Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Mind Food, a series of more casual content that's easily digestible from the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: This episode is brought to you by our Winter Funding Drive donors, three of which are Brandon Peters, Tracy Smith, and Anonymous coming in clutch.
Speaker: Thanks so much for everyone who donated to helping us reach that goal and fund our upcoming programming.
Speaker: We ended up crushing.
Speaker: absolutely crushing our winter fundraising goal of $2,500 to bring you all the edgy futurism series here in the next few months.
Speaker: You can learn more about that series by watching the video here on YouTube.
Speaker: I'll have it linked somewhere up here.
Speaker: And if you're listening on audio, you can just head to our website and learn more about that there.
Speaker: So who am I?
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington.
Speaker: I'm the creative director of the Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: And I'm here with Chris McNutt, the executive director.
Speaker: And today on MindFood, we're talking the best and worst edu-trends of 2022, as well as our hopes for 2023.
Speaker: Now, what is interesting, Chris, before we get started on this, is that...
Speaker: About this question in particular is that for this year and this probably this year alone, we've now both spent half the year inside the classroom and almost exactly half the year outside.
Speaker: So we kind of have had a foot in both of those worlds.
Speaker: And I think that gives us a pretty interesting perspective.
Speaker: Like I still keep catching myself thinking from the mindset of, you know, 10 years of classroom teaching, like, how am I going to teach about the
Speaker: the house speakership drama, right?
Speaker: That's happening right now thinking, okay, if my kids wanted to know about that, how would I bring that to bear?
Speaker: Or how could I incorporate something that I'm reading or listening into, you know, a lesson about the middle ages or something in AP Euro?
Speaker: Um, so I don't know.
Speaker: Do you find yourself thinking in the same, uh, kind of with the same set of perspectives?
Speaker: I mean, yeah, I constantly think to myself whenever I come across it, like AI, for example,
Speaker: I can't stop myself from thinking, how can I make that into a project?
Speaker: Oh, you could do this with it.
Speaker: That'd be super cool.
Speaker: And I sit there and I realize, oh, I actually can't do that.
Speaker: I guess I can make something for someone else, but I don't have that luxury anymore.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's what's crazy is I think a lot of then our creative energy and that that desire to to teach and to communicate then goes into the human restoration project, which is cool.
Speaker: So, yeah, we'll talk about upcoming things, I guess, in a separate episode.
Speaker: Do you want to start with with your best?
Speaker: Do we want to start with our worst?
Speaker: Let's check this out.
Speaker: Kicking off our two best.
Speaker: Things of 2022!
Speaker: Is this just generic music or is this actually from something?
Speaker: Oh, this is from an RPG.
Speaker: My favorite video game.
Speaker: A little bit of trivia.
Speaker: Yeah, I loved that game.
Speaker: I have I have a story.
Speaker: I had a Super Nintendo and my dad sold it at one of our garage sales and I was devastated.
Speaker: And then we had Super Mario RPG, which also sold with it.
Speaker: And right now that game is worth so much money.
Speaker: If you have a copy of Super Mario RPG.
Speaker: I sold that in geez, like at some point in college for like 200 bucks to pay for textbooks.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Shout out to emulators.
Speaker: Anyways, anyways, I'll start with one of my my best things at 2022 in terms of trends, then I'll shift it back over to you.
Speaker: So shout out to our Discord community, because it's something I was already thinking, but it was confirmed by Chris Barber on our Discord, which is one of the best things was the growth of ungrading, feedback-driven learning, SEL, just general progressive ideas throughout the previous year.
Speaker: There's been a lot of mainstream attention given to on grading.
Speaker: We've had our own graduate course on the subject.
Speaker: I've noticed more and more conferences and course offerings popping up on moving away from grades.
Speaker: And it seems like there's less of an emphasis on the standards-based grading movement and some of the other twists on traditional grading and more of an emphasis on grading.
Speaker: How do we just get rid of this thing altogether and focus on portfolios, which only makes sense given how like the job market is shifting, how more and more employers don't care about more like traditional resumes or test scores and want to see something that you produce.
Speaker: So it's it's much it's catering to that workplace market as well as a more progressive system in general that that's better for kids.
Speaker: So that's been super exciting.
Speaker: And shout out.
Speaker: Actually, I didn't even think about it, but my mug.
Speaker: Shut the teachers going gradeless for continuing that movement and doing a lot of cool work regarding that.
Speaker: Right on.
Speaker: You know, it's funny.
Speaker: My my second best that I was going to talk about is kind of related to this.
Speaker: So maybe I'll just I'll just riff off of that here, which which is kind of exactly that.
Speaker: Going back to the context of the pandemic and just sort of the roller coaster that we've been on since since 2020 now.
Speaker: headed into year three with all of this stuff is I think alongside that ungrading kind of thinking about alternative ways of assessing students, which also relates to my other best, but I'll talk about that later.
Speaker: But I think there is more of like a shift to just reconnect with that human humanization.
Speaker: You know, we have certainly a biased perspective in our organization about that and maybe are more sensitive in terms of just picking up those kinds of threads.
Speaker: Because that's the work we do every single day.
Speaker: But I have definitely noticed the conversation shifting more towards health, you know, particularly of students, of educators, of, you know, employees, of parents and families, of everybody else there.
Speaker: An emphasis particularly on mental health, I think, has helped humanize some things, too.
Speaker: And I think that.
Speaker: So rethinking of education and the role of schooling through that lens kind of has the positive trickle down effect then in terms of what we do in the classroom, you know, and providing perhaps more breaks, being more cognizant of of student mental, emotional load, you know, kind of feeling the energy of the room a little bit more and being perhaps more responsive to that.
Speaker: If that's not actively happening, I think perhaps there's a lot more grace to
Speaker: to allow educators and classroom teachers to make those changes on their own and justify it through that lens and say, hey, you know, we're not going to do this thing that I had planned today because I can kind of see that we're not, you know, we're being responsive to something somewhere else in the ether, something somewhere else in our environment.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: You know, we'll kind of take a day and we'll do that or we'll we'll restructure this assessment in a different way to make that work differently.
Speaker: So I think there's just this overall general trend and vibe towards more human centered.
Speaker: I don't know, everything at least would be the would be the goal, but particularly for human centered classrooms.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think those are good.
Speaker: The the.
Speaker: ungrading, perhaps becoming more mainstream in K-12 and higher ed, and really seeing that as the tip of a spear towards changing, humanizing practices across the board.
Speaker: That's a good one to start off with.
Speaker: I think too, it speaks to perhaps a challenge with this work that I hope more and more folks embrace.
Speaker: This is not one of my hopes, but it is for sake of the conversation, I guess, which is folks embracing a more systemic outlook or perspective on those types of changes that you're describing.
Speaker: So as opposed to making school suck less by kind of working around the edges and saying like, hey,
Speaker: you know, this lesson could be slightly better or, hey, let's not do this lesson today, but we'll do it later.
Speaker: Instead, focusing on root problems and looking at, like, why was it not good to begin with and really looking at a system level of how can we change things slightly more drastically?
Speaker: Obviously, within like your own context and your own power to do so.
Speaker: But I think that
Speaker: collectively, everyone could probably push harder to do some kind of reimagination work within their classrooms and see to that.
Speaker: I think about, especially released this year, or 2022, Alex Bennett's work, the Trauma-Centered Equity-Informed or Equity-Informed trauma-centered.
Speaker: I believe so.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: It has been a very long year.
Speaker: But a lot of Alex's calls to action in that book are centered around systemic changes as opposed to tacking on like programs via like a guidance counselor or something of that nature.
Speaker: Like, why are the problems there?
Speaker: To begin with, I think we could use that exact same lens on grades, on discipline, on curriculum, on interdisciplinary work, et cetera, et cetera, and change things for the better.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: There's there's that there's that apocryphal story.
Speaker: And I won't say, you know, an origin because I think the origins are confused to history, but gets misattributed, I think, to a lot of different people.
Speaker: But there's the story of, you know, people on the riverbank seeing all of these folks floating downstream.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: you know, and one person goes out and rescues one and then more people start to come out.
Speaker: And, you know, the story can be as elaborate as you want it to be.
Speaker: But let's say that the people on the bank form a human chain and they're going and pulling all these people out of the river.
Speaker: And one person gets this idea to say like, oh, hey, like I'm going to go upstream.
Speaker: So so take a break here.
Speaker: You know, I'm going to go upstream and actually see what it is that causes these people to be in the water in the first place, I think.
Speaker: again, the pandemic probably has a lot to do about this.
Speaker: But it's the case that I think a lot of people are pausing that intervention work, that emergency pandemic work that we've been doing for a breakneck pace for three years and saying, okay, let's pause this emergency work here and let's go upstream and kind of see what the upstream effects are of this and actually address it at the source.
Speaker: And
Speaker: And maybe that's like a good framing to really help think about mental health and think about grading practices and think about those two as educators heading upstream to look at the systemic the systemic impacts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's one of your victories?
Speaker: Oh, one of my victories.
Speaker: OK, a best.
Speaker: OK, now I'm cheating a little bit because my best is also one of my worst.
Speaker: And I think you'll probably agree with this, too.
Speaker: So I put on here the chat GPT slash AI tools discourse as one of the best.
Speaker: And then on the flip side of that, it also is one of the worst because, you know, like with anything sort of new and shiny in education, you have all sides of all sides of people like both trying to take advantage of it.
Speaker: And then, you know, the sense that there's an arms race and you have to just like respond to fire, fight fire with fire.
Speaker: And there's, you know, there's like the chat GPT.
Speaker: I just saw this week, the chat GPT AI that you can feed an essay to and it will see, you
Speaker: It will like rate it to see whether or not it was written with AI.
Speaker: It's like, oh, my gosh, very problematic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Super.
Speaker: But but I thought like a positive outcome of that chat GPT AI tools discourse is really forcing us to step back and reevaluate the purpose of assessment.
Speaker: You know, I've heard so many people say, well, I'm just going to you know, I'm going to have to incorporate more information.
Speaker: more oral assessments.
Speaker: Because regardless of what you've written or what you've submitted in terms of your writing and your work, if you can't talk about what you've written in a way that makes sense to another human being, then it's clear that those ideas are not your own or you don't really have the understanding to support it.
Speaker: So just those quick check-ins, it doesn't have to be a big elaborate thing.
Speaker: A quick check-in just to like, hey, explain this concept to me here.
Speaker: Check off that box.
Speaker: you know, give that feedback.
Speaker: It's just that quick conversation, that quick discussion.
Speaker: You know, those student-driven conferencing tools have always been a tool, you know, in the HRP toolkit that we've been talking about in our, you know, ungrading realm for years and years.
Speaker: So I think that's awesome to kind of see people's response to
Speaker: The perceived threat of, say, chat GPT or those AI tools being like, well, crap, I'm going to have to emphasize my classroom practice and assessment on the things that humans do really well, because now the machine tools can, you know, feed the content and skim the Wikipedias and, you know, frame everything else for me.
Speaker: I'm really going to have to emphasize the things that humans do well.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: I think it's not only caused some reflection on evaluating the purpose of assessment, but really then alignment with our values and the purpose of education and just say like, well, why are we doing this stuff in the first place?
Speaker: You know?
Speaker: So not, not only like, Hey, am I going to have students write an essay on the topic of, you know, what were the causes of the Protestant reformation?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That's probably something that chat GPT can, can write for you in a heartbeat.
Speaker: If you can't just skim a Wikipedia article and get,
Speaker: you know, summarize it already.
Speaker: Like that's a pretty low value assessment right there.
Speaker: So how can I take, say that same content question and make it, you know, something more interesting that speaks to engagement and speaks to the value of, uh, of, I don't know, our relation to the divine or right.
Speaker: How do, how do human beings kind of organize themselves in spiritual communities or, uh,
Speaker: Focus on the study of world religions and go out into, you know, different churches and temples and, you know, visit the world around you and explore those big picture questions.
Speaker: Because then you not only understand the causes or purpose of, say, a Protestant Reformation, but then you'll understand the human context and the world around you there.
Speaker: So, you know, that's one of those things that I think has really caused educators to flex ideas.
Speaker: Those things that that make us awesome, right, which is the human stuff.
Speaker: It's making community connections, making connections to kids, getting creative in our in asking and answering those big picture questions.
Speaker: How are we going to evaluate?
Speaker: How are we going to assess and really kind of causing a little bit of of positive disruption in that space?
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to include this on my best of, but I assume that you were going to mention it.
Speaker: So I'll talk to it for a bit.
Speaker: This is actually something that we plan on talking about potentially at a conference coming up, which is how can we be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to AI?
Speaker: I would certainly include AI as a best of thing.
Speaker: To me, it's like the most exciting thing since maybe like a Wikipedia or the Internet.
Speaker: Um, it's, it's honestly so fun and joyous to use.
Speaker: And I think that there's so many practical applications, uh, that we could utilize with AI to make our lives better.
Speaker: Um, barring all of, again, the potential problematic uses of AI, which are things that you should be talking about, um, within a classroom in the exact same way that you would talk about problematic uses of the internet or of Wikipedia or any other, uh, like growth of technology.
Speaker: Um, like for example, uh, you know, you
Speaker: I think it brings about in terms of that human centeredness, the question of what makes someone different than an AI.
Speaker: Like if you're writing a five paragraph essay and the AI writes a better five paragraph essay or the same five paragraph essay that you do, you know, what does that mean about what you're doing?
Speaker: Where is your voice?
Speaker: Where is your,
Speaker: creativeness and your expressiveness.
Speaker: And I think it opens up interesting questions about exploring writing and reading and content generation for young people to recognize that it's not about following like a guidebook.
Speaker: There are certainly rules that you'll learn about, but the joy is in figuring out ways to break those rules or find the thing that it is that you do.
Speaker: And sadly, that's left out of a lot of classrooms as we teach the test because they are very much rule based.
Speaker: I think certainly that if you fed chat GPT, a college board essay, for example, it probably would get a four or a five almost instantaneously.
Speaker: So it would be my hope that.
Speaker: As these technologies grow, that tests kind of change the types of questions or the types of ideas that they're asking for because they are going to be invalidated quickly as opposed to the reactive approach, which will be like trying to figure out like, is this by AI or not and competing with like plagiarism or like a new turn it in or something of that nature.
Speaker: Yeah, just one more way for us to, you know, be cops instead of educators to be, you know, surveillers and to, you know, yeah, to build more gates and build more walls instead of try to see how we can actually use these tools to.
Speaker: you know, as collaborators.
Speaker: Like, you know, you're never going to, well, I don't want to say never, but you're not going to use the tools in their current iteration to be able to, you know, bring evidence to bear on a topic of a question.
Speaker: So if I said like, hey, find five sources or create, you know, this annotated information
Speaker: you know, kind of source list, find some primary sources that are going to explain your perspective on a topic.
Speaker: I mean, maybe you could do that with, you know, the chat.
Speaker: I mean, it'll help you start.
Speaker: But there's also like problems with like whose sources are pulled from who generated the initial list.
Speaker: There's a lot of questions to be had because you could certainly get started with that.
Speaker: But
Speaker: I was reading someone was talking about how it's a very much a white male perspective in the AI itself, because the Internet tends to have a kind of a white male bias because of the programmers who are the content creators, etc.
Speaker: Yeah, there's lots of cool tools for that.
Speaker: Do you want to go to your number two best then?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So my number two best, a little bit different than what we've been talking about so far.
Speaker: I actually went on Social Blade and Google Analytics to confirm my suspicions about this to make sure I wasn't just making this up.
Speaker: which is one of my best stuff for 2022.
Speaker: And really you could say it was for 2021 as well.
Speaker: Is that Edu celebrity culture seems to be dying.
Speaker: Uh, the, the old days of the, uh, bald or slightly balding white guy, uh, biking around on Twitter and giving positive affirmations about how teachers just need to do better for their kids.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: is not nearly as popular as it used to be.
Speaker: I was checking out like to make sure to look at some of those accounts, uh, teacher like rock stars, et cetera.
Speaker: Uh, those types of things, all of them are down like 100, 200, 300%, uh, since the heyday, uh, pre pandemic when I feel like that stuff was really popular.
Speaker: Even if you go into a Barnes and Noble or a bookstore, the education section is basically cut, which used to be filled with those types of books.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And I think that's because people are in general taking more seriously issues of social justice, of concepts that are –
Speaker: would have been deemed as more radical or blunt within the education sphere.
Speaker: And people want more nuanced academic critiques as opposed to just banal platitudes.
Speaker: There was that seeping sensation of almost a self-help type book in the teaching sphere where you just kind of read it and you're like, this isn't really saying anything.
Speaker: This is just a book that's talking about doing better.
Speaker: Like, I know that.
Speaker: I think people are really rejecting that, especially now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think we don't have the luxury of platitudes any longer is what it is.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: you know, in, in an age where, you know, burnout is so high, teachers are already working incredibly hard, you know, to get the results and to do the things that they do every single day that someone coming and say, Hey, just like kids more or whatever is just, you know, Hey, today, you know, do it for the kids, guys, just do it for the kids at teachers who say, I've been doing it for the kids for the last three years during this pandemic.
Speaker: Teachers do it for the kids.
Speaker: There's no other reason to do this job.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: But I think also teachers to your point about those systemic social justice issues, just like it's time for somebody else to do that work to be like teachers have been doing it.
Speaker: But it's like we can't solve the issues of, you know, of social economic inequality at the schoolhouse door.
Speaker: You know, we need some other parts of the political, social, economic system to pick up the slack.
Speaker: So that way, you know, they can address a little bit of that.
Speaker: So that way, you know, it's one thing off of teachers and schools plates.
Speaker: You know, if we could address issues of, you know, racial, social justice outside of the classroom as well, right, then that'll also help facilitate the things that we want to do there.
Speaker: So again, like schools as part of this ecosystem, realizing just how much of the slack schools have been picking up for so long.
Speaker: And then perhaps related to one of my worst things here, too,
Speaker: If I could make that transition is I think, wait, are you going, are you, did you already do both your victories?
Speaker: You're both.
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I did.
Speaker: I did the humanizing and the transition into the negative.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: The worst of 2022.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Is this also a Mario RPG?
Speaker: That's all from the same game.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: This better not get us whatever, copyright strike or anything like that.
Speaker: One of the worst trends, I think.
Speaker: But there's also, again, the ray of hope because I think it died out just as quickly as it came up.
Speaker: It was just like flash in the pan.
Speaker: two or three weeks of discourse, and then it was gone, which is the continuation of the learning loss narrative via those NAEP scores, which were the first post-pandemic.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: It's as bad as it has ever been, speaking as someone who is recovering from a case of it.
Speaker: But yeah, it was interesting to kind of see how –
Speaker: You know, because I think in the previous iteration, back in the early part of 2020 and 2021, there was a lot of emphasis on that learning loss narrative, right?
Speaker: Like it was, how can we avoid it?
Speaker: And then how can we recover from it?
Speaker: How do we do accelerated learning?
Speaker: How do we do all these interventions?
Speaker: The NAEP scores came and they were like, kids have lost 20 years of learning.
Speaker: Our fourth graders are 20 years behind in their reading scores.
Speaker: And I think everyone looked at that and they said, that doesn't mean anything.
Speaker: You know, I think we very quickly realized the structural impediments and structural restraints of the pandemic put on us just to say like,
Speaker: what else were we expecting from these scores?
Speaker: You know, and in fact, they weren't really all that bad.
Speaker: They didn't fit into the existing narratives about school closures and urban schools, and they didn't fit into a lot of those things.
Speaker: So I think people saw those and, you know, they either confirmed their priors or they didn't.
Speaker: And it was kind of moving on from there.
Speaker: And one thing that's really ironic is now that now that we're kind of past those those that NAEP score gap is I've seen some analysis that actually says, you know, the same people who are criticizing the public school closures and, you know, public school performance generally.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In light of the pandemic score reports have now turned a blind eye to the fact that, well, if you stack up the pandemic learning loss narrative alongside the impact of school vouchers, particularly in Ohio, no offense, in Indiana, that's
Speaker: the impact of shifting those programs to a voucher choice system was actually worse for performance than the pandemic was.
Speaker: So it's like, if that's a thing that you really care about, perhaps you should care more about the impact of vouchers than on the impact of a pandemic, because we can recover from this pandemic thing, hopefully, my goodness.
Speaker: But the impact of vouchers is a little bit more politicized on that front.
Speaker: But yeah, I think...
Speaker: In response to NAEP and this learning loss thing, I think there also is, again, a humanized thing where I think we're seeing then people leaning into structures and systems that might help alleviate some of those impacts, at least as far as mental health, as far as supporting teachers, as far as salaries, working conditions, all of those kinds of things too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think then seeing the value of school as separate from its assessment scores.
Speaker: But I think that was one of the worst trends, but I think it was a little bit blunted in its current iteration compared to what it was before.
Speaker: All right, your other worst, your worst.
Speaker: What do you got?
Speaker: So one of my worst highly relates to that.
Speaker: And I think it's kind of the opposite, the antithesis of the more positive response to those changes.
Speaker: So on the one hand, we have people focusing more on SEL and care and making sure that all kids feel valued and loved, et cetera.
Speaker: On the other end,
Speaker: we have the push, especially late 2022 toward job readiness culture.
Speaker: Uh, and the idea that the way that we escape the, the learning loss narrative and in the quote unquote, terrible state of schools is by making everything into a certificate, making school into a job training factory.
Speaker: I think specifically recently with, uh, the tweets by secretary Cardona, um,
Speaker: And we actually wrote about this like 2020.
Speaker: I remember writing about Secretary Cardona's background and how he has always been a little like neoliberal.
Speaker: I mean, he's a traditional like kind of left leaning bureaucrat.
Speaker: So that's what he does.
Speaker: He very much buys into that narrative of schools.
Speaker: can help kids escape poverty.
Speaker: They are there to help kids make a thriving career, et cetera.
Speaker: And I don't think anyone would argue that it's not important for kids to get good careers, but the purpose of education is not for kids to get good careers.
Speaker: The purpose of education is to make
Speaker: a thriving democracy and help kids care for each other and make a better world, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And public school in the United States is one of the few places where you can have a community that can do that.
Speaker: That's not monetized.
Speaker: That's not based around some kind of corporate branding.
Speaker: And it seems like increasingly there are more and more partnerships between corporations and schools.
Speaker: And there's more and more of a focus on
Speaker: almost certification at any cost.
Speaker: The idea that we should double down on some of those negative practices regarding mental health pre-pandemic and ensure that kids can make a lot of money.
Speaker: So that way they're quote unquote successful.
Speaker: And you've seen that in the workplace as well.
Speaker: There's been a lot of workplaces that have shifted away, for example, from the idea of a four-day work week or working from home or extended breaks, et cetera, because they see potentially productivity going down or the bottom line is going down for various reasons.
Speaker: And they think, well, people just need to work harder in the exact same way that schools now are starting to see that same narrative with kids.
Speaker: Whereas like we could we could actually make our lives better.
Speaker: It's not all about money.
Speaker: There is a lot more to life than just generating as much revenue and earning as high of a salary as possible.
Speaker: Like the way we feel matters a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, there's that issue of preparing kids for a workforce or preparing a workforce for the kids that we have.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So one kind of deals with the educational factors, the schooling factors.
Speaker: The other one deals with the economy writ large.
Speaker: And right.
Speaker: We know that the economy is an incredibly dehumanizing structure institution.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: done democratically.
Speaker: It's not a place where you have a lot of individual power.
Speaker: So that's certainly one of the, to kind of put a silver lining, I guess, on this is I think one of the ways that we can actually help make those changes is model education in schools in ways that we would want to see workplaces organized and arranged.
Speaker: And frankly, that's probably one of the reasons why
Speaker: people who want to privatize education attack public ed with such vigor is because they're one of the last bastions of union membership and collective power, a place where the public has a lot of input, you know, through local school boards, through...
Speaker: state funding guidelines and federal, you know, strings, they all kind of come with different levels of accountability.
Speaker: And well, in the private system, you don't have to deal with any of those things.
Speaker: You can pick and choose which students and families you want to serve, which ones are meeting your bottom line.
Speaker: You know, you can take that voucher money.
Speaker: You can, you know,
Speaker: You can buy gift cards with it.
Speaker: You can fund your own salary.
Speaker: You can use it to pay the real estate that you're doing all these things from.
Speaker: So I think, yeah, I think the privatizers are sort of having a heyday with that.
Speaker: And of course, then if Amazon or Walmart or wherever can fund those groups that are pushing for the privatization, then it's a kind of a quid pro quo from amongst all of those things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And honestly, that gets into my second worst trend, which I think there again, there's a there's a little bit of a tit for tat here because the last few months, I think we've seen national politics post election.
Speaker: They sucked a lot of the air out of the education culture war.
Speaker: I don't think the education culture wars have been as severe or as much of a highlight post election.
Speaker: I think they were in the lead up to November because they were like a big part of election strategies.
Speaker: Yeah, they'll be back, but they've kind of sucked the air out of it.
Speaker: So that's one of my worst and kind of heading into now the new year legislative sessions will begin across the country.
Speaker: I think that's what I was going to say.
Speaker: Those issues are going to come back.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Whether it's about privatization, voucher schemes, education savings accounts, those kinds of things, we're going to see a lot of that in Iowa.
Speaker: But also, of course, the issue of transgender youth in schools, transgender youth in sports, and just like the trans panic writ large, I think is not a good trend generally for women.
Speaker: the future of education for the future of democracy in this country.
Speaker: Um, and I think we're just going to see a lot of those impacts, um, carried forward and who knows what the next iteration is going to be.
Speaker: You know, we've, we've moved past, um,
Speaker: masking and vaccines, or at least the vast majority of people have, as the premier culture war issue.
Speaker: We've gone through critical race theory and divisive concepts and things like that.
Speaker: We're seeing the fruit of all of that now.
Speaker: But the trans panic is really the newest iteration of that culture war scheme.
Speaker: So I think we're going to see more of that in 2023.
Speaker: And I think we'll see...
Speaker: You know, a continued evolution, whatever is going to draw rage bait, whatever is going to draw headlines and clicks and, you know, drive social media is going to be the next thing.
Speaker: And I don't know what it's what's going to be the next groomer panic or something.
Speaker: But I would I would I would like to see that just die out and be left in 2022.
Speaker: But we're really going to have to fight against that.
Speaker: I have a strong feeling that you'll see a huge connection between both those worst ofs where you'll see more and more folks who don't necessarily have a stake in the culture war utilize that narrative to promote more work-based training.
Speaker: The idea of why should we focus on DEI or DEIJ and trans rights, et cetera, when kids are falling behind in math and reading and aren't getting jobs.
Speaker: Yes, which they won't explicitly say that, but there will be a catering to that audience to make that happen.
Speaker: It's so it's so ironic that right that that's always been the drum that they'll bang on, right?
Speaker: That the DEI social justice stuff is a distraction from the basics, the basics, the basics, the basics.
Speaker: I'm reading no leeway.
Speaker: Rooks is cutting school.
Speaker: And she has a section in there, of course, going back to the post Brown versus Board 1954, the massive resistance to all of that.
Speaker: Can you guess what the what the southerner, the southern politicians guess what drum they were banging in the wake of of desegregation orders?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They were saying that, yeah, all this integration is a distraction from the basics, right?
Speaker: When we get, right, when black kids get into these schools, it's a big distraction from their education.
Speaker: It's not good for the white kids' education.
Speaker: It's all these other things.
Speaker: So, of course, that's what we'll always see, right, is social justice is a distraction from X, Y, or Z. And again, cutting schools is going to be something that we'll be talking with Naliyah Rooks with certainly in this new year, but
Speaker: her point is that that's not like an evidence-based case.
Speaker: The evidence-based case actually says that, you know, integrated schools have better social outcomes for kids.
Speaker: They have better educational outcomes for kids.
Speaker: And that's really been a thing that we have, that's a thread that we have lost in the last, you know, 20 years, certainly, but like since the nineties, you know, kind of is, is that integration really is a key here.
Speaker: But what we see are schools that are de facto segregated at rates that are higher than they've
Speaker: than they've ever been post-Brown.
Speaker: And there are social economic incentives for people to play into and to continue that social economic segregation.
Speaker: She calls this segronomics.
Speaker: So the people who take advantage of
Speaker: those segregated communities, particularly in education for their own personal private gain.
Speaker: So that'll be a conversation we'll have to have with the leeway in the new year.
Speaker: So kind of rough transition here to my second worst has nothing to do with any of this.
Speaker: I guess it vaguely does.
Speaker: And this might be more of a unique one to me because I think that I I'm fascinated by this culture, which is throughout 2022, the
Speaker: The mainstream culture very much turned against Web3.
Speaker: So NFTs, your metaverse stuff, cryptocurrency, all of these concepts, even I feel like people that have no idea what any of that stuff is or how it works, they have a negative association with it.
Speaker: They've seen what's happened to San Diego Free.
Speaker: They've seen the news regarding the crypto market and they've started to recognize, hey, maybe having a massive deregulated market
Speaker: is just repeating the mistakes of like the 1920s.
Speaker: And that's the reason why it's all regulated.
Speaker: Regardless, of course, just the way that ed tech works, that's now starting to make a resurgence within the K-12 world.
Speaker: So after it dies in the business world, like many things, it starts getting pitched to K-12 public schools because there's a lot of money to be made.
Speaker: in schooling in general.
Speaker: And throughout 2022, I've seen more and more ed tech businesses pop up surrounding the idea of learn to earn, where you utilize blockchain technology to have students, like for example, submit quizzes or tests, et cetera, earn cryptocurrency, like their unique crypto.
Speaker: And then
Speaker: In theory, sell that in order to earn a profit, even though it isn't worth anything.
Speaker: Or, for example, turning in assignments and instead of a badge like you would on like an LMS, maybe you get an NFT, like a trading card that then could have value within this hypothetical market.
Speaker: We live in hell.
Speaker: That is awful.
Speaker: I mean, it doesn't take a quick Google search of just type in like K12 crypto or K12 Web3.
Speaker: This is more mainstream that I think people are giving it credit for.
Speaker: One of the main keynote speakers at South by Southwest EDU is a crypto enthusiast.
Speaker: They're talking about Web3 technologies.
Speaker: If you look up the lineup for South by Southwest EDU and some like future futurist conferences regarding education, there is a shocking amount of Web3.
Speaker: uh, being pitched as a way to, uh, redo how diplomas work or how micro credentialing works or how like these different various technologies work.
Speaker: And without diving too far into it, cause it would take the length of the podcast.
Speaker: The bottom line is, is that web three is not more secure.
Speaker: It's been hacked time and time again.
Speaker: It certainly isn't going to earn revenue.
Speaker: It's a, it's a scam.
Speaker: I mean, it's all just a giant scam.
Speaker: There are better ways that we could utilize art.
Speaker: I think the best thing I saw about this, I think it was actually on Twitter.
Speaker: Someone said that like AI was embraced at like 400 times the rate that Web3 ever was because it actually has a thing that it does.
Speaker: Like AI actually has a use.
Speaker: Web3 is pointless.
Speaker: It's just a bunch of people that are trying to make money off of each other that couldn't be proven.
Speaker: So yeah, definitely steer clear of Web3 if you're in a...
Speaker: I don't care how good it sounds.
Speaker: There are better solutions in terms of ed tech.
Speaker: That's very scary.
Speaker: Jeez.
Speaker: On that note, should we go to hopes?
Speaker: I'm bummed.
Speaker: You got me bummed out.
Speaker: I'm going to get to move into our hopes for the future.
Speaker: I know for 2023.
Speaker: Nick, what do you hope?
Speaker: Oh, my goodness.
Speaker: Well, my number one hope is I'm going to lean into I'm going to lean into edgy futurism.
Speaker: And I think while while this is like a clever branding thing for us, right, I don't think it's it's not a new idea, but I think it's a framing that was that we really latched on to.
Speaker: We did a lot of research and reading on.
Speaker: And for me, it's really changed my perspective from.
Speaker: you know, it's not the choice necessarily between utopia and dystopia.
Speaker: You know, the dystopia is what we have if we don't make any changes.
Speaker: I love the idea, though, of this solar punk future of the future with humanity put back into it as as kind of I've embraced that framing, because, you know, if the sci fi dystopias and the totalitarian political
Speaker: dystopias that we see in science fiction, young adult fiction, think Hunger Games for kids, Blade Runner for adults or RoboCop and all these things.
Speaker: Those are the results of us kind of losing control of the tools that we were using to try and create better futures for ourselves.
Speaker: And so what a what a solar punk future does is it looks at actually, you know, it says those things are not inevitable.
Speaker: We can we can choose to embrace technologies and tools that are actually going to work for everybody and not just work for, you know, the dystopian corporate faceless corporation, you know, that produces the A.I.
Speaker: that eventually, you know, takes over.
Speaker: our lives or whatever.
Speaker: So our vision of edgy futurism is like education with humanity put back in that emphasizes all of those things that we've talked about that connects to those values that have driven this organization for a long time, but also then in just expanding those semiotic domains of education to really
Speaker: re-imagine, truly re-imagine, like what education is for and what it's capable of accomplishing.
Speaker: And I think that connects a lot to the previous conversation that we've just had about, you know, utopias, dystopias, those best and those worst things.
Speaker: Like we're not going to achieve a different future if we don't start to tinker, if we don't start to make those tiny changes, if we don't have a grassroots approach
Speaker: a grassroots movement toward a revolution, right?
Speaker: So it's not that a revolution is going to happen and we're all going to be participants in this thing, right?
Speaker: The revolution is in this conversation.
Speaker: The revolution is in the work that you do in your classroom every single day.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: Those conversations, those little drips and drops that accumulate and snowball into those big downstream effects as we move through space, as you move through time, as you move through social spheres.
Speaker: It's like starting those chain reactions.
Speaker: And
Speaker: As we've talked a lot, Chris, in the last year since our conference to restore humanity, right, that those words of Henry Giroux as hope as a platform for action, like that's really where we're at.
Speaker: It's really like, OK, we've seen the worst that humanity has to offer.
Speaker: We're going to choose differently, right?
Speaker: We're going to hope for a better future.
Speaker: We're going to put our stock in it.
Speaker: But then we're going to work to actually start to make that change.
Speaker: So our edgy futurism series is going to be workshops that kind of move us in that direction of speculative fiction, actually getting us, pushing us into a little bit of discomfort to think differently about the future.
Speaker: And then a lot of the other sessions in there as well to actually give us the tools and the community to reimagine things.
Speaker: And to actually do that work differently, both in our in our workspaces, in our classroom spaces, in college, in our, you know, in our work lives, kind of whatever.
Speaker: So integrating all of that into like one thing under that banner of edgy futurism is sort of the vision that we have for that.
Speaker: So I'm I'm really excited.
Speaker: I'm hopeful for that.
Speaker: And I think, you know, we can help propagate that influence and that that notion of like an incremental grassroots revolution for more people.
Speaker: What do you got?
Speaker: That's basically my first one.
Speaker: My first one was all about ed tech doing something good and that we can actually utilize technologies to make our lives better in and out of the classroom.
Speaker: I'm actually quite hopeful for that.
Speaker: I think about, for example, again, the invention of the Internet.
Speaker: I think despite all of the problems the Internet brings to our world, and I'm sure that people argue that our lives have been made worse by the Internet in various ways, I think
Speaker: Overall, it's a net positive in terms of the ability to communicate with other people, people who didn't have voices before being able to amplify their message and talk with other folks, folks that were historically marginalized being able to amplify their message and have people hear it.
Speaker: And also just all the different tech tools, just cool stuff that average everyday people can do, whether it be graphic design, whether it be
Speaker: like being able to showcase video or the various different things you could do are more accessible now than they ever have been.
Speaker: And despite the fact that the vast majority of ed tech sucks in attempts to replicate many of the traditional notions of school, there are ed tech companies that are
Speaker: I'm doing some cool stuff.
Speaker: For example, back at that conference, we had a floop, which I've always been like a huge proponent of doing some cool feedback driven learning stuff with with technology.
Speaker: So it's not the technology is bad.
Speaker: It's just that you have to really dig through the weeds to find the good stuff.
Speaker: So I'm hoping that more and more folks do some some awesome work with technology.
Speaker: And it's curating and cultivating a toolkit that is going to help you achieve a purpose rather than say, oh, here's this tool.
Speaker: Find a way to incorporate this into your practice.
Speaker: That's usually a backwards way of starting.
Speaker: And a lot of times we can't help that.
Speaker: I remember as a new teacher being like, oh, I think this thing is cool.
Speaker: How can I use it?
Speaker: And sometimes that found its way into my practice.
Speaker: A lot of times it was kind of a one and done to be like, I had this, this cool experiment.
Speaker: Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't, but I don't want to, I don't want to do that again.
Speaker: It doesn't fit into, you know, the classroom flow.
Speaker: So yeah, like it's just, it's just a way of thinking about these cool tools as ways to facilitate the awesome stuff that we already want to do in our classroom, right?
Speaker: If we want our kids to be connected, how can we use tools to be connected?
Speaker: If we want our kids to be connected,
Speaker: critical thinkers about information and media, how can we use these tools to be able to do that?
Speaker: The AI tools in particular, right?
Speaker: Those are great tools to be able to do that.
Speaker: Or how can we, you know, how can we put a, how can we have our kids actually help partner with those AI tools to be, to generate new things?
Speaker: So, you know, how, and then model that for kids and kind of be the guide on the side to actually facilitate that.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I think right now, you know, I've talked to you, Chris, about like I got Minecraft for my daughter for Christmas and I've ended up playing most of it, you know, because it's such a cool, neat sandbox.
Speaker: I'm always finding new things to do, but my daughter doesn't like to play it unless I'm playing with it, too, because she says, like, it's too hard.
Speaker: And really what that means is like she just hits walls that are intuitive for me as a game player, as a, you know, experience, more experienced person.
Speaker: But if I'm there just to help her get over more of those hurdles, then she gets really involved in that, in that game and that world and like telling a story with the space that she wants to be in.
Speaker: So it's like we still need like adults to model and scaffold and build these tools for alongside kids.
Speaker: So why not teach them how to use chat GPT or these AI generated art things to be like, hey, you know,
Speaker: How can we, you know, what does this help us answer about these questions?
Speaker: Like, what is art?
Speaker: What do humans bring to art?
Speaker: Like, what goes into creating these those things?
Speaker: Whose perspectives are they?
Speaker: How can we use it as a generative tool to actually a feedback partner to have us help generate better ideas, you know, generate thesis statements?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, design as well.
Speaker: Like how do we use technology in an ethical way in the exact same way that like you wouldn't just like copy and paste all the content from a web article and claim it as your own.
Speaker: If you're generating art on an AI generator, like whose art was that?
Speaker: Is it ethically sourced?
Speaker: What companies are doing it ethically?
Speaker: Can it be done ethically?
Speaker: Like those are all interesting questions that could be embedded into most curriculums.
Speaker: That's things that kids would be interested in because it deals with things that they're seeing every single day.
Speaker: And if they're not, ask them and see if they'd be interested in it.
Speaker: I think it's cool.
Speaker: But maybe the kids don't and you could talk about something else.
Speaker: Yeah, no, that's awesome.
Speaker: Like, yeah, I just get excited.
Speaker: Like, those are those moments where I was like, man, I wish I could be in a classroom tomorrow doing that work.
Speaker: So am I on to my next hope?
Speaker: Yes, you are.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Mine is less education focused, I think.
Speaker: But it is.
Speaker: But it is focused on some of the things that I talked about previously in that teachers recognizing their humanity and the need to change structures.
Speaker: And my second hope is labor militancy for the new year across the board, but particularly for educators, right?
Speaker: We need to recognize our collective power in all of this.
Speaker: And one podcast I was going to have in this fall and then scheduling and things kind of fell through was with Kim Kelly.
Speaker: who's a formerly a music journalist turned like premier labor journalist in the country.
Speaker: Someone that I've known for years on metal forums and been to concerts with and stuff, which is crazy to see her success.
Speaker: But she wrote this awesome book called Fight Like Hell, which is about sort of the, it's like a people's history of the labor movement.
Speaker: You know, through the through the lens of women, you know, racialized minorities and these these groups who really, you know, helped build the the world of work that we understand it to today, like who who resisted successfully, collectively at great cost against the forces who, you know, saw their lives and livelihood as profit exploitation, you know.
Speaker: And so I was going to have a conversation with her in the fall again, scheduling or whatever.
Speaker: Hopefully we can we can reschedule that for the for the spring.
Speaker: But we are living in a time where there's like unprecedented support for organized labor and for labor unions.
Speaker: It's as high as it's ever been.
Speaker: But I don't think we've seen that translate into a lot of successful radical action.
Speaker: I mean, maybe with Starbucks and baristas.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Oh, we saw in twenty twenty two.
Speaker: John Deere had their first strike in like 40 years and got awesome concessions out of that.
Speaker: But we haven't seen that translate into education in the same way that we did, say, in 2018.
Speaker: Red for Ed was huge, right?
Speaker: Places where labor strikes were illegal, right?
Speaker: These places successfully went on strike and got massive concessions.
Speaker: You know, that helps bolster the movement politically.
Speaker: That helps.
Speaker: improve the practical working conditions for educators, which improves classroom learning spaces for students.
Speaker: So it's this huge mutual web of growth there.
Speaker: But a hope that I have is to see more of that labor militancy, especially headed into this legislative session.
Speaker: where the aforementioned bills are going to be on the, you know, on the table.
Speaker: So I hope we do see labor organizations step up in support of, you know, trans, transgender compatriots, right?
Speaker: Transgender members in particular.
Speaker: But, you know, for everybody, like recognizing basically that, you know, an attack on one is an attack on all.
Speaker: If they're dehumanizing our transgender, you know, comrades, then, you know, that's that's that's just one more step towards, you know, dehumanizing all of us.
Speaker: So it's really like putting up this huge front.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: I have I have real high hopes for that headed into the new year.
Speaker: I don't have intel on what exactly that's going to be, but if it's going to be on Amazon, if it's going to continue in Starbucks, it's going to filter into other industries.
Speaker: But I think worker power and labor militancy is going to be one of those keys to achieving a more humane, humanized, maybe not that quite solar punk thing, but you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Like getting more power, democratic voice in our economic, social sphere and our working conditions and stuff is something I have a lot of hopes for.
Speaker: Same thread really for my second hope, which is we were talking before about how there's been a lot of growth within ungrading, SEL, et cetera, in the previous year.
Speaker: It's my hope then that educators and young people advocate and grow and expand into other progressive topics.
Speaker: We talk about this a lot at our own PD, which is when you start stepping into ungrading, for example, it's inevitable that you're going to start questioning the
Speaker: other assessment practices.
Speaker: You're going to start questioning homework and testing, the types of projects you do, the level of student voice and power within the classroom, and then diving into other kind of like human-centered or progressive ideas like restorative practices, self-determination, even food and the types of food that kids could eat every single day and what access they have to empowering healthy food.
Speaker: So it would be my hope that one folks dive deeper and deeper into those other progressive systems other than just ungrading as they start to tackle those ideas.
Speaker: And it's, I think, a little bit more far fetched, but I would hope that it happens is that in terms of that labor militancy.
Speaker: That unions adopt more of a stance on pedagogy.
Speaker: Unions historically have focused a lot on labor hours, conditions within the classroom, standing up for identities and folks and ensuring that they are successfully defended, et cetera, which all of those things are vitally important.
Speaker: However, I also think that there's more space for young people to have their voices heard regarding the actual pedagogy and teaching within school.
Speaker: Whereas the argument isn't simply for better working hours, but better work in general.
Speaker: For example, it's not just like advocating against standardized testing, which is part of it, but also like...
Speaker: How can we ensure that schools that have unions also have the best research possible, for example, restorative practices?
Speaker: How do we shift away from more carceral networks of school and ensure that kids are not being kind of led into either directly via the school or after school into prisons?
Speaker: How can we move away from that type of pedagogy?
Speaker: So it'd be my hope that we see more of a united front in that regard.
Speaker: Can I add on that note?
Speaker: So one of our most recent episodes, one of our recent episodes was actually with a journalist who went to Des Moines high schools, Des Moines Roosevelt in particular.
Speaker: But to see the impact of them, the
Speaker: The city of Des Moines police, they pulled their school resource officer contracts back in 2021.
Speaker: So Des Moines was like, what are we going to do?
Speaker: And they said, let's implement restorative practices instead.
Speaker: So the article she wrote was the city that kicked out school, kicked out cops.
Speaker: and implemented restorative practices instead.
Speaker: And it's a great article.
Speaker: But speaking on the labor side of that, one of the biggest proponents of that and the people she speaks to in the issues in the article are members of DMEAs, the Des Moines Education Association, which, you know, is the local for the Iowa State Education Association, you know, which is the Iowa chapter of the NEA.
Speaker: So there is a lot of, I think, information
Speaker: I don't know if it's at state level is a little bit problematic in some places.
Speaker: You know, we've got a red state.
Speaker: You got a I don't know.
Speaker: Membership's an issue.
Speaker: But locally, you know, urban areas, I think there is a big push, you know, for those kinds of things.
Speaker: So it's a great that's a great conversation from a recent episode as well.
Speaker: And that's that's kind of our whole thing, which is you can't wait for someone to rule on these ideas from the top down.
Speaker: You have to start researching and implementing these practices at a local level in whatever way you can, whether that be within the context of your four classroom walls at whatever level is possible or advocating with other educators if you're in a union perhaps going that way or without a union.
Speaker: Uh, there's, there's multiple ways that don't like what your union is doing.
Speaker: You can advocate for change within it.
Speaker: Like if you're a member, you can run for an office within there and then, you know, join those processes that actually do have impacts and inputs on those practices.
Speaker: So, um, I've seen it happen.
Speaker: So there's space for everyone to get involved in making those changes.
Speaker: It's both an incrementalist approach where you're trying to move everyone at once and it takes a lot of effort and every little small step makes a difference.
Speaker: Or it's folks that are taking more radical actions that are taking much larger steps.
Speaker: It just requires folks to be aware of their...
Speaker: of their talking points so they understand like what it is they're talking about they have their research but also that are willing to take small or big risk based off their own personal uh privilege um it's certainly easier for you know for us to make these changes especially now that we're not you know literally in the classroom we can be a little bit more blunt about what we think um but there's space for everyone to make a difference within their own context
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, again, the revolution is not going to is not some distant thing that we're waiting for.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like every single day, you know, chipping away, contributing, you know, that drip, the drips and drabs that are going to accumulate into big long term changes over time.
Speaker: And so focus on what you have, you know, within your locus of control, within your power, relative power and privilege in your context and start to, you know, whittle away.
Speaker: in in in that direction and just like you know slowly we can grow that conversation and you know restore humanity to education exactly and just keep in mind too 2023 uh the change is happening there is a lot of really cool stuff going on don't be dismayed by the algorithm making you hate everything and everyone there are a lot of really cool local initiatives that are making a difference on the ground
Speaker: We can't let our cynicism and apathy stop us from even attempting to make those changes.
Speaker: This was awesome, Chris.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us too, Nick.
Speaker: So, so if you want to learn more, you can go to our website, human restoration project.org.
Speaker: You can follow us on anywhere, you know, Twitter, post, Instagram, Facebook, Tik TOK, search for humor as pro.
Speaker: If you like this podcast rate, review us on all of the apps, all there like, and subscribe on YouTube, do all the things please.
Speaker: Because every little bit, you know, helps get our work in front of more eyeballs.
Speaker: And yeah, hope to see you next time.
Speaker: And let's restore humanity together.
