go Fish with my grandma and her next door neighbor, as a 90s kid who grew up with an NES, it felt like every console generation was a leap forward in graphics and game quality, and, regardless of who you’re cheering for, tomorrow’s World Cup final  will be watched by an estimated 2 billion people.

But even though at some point many of us stop playing games—even if we don’t stop paying attention to them—we hold onto the experiences, the feelings, and the lessons: what they taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And it’s because games play an important role in human development and tell us so much about societies and cultures at large, the relationship between play, games, and learning has always been a focus of our work. It’s also been the lifelong interest of my guest today, game designer, artist, author, and researcher, Dr. Mary Flanagan.

Mary Flanagan is the founder of Tiltfactor game studio, whose tabletop and digital games intentionally tackle a number of social issues. The tagline on the Tiltfactor homepage reads “Game design for social change” with the challenge, “Can you make a more just and equitable world with games? At Tiltfactor, we believe we can.” Mary has also authored several incredible books, including the pivotal Critical Play about radical game design, and coauthored, Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Given Mary Flanagan’s unique and consequential focus, I wanted to sit down with her to see what we can learn at the intersection of play and critical pedagogy.

Playing Oppression : The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047913/playing-oppression/]

Critical Play: Radical Game Design [https://maryflanagan.com/writing/critical-play/]

Critical.play [https://www.instagram.com/critical.play/?hl=en] on Instagram

http://tiltfactor.org/

https://resonym.com/

The Power of Critical Play w/ Dr. Mary Flanagan

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

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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