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Learning and Ways of Knowing
21 Plays6 months ago
What is learning and how do we learn?
In episode 8 of Drawing From the Well, we hear from:
- Youth expert Laila, who imagines a school that centers student wellness and creative ways for teachers to approach teaching.
- A Q&A with professor, researcher, and learning scientist Dr. Shirin Vossoughi about her work in trying to understand the complexities of learning to contribute to projects of educational justice.
- Kyle Beckham of the Berkeley Educators for Equity and Excellence who reflects on what learning is, the differences between knowledge and understanding, and how experiences and the application of knowledge leads to a greater depth of understanding.
Drawing From the Well is hosted by Tiffani Marie and is produced by Jon Reyes.
Music by King Most.
DFTW is supported by Community Responsive Education, continue the conversation at youthwellness.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
um Drawing from the Well is a podcast series from the youth wellness movement. We are educators, researchers, healers, parents, and community members striving to repurpose schools to address the critical wellness gaps in our youth's development.
00:00:19
Speaker
Founded by Community Responsive Education.
Youth Perspective: Erin Russell
00:00:25
Speaker
My name is Erin Russell and I'm 10 years old in fifth grade. When I think about learning, I think about learning more about science because it's one of my favorite subjects in school. It involves a lot of action. You can do cool experiments. Like right now, I'm doing physical and chemical changes, but earlier I was doing states of matter.
00:00:45
Speaker
Certain states of matter can be made into a physical change or a chemical change. Smoke, that's the sign of a chemical change. It's also cool how all of those subjects come together.
00:00:57
Speaker
I just like to learn by gathering the information and then processing it and so that way I can understand what I'm learning. It can happen anywhere.
00:01:08
Speaker
At home, you can be teaching me to make a beat, write a song, write a poem, draw. I think I could take more art classes to learn how to draw. There's a thing in my school called 4-H where we were learning about like giving speeches, how to deal with the nervousness that you can start to feel.
00:01:28
Speaker
I really want to be a football player because as I've watched games for as long as I've lived, they've been really cool. I like all of the action. I like how it takes lot of I've liked how players can interact with their coaches because that's also being social too because you have 52 teammates on your team and plus coaches that's a lot of people so you get to socialize a lot and it requires a lot of the assets that I think I have.
00:02:03
Speaker
And i can also like practice certain football plays. And in order to be one of the best football players, for instance, Tyree Kill, Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelsey, or any of the other famous football players, you have to learn the plays. You have to practice them. You have to run them accurately.
00:02:23
Speaker
You have to just keep on practicing and practicing. Learning is possible in lots of ways, so you can pretty much learn anywhere.
Episode Focus: Learning and Wellness
00:02:39
Speaker
Welcome to Drawing from the Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. Today's episode centers learning and ways of knowing. First, we hear from youth expert Laila, who imagines a school that centers student wellness and creative ways for teachers to approach teaching.
00:02:57
Speaker
Then, I speak with professor, researcher, and learning scientist, Dr. Sherine Vosevey. Dr. Vosevey and I talk about her work in trying to understand the complexities of learning to contribute to projects of educational justice.
00:03:13
Speaker
Finally, we hear from Kyle Beckham of the Berkeley Educators for Equity and Excellence, who reflects on what learning is, the differences between knowledge and understanding, and how experiences and the application of knowledge leads to a greater depth of understanding.
00:03:32
Speaker
Hi, my name is Lila and I'm eight years the first question is, what is wellness to you and why do you think it's important?
00:03:43
Speaker
Wellness is the practice of being well so that you have enough love for yourself to have balance in life. I think it's important because if we didn't have love for ourselves, it would be harder to do things for the world.
00:03:58
Speaker
We would be more exhausted. I know that because I was doing a project for a long time without rest, I got frustrated a lot. And my mom told me to take a break.
00:04:10
Speaker
And when I went back from the break, I wasn't frustrated. I think nature is a great place to rest. When you're tired of doing work, you need a refresher. The next question is when are times you felt the most loved and how did it feel?
00:04:29
Speaker
The times I've felt the most loved is when me and my family do something creative together, like doing a puzzle, cooking, or baking. Other times I've felt really loved when I'm comforted by my family when I'm sad or angry or I have other strong feelings.
00:04:48
Speaker
It felt in those times that I was safe, warm, happy, and amazing and cozy. So the third question is, what do you think it means to love yourself?
00:05:08
Speaker
the third question is what do you think it means to love yourself I think to love yourself means taking a break from hard work and taking care for yourself and just acknowledging that you are great and that you are enough and you are the best you can be.
00:05:30
Speaker
Awesome. If you could actually create your own school, what would that school look like if it was a place where everyone could be well in the way
00:05:46
Speaker
Uh, like, maybe instead of like where they get stuff for being good, stop doing that because not all people get the prize.
00:06:00
Speaker
And sometimes they feel left out because in my school, they kind of do that. And I'm not really doing it anymore. I don't really need it. And we can just do activity for everybody so that they don't feel left out.
00:06:18
Speaker
And then they feel acknowledged. They're not just like there to learn. They're there to have fun too. Sarah, are you talking about how sometimes students get rewarded for like doing them?
00:06:34
Speaker
and yeah Sometimes if a student isn't able to do whatever the work the teacher expects, then they get punished or they get yeah something taken away from them.
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, and I think maybe they don't have time to do that. You know, people are different. So just acknowledging how people learn differently. Yeah, like everybody's different.
00:06:56
Speaker
That's okay. Is there anything else that you would do at your school? Like when you would do learning and stuff like science and math, incorporate fun stuff into it.
00:07:09
Speaker
Like for example, maybe are reading something and then maybe something fun pops up and maybe you could learn a little bit more about that.
00:07:21
Speaker
Or like in math, you could just make it a fun strategy so that it's a little funner.
00:07:32
Speaker
breaks meditate maybe we sometimes do that but not all the time where we just focus on being calm and just be a little bit more calm and rested before you do something again because when don't have enough rest for yourself
00:08:02
Speaker
Thank you, Lila. That was so great. Next, I speak with Dr. Shirin Bozaveh. Dr. Bozaveh gives us insight on her work as a learning scientist, the intersection between learning and wellness, and how learning is the process of experiencing your future self.
Dr. Sherine Vosevey on Educational Justice
00:08:21
Speaker
All right. On this episode that is centering learning and ways of knowing, we have internationally renowned ethnographer of education and ah learning scientist with us today.
00:08:36
Speaker
going to start with a very simple question, and that's for you to introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit more about who you are. Thanks for having me. My name is Shirin Boussourie.
00:08:48
Speaker
I am an educator. i'm also a mom of a wonderful five-year-old who teaches me a lot about learning. And as you mentioned, I'm a learning scientist and an ethnographer. And ah have been concerned for a long time, ever since I was a young person myself, with the social and cultural and political and ethical dimensions of learning.
00:09:12
Speaker
In my work, I try to understand the complexities of learning in order to contribute to projects of educational justice. So I work with lots of different folks to try to create meaningful and generative and humanizing learning environments.
00:09:29
Speaker
And as a researcher, I try to work with people to study those environments, to study the kinds of teaching and learning the social relationships that become possible within settings that are trying to enact a kind of educational possibility.
00:09:47
Speaker
And I think what's also important to say is that I think a lot about the relationships between micro moment to moment interaction within learning spaces. And when I say learning spaces, I don't just mean in schools, I mean everywhere all the time, the relationships between those micro interactions and macro forms of social and historical change.
00:10:09
Speaker
Your work sounds very complex and it seems to reflect really our lived experiences in this country. So I'm interested in like, what inspired you to this work? Was there like a moment where you realized that this was the work that you wanted to do? Like, how did you get to this?
00:10:28
Speaker
There's two stories that I think are important to this. One of them is my family history and specifically my father, whose name was Majid Vusufi. My family's from Iran.
00:10:39
Speaker
My father was a leftist. He was a communist growing up in Iran as a young person in the forties, fifties, and sixties. And part of the reason that context is important is because he was helping to try to enact a kind of economic and decolonial justice in his context as a young person and experienced a lot of repression at that time at the hands of a leader who was a U.S.-backed dictator, like many other places in the world.
00:11:13
Speaker
and was in and out of prison as a young person as a result of that context and supported, like many other Iranians, a revolution to depose that dictator and to create a more egalitarian and democratic society, which took place in 1979.
00:11:33
Speaker
And part of the reason I share that story is because my father and many others supported this revolution that in its instantiation ended up recreating really many of the same structures of repression that had existed before.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so the reason I'm here on this podcast speaking in English to you is because my family was displaced like a lot of other families. through a political process that ended up persecuting many of the people on the left that had supported the revolution.
00:12:04
Speaker
The reason that's important to the work that I do in education and and especially in critical pedagogy and political education is that as a young person, like when I first learned that history, i started to understand that big macro forms of social change and political change and revolution are necessary but insufficient.
00:12:25
Speaker
unless we know how to be with each other differently. And unless we know the kind of world that we're trying to build and we're trying to practice, then it's likely, as has happened in many other contexts around the world, that revolutions can actually reproduce a lot of the structures of repression and injustice that people are fighting.
00:12:46
Speaker
within them. And so that was a really important lesson for me and it's actually what brought me to learning because it means that social change requires a certain kind of human learning, that we have to learn to think differently and be with each other differently and that systemic change requires relational change.
00:13:04
Speaker
which for
Mentorship and Influences in Education
00:13:05
Speaker
me is learning, right? Learning how to be different and be together differently. So that's like the number one story. And then the number two story, which is important to what kind of brought me into the field as an educator and as a researcher is a program that was taking place at UCLA.
00:13:21
Speaker
in around two thousand two two thousand and three called the Migrant Student Leadership Institute. um This is around the time that I was coming out of undergrad trying to figure out what I was going to be and do, you know, like many young folks trying to kind of find my way. And happened to become a part of, through a close friend,
00:13:41
Speaker
This program that was run by Chris Vitieres, Carlos Tejeda, Manuel Espinoza, who became some of my most kind of cherished mentors. And the reason I was really drawn to that space was because it was a group of people who were working to create a space of political education that served.
00:13:58
Speaker
high school age migrant students from around the state of California, the children of migrant workers. And it was attempting to enact that political education, not only to support young people to have a critical social analysis of their own experiences and their families' experiences, but also to support them to imagine the possible and to engage in a kind of social dreaming, what Manuel Espinoza calls social dreaming.
00:14:24
Speaker
And that space was really powerful for me to experience as a young person who was always interested in education and in working with young people, because the best way I can say it is that the people working in that space were artists.
00:14:38
Speaker
They were educators and they were artists in the classroom. They were doing really imaginative teaching that brought ideas to life. that engaged deeply with young people's lived experiences and that created a space of love and of curiosity and imagination that was that felt really powerful to me.
00:14:58
Speaker
and it was a group of people who, like my dad, you know, like that my family and the people that had raised me to think critically about systems of racial capitalism and imperialism, shared those politics and were also interested in figuring out what education could be what was possible with education.
00:15:18
Speaker
And the last thing I'll say about that space is that the folks who raised me in that context were also studying it. They were videotaping, they were taking field notes, they were trying to understand what we were doing at a deep level.
00:15:31
Speaker
And that was also a really important lesson because it taught me that as designers of learning environments, as people who are trying to create educational change, we can set into motion different possibilities within the spaces that we create and teach in.
00:15:48
Speaker
But then we have to try to understand what becomes possible in those spaces. And because young people are brilliant and complex and powerful thinkers, what becomes possible is always going to be greater than what we imagine.
00:16:02
Speaker
And so research for me was about like, how do we understand that? And how do we use research as a kind of practice in order to continue to make those spaces better?
00:16:14
Speaker
I really appreciate this connection between social transformation and relationships. And so you named a few folks.
00:16:25
Speaker
I took Chris Gutierrez's class at Cal. I took her methodology course, and it ultimately changed the way that i understood research. And even i remember this assignment where we were to create a landscape of one minute of interaction, you know, amongst whatever the social phenomenon that we were studying.
00:16:47
Speaker
And it was so profound to me what you can learn in 60 seconds. of really just sitting and observing. And so I really appreciate that. and so you name her, you name some other folks, but I want to still ask this question, like who are your mentors? And if those are the folks, then just give some shout outs, but are there others? Who are your mentors? Who do you want to name? Who are the folks who have helped to ultimately shape why you do this work and the way in which you do this work?
00:17:16
Speaker
And I know you've touched on it a little bit. If there's others, you know, give people their flowers before they get out of here. Well, I started with my dad. I'll also offer my aunt, Maryam Neshat, who was a really powerful you know womanist, feminist figure in my family growing up.
00:17:32
Speaker
Somebody who taught me what it means to be a leader. Somebody taught me what it means not to be afraid to speak your mind and to be direct. and to move with power in the world as a woman of color. So I want to give my aunt her flowers.
00:17:48
Speaker
And in that spirit, there are a number of amazing women of color scholars, Chris being one of them. I would also add Carol Lee and Nayyuan Asir.
00:18:00
Speaker
Paula Hooper and Megan Bang as other folks that I have been really truly blessed to learn from. And one of the things that I think this group of women share is a refusal of the separation between intellectual work and community work and justice work in the world.
00:18:20
Speaker
And all of them, I think, have, I mean, really revolutionized the field of how we think about human learning and argued that questions of culture, questions of diversity, questions of, you know, the political and the ethical dimensions of learning are central to how we understand human beings.
00:18:39
Speaker
And they have done that not only through their scholarship, but through scholarship that is connected to the learning environments that they've created and then they've worked with community to create So I would shout them out.
00:18:51
Speaker
And I would also give a shout out to Mike Rose, who recently passed, who was one of my mentors, who is somebody who had a profound effect on me, not only in his way of thinking about learning, but in his way of thinking about writing.
00:19:06
Speaker
One of the things that I feel blessed to continuously and engage in is helping students develop as writers. And Mike Rose was somebody who did that for me and who modeled for me what it meant to engage with people in a way that took their minds seriously and took their ideas and questions seriously. So, like, just because he's, you know, on my mind, because I'm, you know, in a place of grieving him, one of the things that I feel very strongly about him is that when you were talking with him as a student,
00:19:38
Speaker
It felt like whatever you were saying was the most important thing in the world. And that is such a powerful thing to offer as a teacher and it's something that I try to emulate. like It's like the whole world falls away.
00:19:51
Speaker
Whatever idea, half-baked idea or like emergent question that you're trying to articulate is gold. And to me, that's like the heart of educational justice is that young people, particularly young people who have systematically been denied that experience within our schools, feel that in abundance.
00:20:12
Speaker
For sure. i have some memorable experiences with educators who ah help to curate spaces like that for me. So I really appreciate that.
Redefining Learning and Science
00:20:22
Speaker
you know, I'm thinking as a learning scientist,
00:20:28
Speaker
I'm thinking about this title. And in our work, we look at and examine schools. And so much of schooling focuses on this idea of learning.
00:20:39
Speaker
So from the scientists themselves, how do you define learning? The first thing I'll say is that I was initially and sometimes continue to be uncomfortable with the label scientist.
00:20:53
Speaker
And I think that's for good reason because science has done harm. You know, we could talk about that, but I think there's a lot of ways in which people think of science as this benign and neutral and positive thing. And there's many ways in which the endeavor of science has done harm.
00:21:08
Speaker
to communities of color in the US, to you know people around the world. And I think has represented a kind of narrow Western science that initially made me very skeptical about the term.
00:21:20
Speaker
And especially as an ethnographer, like I was trained up as an ethnographer, so we're taught to be skeptical of, you know, capital S science, I think is the best way to say it. But I have since come to embrace it.
00:21:32
Speaker
And part of the reason I've come to embrace it is that my reading and the teaching of some of the people that I named around sciences, multiple sciences, non-Western and indigenous sciences, other ways of knowing has helped me to think about and embrace and reclaim in a way.
00:21:51
Speaker
Science is the deep study of natural and social phenomena in the world. in ways that matter for the ways that we're trying to change the world. So i kind of embrace it from that perspective. And the thing I would say about how I've come to define and understand learning is that I think historically, you know, learning has been thought of as this purely cognitive process and as an individual process.
00:22:18
Speaker
um And I think that's some of the hangover of Western ways of understanding human beings and human learning. And part of my effort, along with many other folks, has been to challenge that by understanding learning as a fundamentally social and cultural process, as a political and ethical process, as an embodied process, and to try to hold all those different dimensions of human learning.
00:22:48
Speaker
And the other piece of it is that I think in you know, under kind of like a capitalist mentality, there's this idea that learning is the accumulation of knowledge and it's how we've structured our schools, right? Like people put stuff in your brain and then you dump it out on the test and that's learning. And we all know, in fact, that is quite the opposite. Any student will tell you like, i remember that.
00:23:10
Speaker
I don't remember a lot of that myself because it's not designed for it to be meaningful, right? And so I have been trying to think about learning as a process of becoming, as a process of becoming more of ourselves and and ah as a process of becoming the kind of people we want to be, whether that's in a particular domain or some other aspect of how we want to develop ourselves. and I think that it can be helpful to think of learning as the cultivation of our gifts and of teaching, therefore, as an effort to understand and help other people cultivate their gifts.
00:23:47
Speaker
And I think that this idea of learning as fundamentally social has been really important for me in thinking about how it emerges in relationship and how it emerges in moment to moment forms of talk and interaction.
00:24:03
Speaker
And so I think a lot about what are the conditions that support that kind of development and becoming.
Supportive Learning Environments
00:24:12
Speaker
And one of my other mentors, Ray McDermott, who I would also want to give flowers to, has this line that has always stuck with me, which is the idea that people in interactions can be environments for one another.
00:24:26
Speaker
And to me, that's such a powerful idea because it means that a teacher and by teacher, I don't just mean school teacher, right? I mean like mom, aunt, sibling, you know, older cousin, sometimes younger cousin, right?
00:24:39
Speaker
Whoever is in that role at that moment can be an environment for another person. And I think, you know, if we think back to our greatest mentors and teachers, I think people might know what that feels like and what that means. And part of what it means is that you are different in their presence.
00:24:56
Speaker
that you get to be more of yourself because there's a sense of being loved. There's a sense of being seen. There's a sense of being held in your vulnerability of trying to learn something new.
00:25:07
Speaker
And that idea of vulnerability as a positive experience to me is one of the indicators of a just learning environment. There are so many experiences of negative vulnerability within the system as we've set it up, like showing yourself not to know,
00:25:26
Speaker
is at risk of being seen as dumb or feeling dumb, right? And so what powerful, like justice-oriented, loving educators do is create conditions where you can show that you don't know something and it doesn't feel bad.
00:25:41
Speaker
And it in fact feels good, right? Like I was having a conversation with an undergraduate student the other day who, you know, we were talking about the feedback on writing that people get in our class.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I asked her like, how's the feedback feeling? You know? And she said, well, it feels different because it doesn't feel like I'm in trouble. What a profound way to talk about what has happened to writing in schooling, how writing has been disfigured and how learning has been disfigured.
00:26:08
Speaker
How do you redefine that and reshape that to feel like love, to feel like care, to feel like shared work together in whatever it is that you're trying to learn as a learner?
00:26:22
Speaker
And so I think that's one part of it. And then the other thing I'll say, because I'm a Bogatskyan and I have to throw in the zone proximal development somewhere, here is that I think part of what happens in those learning interactions is that through the so support it and guidance of another person, you actually get to experience your future self.
00:26:46
Speaker
And through experiencing your future self, you get to actually grow into that self. So I'll just give like an everyday example that I would give in my classes, which is like when my dad was teaching me to ride a bike, I was stubborn and I didn't want to ride a training wheels, you know, so I wanted to be on the two wheeler before I could really be on the two wheeler and I would have fallen and, you know, hit my face if I didn't have some help. So he put his hand on the back of the bike, you know.
00:27:11
Speaker
So he put his hand on the back of the bike and walked me down the street and talked me through it. So I'm pedaling and I got my hands on the handlebars. He's probably telling me to look straight and not ah at the ground and all of that. Right. But the point is through that gesture of putting his hand on the back of the bike,
00:27:27
Speaker
I can now feel what it feels like to successfully ride a two-wheeler through somebody else's help. And I think that is such a powerful like portal. It's like learning is a portal into this experience of your future that actually makes you grow.
00:27:46
Speaker
And so I think about that a lot when I think about other domains, right? like What does it mean to have your hand on the back of the bike when you're teaching somebody how to write? When you're teaching somebody how to think about scientific inquiry or the natural world? What does it look like when you're helping somebody learn how to teach?
00:28:03
Speaker
So I think that for me, there's a way in which the relational piece becomes really important to how we redefine learning from this perspective.
00:28:14
Speaker
I love this idea of the learning as this portal or this process of becoming. And I really love this departure from learning as an environment that's punitive and has harsh consequences, which, you know, in my time in the academy, that was a lot of my experience with learning.
00:28:37
Speaker
So I really appreciate that reframing.
Interconnectedness of Learning and Wellness
00:28:40
Speaker
And so much of what you said also reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer's work around embodiment, around these ideas of knowing and stepping away from Western understandings of knowing outside of just the cognitive to engage different components of our personhood in the process of learning and knowing. So I really appreciate that. And as you were speaking, as you were telling these stories,
00:29:06
Speaker
I had a somatic experience, And so I was learning in a way that made me feel good while you were teaching us and teaching me. And so this podcast really centers this idea of wellness.
00:29:21
Speaker
So you've already, you know, you've been preaching for about 20 minutes now, but I want you to, going to play the organ behind you and I want you to take us higher and help us make this connection between how you define learning, how you're understanding learning, and really the topic of our show of wellness.
00:29:39
Speaker
How do you understand the intersections of learning and wellness? And I also want you to think about um your work and how it connects to the body. So like the intersections between learning and wellness and these ideas that led you to consider particularly the role of the body in learning.
00:29:58
Speaker
Well, I'll say, first of all, this is something that's kind of at the edge of my thinking and your podcast has been really important for continuing to deepen my own learning about this. I'll start with the body and I'll just say that one of the reasons the body became really important to my own thinking as an educator and a researcher is that I started to see that this idea that for learning how to be differently with each other in the world, by which I mean,
00:30:26
Speaker
learning to engage with one another outside of systems of supremacy, right? Like white supremacy, male supremacy, heteronormativity, like we could you know keep going. Unlearning supremacy and learning to engage with each other in ways that embody a kind of relational wellness involves learning how to move differently.
00:30:46
Speaker
And that involves the body, you know? So in one of the environments that I got a chance to work in, which was the Tinkering After School program in San Francisco, and we were working in Viz Valley at the Boys and Girls Club there, along with Meg Escudet, who was a teacher that I partnered with in that space, we started to notice that sometimes these educational inequities would show up in subtle ways in the ways educators interacted with students in these embodied interactions.
00:31:18
Speaker
And so, for example, we noticed that girls would have projects taken out of their hands more often than boys and people would fix stuff for them and then give it back to them. or kids that were being hyper-disciplined in school and racialized in different ways would end up with like less open-ended tasks.
00:31:38
Speaker
And it showed up in the ways that people were you know literally taking over sometimes for kids and finishing things on their project and giving it back to them. And so we started to think about this idea of like, we called it hands and eyes.
00:31:51
Speaker
We were like, ah how do hands and eyes play a role? And it was like a making and tinkering space. So the hands-on kind of project-based nature of the activities really drew that out. And we started to work with teachers to watch video of our interactions to notice these moment-to-moment opportunities to respect kids' thinking in the ways that we, the physical ways that we engage with the materials and tools together. And it required a kind of slowing down.
00:32:21
Speaker
And it required attuning to kids in the moment and paying attention to your own hands and body and what they were doing with the tools and materials in the moment in order to carefully like reflect and enact a more just kind of interaction. And the other thing that we noticed from the research, because we got a chance to stay with kids for a long period of time, is that the help that kids received in these spaces became models for how they helped each other.
00:32:52
Speaker
So we started to notice that like the kinds of help kids got, they would almost immediately use to help their friends with the projects and the activities. And we looked at one particular student, Tanya, over three years,
00:33:06
Speaker
And you could actually see it in the data that like there was these days where she was getting certain kinds of help from, you know, the educators. And then she started to use that same help to help her friends.
00:33:17
Speaker
And she started out in the space when she was six. And by the time she was nine, if you looked at her activity, it looked a lot like the seasoned teachers in that space.
00:33:28
Speaker
She was carefully, thoughtfully, intentionally helping younger children. into the activities as a youth facilitator. And so for me, that was such a powerful example, not only of how the body becomes a space where these hierarchies and forms of violence can get reproduced in subtle ways, but also how we can learn to move differently and engage in new ways with each other that actually spill out relationally.
00:33:58
Speaker
Going back to your earlier question about learning, I think that's one of the most powerful ways to think about learning, that these relationships create forms of connection and possibility that start to spill out into other relationships through those people.
00:34:15
Speaker
And I think it happens in negative ways and positive ways, right? Like when we have negative experiences, we can replay those with other people. And when we have those experiences of possibility and love, like we can also replay those with other people. And that's what happened in this space through how kids helped each other.
00:34:33
Speaker
And what it means for me now as a teacher is that when I help somebody with something, it actually has like a double or triple meaning. It's not just like I'm helping you do this right now.
00:34:44
Speaker
I'm also potentially planting the seed for how you might help other people. And so it's kind of like, what does it look like when you build a culture in a space? It happens through those moments and it can happen through the body.
00:34:56
Speaker
So that's one of the ways that I've come to see the body. The other piece I wanted to offer here is that, and this took me a while to learn, I'll just say that, is that as somebody that has always been interested in critical education and pedagogy, I have worked in a lot of spaces where helping young people who bear the brunt of these systems to critically analyze these systems has been a central focus.
00:35:26
Speaker
whether through literacy, through theater, through different kinds of STEAM activities, that's always been a central concern. And one of the tensions that I have become even more attuned to over the last like five, 10 years, and part of it is becoming a mother, is that criticality alone is not enough for wellness.
00:35:47
Speaker
And part of that is that when you experience these systems and then you encounter spaces that help you deconstruct them and analyze them, it is important because it helps you not internalize it, right?
00:36:01
Speaker
But it also makes you see it in HD, right? Like now you see it everywhere. That can be really heavy, you know, that can be really heavy. um And so now I'm asking you questions about this. Like what does it mean for spaces to be nourishing?
00:36:16
Speaker
and healing and joyful. And how do we support young people not only to have critical analyses of these systems, but also to be able to imagine and enact life-giving systems. And I think this is, you know, what the abolitionist work has been pushing for, what a lot of folks in education have been pushing for.
00:36:36
Speaker
especially the conversation has grown over the last few years. And the last thing I'll say about this that's really interesting to me is as we move further into the space of asking about what is nourishing, what is joyful and supports wellness within critical educational spaces, i worry sometimes that it becomes separated from what is possible with the intellectual work.
00:37:03
Speaker
And I have been trying to figure out along with other people, like how do we develop a way of understanding, like Megan Bang has talked about an intellectual wellness or well-being, like this relationship between science learning, math learning, writing, reading.
00:37:19
Speaker
And this type of wellness. And so one of the examples that I'll give in a space that I work in now is that in the writing that we have students do, we think a lot about how writing can support new relationships with family and bring forward their family histories in particular ways.
00:37:37
Speaker
And I have seen over time that writing can become a vehicle for deepening and healing relationships with family. And I think that's one example of what becomes possible when we start to center not only a critical social analysis, which is deeply necessary,
00:37:55
Speaker
but also a kind of view of what the world could be and then what that means for our everyday relationships. So in one class, we were you know talking about critical responses to deficit views of language ideologies and talking about you know African-American vernacular English and the ways that it's been seen from a deficit perspective historically and reading critical articles about that.
00:38:18
Speaker
And one of the young black students in our class had this really profound experience of realizing that she had been enacting that way of thinking in relation to her brother, you know, and calling her brother and apologizing for denigrating his way of speaking and being in the world. And that was a really powerful shift for her that emerged not just from our conversations, but from the texts, from the writing, from the feedback on the writing.
00:38:45
Speaker
And so I think one of the things I'm excited to think more about with other folks who are wrestling with this is like, what are the deep intersections
Impact of Educational Practices on Relationships
00:38:53
Speaker
between what those disciplinary or intellectual practices could be and this kind of healthful human development and becoming that I think we're interested in supporting.
00:39:06
Speaker
Yes. I love this relationship between writing or the production that comes from our classrooms and its relationship to our families and its healing.
00:39:18
Speaker
I had a student, and I just found this out actually, she's graduated a year ago. We had them write poetry and she did a, she focused on a part of the body and she focused on her father's hands.
00:39:31
Speaker
And the entire poem was about her father's hands and She used it as a way to write to him about his alcoholism. And, you know, we went through the process and we don't we don't do grades, but we went through the process and gave her feedback and she revised beautiful poem.
00:39:49
Speaker
And we're filming a documentary ah very recently and she, her father's in the documentary and he started talking about his sobriety.
00:40:00
Speaker
and he pulls the poem out of his wallet during the documentary. And i was the person interviewing him. And I hadn't known that, you know, we're we suggested this is something that can become a part of a conversation with your family, the work that you produce here.
00:40:18
Speaker
But the fact that he named that as ah vital medium that, you know, supported him in his sobriety was so profound. So I hear that. I hear that.
00:40:28
Speaker
And so much of what we were doing in that process of curating learning was really about challenging schooling in and of itself, but so many of the norms, particularly in our curriculum.
00:40:40
Speaker
And a a number of educators around the country are are challenging traditional norms of, you know, classroom curriculum and um finding different paths in ways of bringing about transformation.
00:40:54
Speaker
So my question to you is, how have you observed some of those efforts clashing with each other? And do any particular examples come to mind? I think there are some tensions and debates and clashes within approaches to this type of, you know, critical justice oriented education that I think are important to hold.
00:41:19
Speaker
And before getting into them, I think part of what I mean by that is that I don't think of those tensions as necessarily a bad thing or like as a judgment on different approaches, but that like, if we can hold those tensions and ideas together, then I feel like there is a potential for collective growth in this work.
00:41:39
Speaker
So I'll just say it like that. And one of those tensions that if anybody knows me, know this is like one of my soap boxes that I think about a lot is this tension that happens when people start to move away from, you know, what Fredy called banking education, um this idea of top-down authoritarian education in the context of schooling.
00:42:01
Speaker
And I think one of the tendencies that we sometimes have as a field is that we go to the other extreme and we go to a kind of youth-centeredness that can sometimes be not productive.
00:42:15
Speaker
And I say sometimes on purpose because people use the language of youth centered or child centered to mean many different things. And some of what I'm going to be advocating for here sometimes happen under the banner of youth centered. So it's not necessarily that the language is bad.
00:42:30
Speaker
But I think what I have noticed is that the role of the educator becomes unclear. or the role of the educator becomes flattened to only being a facilitator. And I've heard actually in different spaces, people say like, oh no, I'm not a teacher, I'm just a facilitator, you know?
00:42:48
Speaker
And I think people say that for you know good reasons sometimes because of how much weight the word teacher can carry in a negative sense. But there's a couple of different reasons why I feel like it can be unproductive.
00:43:01
Speaker
One of them is that as we think about the development of new teachers, like young people who are interested in becoming educators, whether in out of school, community organizing, or community-based spaces, or schools, I don't actually think it helps us really understand what to do.
00:43:18
Speaker
and think it helps us understand what not to do, not to be that authoritarian kind of top-down teacher But it doesn't really give us a lot of guidance about how to be with young people. And if you are hands off as an educator, it's actually probably likely that you may reproduce not serving our kids in terms of their growth and development.
00:43:38
Speaker
And so I think we need some clarity around that. And I think one of the ways that I've tried to think about this is that there's these dichotomies that we sometimes reproduce within critical educational spaces, like lecture versus dialogue is a big one, right? Like lecture's bad and dialogue is good.
00:43:55
Speaker
And I'm always like, well, which lecture and which dialogue? Right. Because I've been in lectures that, you know, I wanted to fall asleep in and I've been in lectures that changed my life.
00:44:06
Speaker
And so, you know, the qualities of those experiences is what matters, not necessarily that you're lecturing or you're engaging. Same with dialogue. Right. I've had like you know, experiences of incredible dialogue and dialogues where I felt like this is kind of going through the motions, but we really know what the teacher wants us to say.
00:44:24
Speaker
You know what i mean? So I say that to say that there is so much of a range of, ways of engaging pedagogically, right?
00:44:35
Speaker
That I think this idea of like, we're not teachers, we're facilitators, and we don't do lecture, we do like dialogue flattens it and makes it harder to engage in the kinds of artistic and imaginative and creative pedagogies that, you know, I spoke about experiencing in the migrant program where you know Sometimes there would be just like a 20 minute explanation of something and at the end of that explanation it just felt like your whole world had expanded. you know And sometimes we would be down on the floor sitting with kids reading, you know working sentence by sentence through like complex texts and all kind of hitting our head against the text and trying to figure it out together because
00:45:18
Speaker
we were learners too in that space, you know? So I say that all to say that I think that it would be helpful for us to collectively develop a more nuanced and complex language that does justice to the depth of teaching and the different ways of engaging in teaching that happen across these different kinds of justice-oriented projects and spaces.
00:45:43
Speaker
And I think it would offer different kinds of resources for young people who are interested in coming into this work.
Intergenerational and Artistic Approaches to Education
00:45:50
Speaker
And I think one of those languages that's been really helpful for me is this idea of intergenerational learning.
00:45:56
Speaker
what is the power of, you know, adults and young people coming together to try to know and understand together and to bring all their skill sets. So I'm 41. When I'm working with 18 year olds, I know some things that I can share those things, right?
00:46:12
Speaker
Without being worried that I'm, you know, banking them. Like I can share in the ways that I know how to share it as a you know, baby elder. And are they going to teach me some things? Yeah. You know, like my students did language projects today. One of the groups was working on slang.
00:46:26
Speaker
75% of the words I did not know. You know what I mean? So like there are things that younger folks are doing and thinking that are, you know, powerful perspectives and experiences to bring to the mix of whatever it is we're trying to learn together.
00:46:42
Speaker
And so to me, the language of intergenerational learning is more powerful for the kind of work that I think we're up to than this idea of youth-centeredness. Because I think that youth-centeredness to me at its best means we are centering the humanity of young people. That I can get behind.
00:47:01
Speaker
But if it's about teachers only being hands-off and adults always stepping back, then I think it's a problem because I think we've got to grow together. We all got to grow together. And I think the last thing I'll say, going back to the relational piece,
00:47:14
Speaker
is that I think part of what's important about the intergenerational is that we're actually restoring those relations. And the history of education in this country has been the separation of children of color from their families.
00:47:27
Speaker
And I think that mending and healing and restoring those relations between elders and young people within our communities is part of the work of wellness. Oh, my goodness. You have just blessed us tremendously today. We're going to get out of here in a second. i have one more question for you.
00:47:46
Speaker
A good number of our listeners are baby elders, but we also have younger folks and prospective teachers. And so before we get out of here... I'm hoping you can share with us, you know, what's one piece of advice that you would offer to prospective teachers around their work, both in and outside of schools, and maybe i should say educators, as they seek to center learning and wellness within their practice?
00:48:15
Speaker
Well, I'll kind of go back to where I began. and say that the political part of our work as educators, because being educators is always political, right? Like the political part of our work as educators has multiple layers.
00:48:31
Speaker
And sometimes it looks like being on the street and protesting and organizing, whether that's you know through unions or through at the school level or you know in all the different ways that people are organizing.
00:48:44
Speaker
And sometimes it looks like an interaction with a child. And I say that to say that I think it would have been helpful to me as a 25-year-old for somebody to tell me that the work of helping a student write an essay or explicate text is also the good and important political work of justice.
00:49:07
Speaker
And I think that all those levels are necessary, but sometimes as younger folks, we might feel pressure to do it all at the same time. And I think it's important to create that space to be with young people and to create and learn how to create learning environments that are the kind of world we would like to live in and be in.
00:49:31
Speaker
That is what we're up to. And I think, you know, people use this language of world making. I think it's a really powerful language. Creating learning environments is world making. It's midwifing.
00:49:41
Speaker
And I think that the ethical and political work of that is deeply necessary and important. And it's day to day work. And it's what we need alongside many other forms of work in struggles for justice. And I think that I felt that as a young person, but I didn't quite have the language for it. And sometimes I felt like I was supposed to be out with my protest sign all the time.
00:50:04
Speaker
And so I just say that to offer as a way to ground. And I think that the other thing I'll say, which comes from my experience as a mom, and Miguel Zavala talks about this, is another one of my mentors in the migrant program, is just what it means to really be present with young people and to be present with learners.
00:50:24
Speaker
And it's part of what our systems thwart, you know. They make it hard in the way that they've organized schooling to really be present with our students. but there's nothing more powerful than that deep sense of presence together.
00:50:39
Speaker
And I think that in the all of the unhealth of the ways that teachers are positioned and you know overburdened with everything that's happening, especially right now, that space of grounding, of being present with young people, of like the communion of minds and selves,
00:50:59
Speaker
is not only nourishing to our kids, it's also nourishing to us as educators. It's why we do this work. um And I feel like it's a daily practice, you know, it's almost like a meditative practice. Like it's a daily practice of like really being present in that way and hearing and noticing their thinking, their feeling, their ideas.
00:51:19
Speaker
The last thing I'll say, which I think is reflected in some of the other things we talked about, is an invitation to think of teaching as art. and to think of it as an artistic practice.
00:51:30
Speaker
And, you know, my husband is an artist and he says the difference between artists and non-artists is that artists give themselves a sense of permission to create. And I think that sense of permission to be imaginative and creative as an educator is one of the ways that love manifests with young people.
00:51:55
Speaker
Finally, hear from educator
Understanding Through Interaction
00:51:58
Speaker
Kyle Beckham. He reflects on the differences between knowledge and understanding and how they contribute to the process of meaningful learning.
00:52:09
Speaker
What is learning? Learning is the process through which individuals and groups come to know and understand themselves, others, and the natural and social worlds around them.
00:52:20
Speaker
Learning is demonstrated through some kind of action. The biggest thing that I've come to understand about learning is that it generally falls into two types, knowledge and understanding.
00:52:34
Speaker
The most pivotal change I've undergone in almost 20 years of teaching is when I encountered a book called Understanding by Design. It articulated simply and clearly something I had struggled with as a teacher and learner, the difference between knowledge and understanding.
00:52:50
Speaker
There are many things we learn that lead to knowledge. Knowledge does not necessarily require application, explanation, or even much thought. There are many things that we know but do not understand.
00:53:02
Speaker
Knowledge in many ways is much easier to gain than understanding. We can accumulate knowledge We can have vast quantities of it, but that does not mean much if there is nothing to do with it.
00:53:16
Speaker
It can be pleasurable or interesting, but outside of our own personal internal lives, that doesn't matter much. And still, simply applying or executing knowledge is often insufficient.
00:53:27
Speaker
We can know the answer to a quiz, but forget them ah much later after the quiz is done. We can know how to drive a car even, and that knowledge can mean nothing.
00:53:38
Speaker
until we actually have to get into a car and drive it. We generally privilege knowledge in modern life because it is easier for us to wrap our heads around. Its demonstrations are usually discrete and easier to measure, compare, and or are based on the recall of pretty constrained processes.
00:53:59
Speaker
Many millions of people know how to multiply. Many people were forced to sit and drill their times tables up to 12 times 12. But ask someone what 13 times 14 is and they will usually draw a blank.
00:54:12
Speaker
This is because they know how to multiply. but they do not understand what it is that they are doing, why they do it, or how it relates to the world around them. They have learned something, but that learning is insufficient, because it doesn't result in actual understanding.
00:54:31
Speaker
Understanding is how we know if meaningful learning has taken place. If we understand something, we can apply our knowledge to new problems and scenarios. We can connect it to other things we know.
00:54:41
Speaker
We can use knowledge flexibly to make deeper sense of the things around us, the people around us, and the ideas we encounter and have. We are learning things constantly. My children have learned how to talk, walk, and are in the process of learning how to interact with others in a variety of different contexts and situations.
00:55:00
Speaker
Both know how to talk and walk, but they don't necessarily understand what's going on that makes them walk or talk. They simply do it. My five-year-old daughter has a level of understanding about much of the world that her three-year-old brother does not.
00:55:17
Speaker
She understands why and why not she can and cannot do certain things. Why she cannot just do as she pleases whenever she pleases. Why is this? Beyond simply knowing that her actions impact others, she has come to understand the why of that knowledge.
00:55:33
Speaker
She has experienced so many things that allow her to apply that knowledge towards situations she could not possibly anticipate. Her brother knows some basic things, but he does not understand them as well.
00:55:46
Speaker
He does not have a why yet, and he is still figuring out how to apply his basic and emergent knowledge to novel situations. There are many things I knew, via study and interacting with others, about parenting before I became a parent.
00:56:02
Speaker
I was knowledgeable. However, my lived experience as a parent has created a level of understanding that I otherwise would not have had. I have learned by doing.
00:56:13
Speaker
This is not to say that people without children can never understand what parenting is like. They most certainly can. But that understanding would be achieved with the greatest depth if they were to spend time caring and providing for children.
00:56:27
Speaker
They could enter into a situation of care with high levels of knowledge. And a high level of knowledge is useful because it makes achieving understanding easier, quicker. But it does not sub substitute for experience and application.
00:56:43
Speaker
I wish I had more deeply understood the distinction between knowledge and understanding when I started teaching. I taught for knowledge, and understanding was something that came, but I didn't plan for it as much as I do now as a teacher.
00:57:01
Speaker
I knew a lot, but I did not understand as much as I thought I did. I needed to learn from my peers, my students, my experiences, and through those things, I came to both know and understand a great deal about teaching and learning, far more than I had simply learned about it for knowledge's sake.
00:57:21
Speaker
I think there is much to be gained for learning things for knowledge's sake. However, I believe that learning is best done with others, via exchange, via interacting with the artifacts and ideas of others.
00:57:34
Speaker
It happens most deeply via shared experience, practice, revision, modification, coming back to what we thought we knew, and updating it. If we really understand something, then we will understand that the world is fundamentally dynamic,
00:57:49
Speaker
that we will always be tinkering because nothing is ever completely settled, including ourselves. And that's what being human is about. It's about exploring the worlds we inhabit, interacting with them, giving and taking from them, modifying them, and growing as individuals and collectives.
00:58:19
Speaker
Historically, learning has been framed as the accumulation of knowledge. But as Kyle teaches us in his reflection, learning is built on two separate ideas, knowledge and understanding.
00:58:33
Speaker
Knowledge is easy to obtain, but understanding is only gained through experience and the application of knowledge. Learning is best done by exchange, by interacting with the artifacts and ideas of So in thinking about learning beyond individual cognitive assessment, we see that learning is fundamental in a social and cultural process.
00:58:58
Speaker
We must ask ourselves, what then the role of teachers in all of this? As Shirin teaches us, teaching is an effort to help people understand and cultivate their gifts.
00:59:12
Speaker
For students, learning then becomes portal into your future. And we also must ask, how can teachers get us there? Lila expresses a desire for inclusive, non-punitive ways of learning that is up to the teacher to make sure that their student's vulnerability is a part of a positive learning experience.
00:59:36
Speaker
Shirin encourages us to think of teaching as an artistic and creative practice and that teachers must give themselves a sense of purpose to reframe learning to feel like love.
Closing Remarks and Invitation to Engage
01:00:14
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Drawing from the Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This podcast was produced by John Reyes and music by King Most.
01:00:27
Speaker
Join us as we continue the conversation at youthwellness.com.