Transcript
Speaker: The
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of Mind Food, a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
Speaker: This episode is of course brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are C. Billy Campbell, Monique Schramm, and Corinne Greenblatt.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington.
Speaker: I'm the creative director of the Human Restoration Project, and I am here with Chris McNutt, our executive director.
Speaker: And today on MindFood, we're talking about interdisciplinary learning.
Speaker: How do we define it?
Speaker: What's the need for it?
Speaker: And what are our top interdisciplinary learning ideas?
Speaker: And this episode is really inspired by the work we've done at HRP with schools and previously with 100 Days of Conversation.
Speaker: I thought, Chris, you were really involved in particular with the 100 Days of Conversation.
Speaker: Could you describe basically what that was and what HRP's role was in that?
Speaker: So back in 2020, 2021, we partnered up with Aaron Robb out of re-envision ed.
Speaker: And we ended up reaching out to a bunch of different organizations, schools, young people, individuals, et cetera, to host over 117 conversations with over 500 young people and adults.
Speaker: talking about reimagining education.
Speaker: So we asked a series of questions about what school means to different folks.
Speaker: What does equity mean in education?
Speaker: What does it mean to reimagine school?
Speaker: And that helped both reinforce our own ideas, as well as build upon our resources, reimagine our professional development process.
Speaker: And in general, it's built into a lot of what HRP does now.
Speaker: On our website, if you go to humanrestorationproject.org slash listening, you'll see that framework as well as various findings.
Speaker: And that's really built into the human-centered schools model, which is we go around, we listen to students, we listen to young people, we listen to community members, and we build classroom experiences based off of what folks are telling us.
Speaker: And interestingly enough, and it's not really surprising given the research, the work that we're pushing for is what everyone keeps saying, regardless of their background.
Speaker: What we want is common sense.
Speaker: We want more of that purpose-driven learning.
Speaker: And just for funsies, we'll play a few of those clips right now.
Speaker: I definitely agree.
Speaker: I think that when the most marginalized students in our community feel heard, feel valued, feel like they have enough resources and support, having those basic needs met, if they have all of those things and feel like and can voice that they can succeed, I think that is what equity looks like.
Speaker: Yeah, what Chuck said just recently,
Speaker: We can't just be doing this one size fits all and, you know, moving forward if the kid that we assume already knows the answer is like, okay, good, good to go.
Speaker: And then we move on to the next thing.
Speaker: It's when like the most, the kid that needs the most help is able to articulate that they're good to go is when we can move forward from there.
Speaker: top picks of classes so I think that having more of the power of choice is would be more fair and having like art as a subject and having those things as subjects instead of yeah you don't get to choose to do this you have to just like we'll either choose for you to that you get to do this or you just don't get to do this
Speaker: I do not think education should be a commodity.
Speaker: Like I said in the chat, it should be free, accessible.
Speaker: In a democracy, it's essential.
Speaker: It should be alive.
Speaker: That's a key word.
Speaker: It should be something that brings us alive, not puts us to sleep.
Speaker: And I know that, you know, I've read this a million times that the system currently is working exactly as it was made to work.
Speaker: So what those clips really drive home, I think, is what you had said before about we so frequently hear from kids and community members alike, right, the need for purpose-driven learning experiences that are rooted in the world outside of school in contrast to their experience of school as individualized, isolated, and increasingly like isolating.
Speaker: So that's to say not really connected to the things that they find meaningful and valuable to learn about.
Speaker: They don't have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn them.
Speaker: They're not connected to the peer and community relationships they want to build and maintain.
Speaker: So it's kind of in opposition to socialization.
Speaker: And they don't really see them as being connected to the world outside of school.
Speaker: So it's basically school as a series of hoops to jump through, as a series of tests to take that don't really build on top of one another and don't
Speaker: contribute to, you know, their vision of their life outside of school.
Speaker: So one of the things that I wrote down a couple of weeks ago, and we were engaged in this work with the school district was interdisciplinary learning and how that actually is a step towards solutions toward the
Speaker: these complaints and criticisms that we hear from students, parents, teachers, and community members.
Speaker: So I thought it would be interesting for us then to define what is interdisciplinary learning and what is the need for it.
Speaker: Should I read my definition that I came up with?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I just, I said, and this is just based on, you know, my experience to date so far as a teacher, the research and work that I've read, and obviously the work that we've done too.
Speaker: But I said,
Speaker: that interdisciplinary learning cultivates a mindset of active inquiry that draws from a range of disciplinary ways of thinking in order to investigate essential questions and ideas about the world.
Speaker: So essentially, it's not necessarily...
Speaker: a body of knowledge that seeks to be a master, but it's really like a way of thinking that just gets you active and engaged and involved in answering interesting questions about the world at large.
Speaker: What do you got?
Speaker: And just to add on to that, it's really the practice of weaving together standards from multiple different subject areas.
Speaker: So, you know, that's how things are in the quote unquote real world.
Speaker: You could be integrating other disciplines into your curriculum on your own.
Speaker: For example, a lot of folks integrate reading into their curriculum, even though they're not necessarily English teachers.
Speaker: Or in a best case scenario, it's partnering with one or more other teachers to talk about lessons, project ideas, units, where you're going beyond just your traditional discipline area to talk about something that's a lot more complex and multimodal.
Speaker: And I think, too, a big difference and a shift when you go from disciplinary thinking to interdisciplinary thinking, again, is that while disciplinary learning almost necessarily presumes the why.
Speaker: So it's like, okay, in a math class, for example, why are we here learning, say, algebra one?
Speaker: Well, you'd say, maybe we're here to get you ready for algebra two because that's the next thing in the progression or
Speaker: You know, why are we in U.S. history from, you know, pre-colonial to like the 1860s or something?
Speaker: Well, that's to prepare you for the next step in the process, which is, you know, reconstruction through the modern day.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: It's kind of like that that disciplinary way of kind of getting you to think about a prescribed set of content.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And to kind of test you through that.
Speaker: But that's not necessarily how the world works.
Speaker: So I think that the world is necessarily interdisciplinary, meaning you start with a complex problem or an interest or something else that exists out there in the world.
Speaker: And you draw from a range of perspectives and frameworks and content and skills in order to address it.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: I think our take is that interdisciplinary learning really looks like how we learn in the world outside of school.
Speaker: So the more that we can make schools look like interdisciplinary learning spaces, the more easily kids will navigate that transition from the world of school to the world outside of it.
Speaker: I think a lot of students to add really quick on that too.
Speaker: It's, it's interesting to note that when you look at content through an interdisciplinary lens, it actually makes the disciplinary stuff more interesting in and of itself.
Speaker: For example, when I was in school, I thought math was very boring and didn't understand the point of it at all.
Speaker: And just really didn't excel at it because I wasn't interested in it.
Speaker: You can tell we both became social studies teachers.
Speaker: I know we can't be socialized teachers, but as I grew older and I dove into more of the philosophy of math and how you find it in the real world and puzzles and logistics and just, just all the different ways that math is actually utilized.
Speaker: I find it fascinating.
Speaker: And if that would have been how it was approached in that interdisciplinary lens when I was younger, I wouldn't have dismissed it as heavily.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Connecting to those big picture questions, those key themes, those big things that then you say, okay, let's learn about,
Speaker: Maybe some of the topics that we'll talk about coming up here from this variety of lenses.
Speaker: And I wanted to bring a couple of things to bear on this because I had just been reading Hurt Biestas, his domains of education.
Speaker: And and he really wrestles with this question, too.
Speaker: He's a Dutch researcher, education, philosopher, educator.
Speaker: And he had written a series of articles in the last decade or so exploring this idea of subjectification as one of the many purposes of education.
Speaker: So he pretty much says that there are three domains of education.
Speaker: There's qualification, which is the school stuff.
Speaker: That's the content stuff.
Speaker: That's
Speaker: that he defines as transferring knowledge and skills deemed valuable by society.
Speaker: So, right, what are the things you're going to need to know just to be, you know, competent, have a shared body of knowledge and shared experience between, you know, adults and kids alike.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Socialization, which is pretty self-explanatory, but he calls it the presentation or the representation of cultures, traditions, and practices.
Speaker: And he kind of warns that the questions that we ask,
Speaker: often answer in education kind of fall on an imbalance of one of those two things, right?
Speaker: Kind of seeing those at odds with one another, um, the content delivery model.
Speaker: And a lot of the, uh, the, the ideas that we push back again tend to be in that qualification territory, but beast to also argues about maybe, um,
Speaker: avoiding an over-reliance on socialization too, you know, in that the cultures, traditions, and practices.
Speaker: He says the most important and the most ignored is, in fact, subjectification.
Speaker: So that's turning yourself, right, as the subject of education, which he calls the freedom of human beings to act or refrain from action.
Speaker: Of course, implying that there's some sort of autonomy and agency within the learner as well.
Speaker: And I think that really fits the interdisciplinary lens because, right, it's not...
Speaker: memorizing a prescribed list of content and skills and abilities that might fall more in the qualification part, it's not even necessarily concerned with reproducing social cultural norms, but it's really like seeing yourself as an active agent in the world and kind of seeing how all the various lenses of thinking about yourself and the world apply to you or not and how you act based on that information.
Speaker: And another framework I want to bring to bear on this is actually an interdisciplinary framework that I think really mirrors Bista's domains of education.
Speaker: So the framework that I'm going to look at here actually says that there are three aspects of interdisciplinary learning, critical thinking, collaboration, and reflection.
Speaker: So even having some of those components of qualification in the critical thinking, what is it that we are thinking about?
Speaker: There's the collaboration part.
Speaker: So formulating a common goal,
Speaker: situational awareness, shared leadership, perhaps getting at the lens of socialization.
Speaker: And then the reflection part, again, should I act on this information or not?
Speaker: How am I the subject of this learning experience?
Speaker: How can I deal with cognitive biases?
Speaker: How can I take multiple perspectives?
Speaker: How can I embody a questioning attitude with things?
Speaker: So those will be some of the frameworks that help
Speaker: root this conversation here today.
Speaker: But Chris and I also just have some experience in, I don't know, teaching interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary ways, teaching project-based learning, which tends to have an interdisciplinary focus.
Speaker: Chris, do you want to talk about your experiences with that too?
Speaker: Yeah, I was very fortunate.
Speaker: So I used to teach at a school explicitly focused on hands-on learning, PBL and interdisciplinary learning.
Speaker: And over time, we really push for the idea of having multiple teachers work on these projects and collaborate together.
Speaker: And we did that for a long time just on a traditional block schedule.
Speaker: So we would partner together as teachers.
Speaker: We would come up with project ideas.
Speaker: Two or three of us would pair up and we would just treat our class like a long PBL experience.
Speaker: It'd be one or two days a week and we'd explore different interdisciplinary projects.
Speaker: I remember doing some of these were good.
Speaker: Some of them weren't so hot, but we tried.
Speaker: We did some math social studies stuff with roller coasters.
Speaker: So talking about like
Speaker: The roots of theme parks, the history of theme parks, how they're themed themselves, and then getting into the math of actually operating those coasters and how that integrates into the experience.
Speaker: We did a lot of work about feeding the world and tackling how do you do everything from like.
Speaker: do chemical engineering, GMO type stuff with seeds and what are the ethics of that?
Speaker: What does it mean to do that?
Speaker: Is it okay to do that?
Speaker: And if so, how do we actually feed the world with that in mind?
Speaker: Is it a supply chain issue?
Speaker: There are so many different questions to answer there, as well as various projects, which I'll get to later surrounding video games and other forms of just explicit content creation that goes both beyond social studies and digital design, which are the classes I taught, into English, science, and math.
Speaker: By the time I had left, we had actually integrated an actual PBL period with the idea that we would design projects alongside the kids that were a framework beyond all four or five of our subject area courses.
Speaker: So it would tackle the standards beyond, you know, four or five different classes.
Speaker: So I was very fortunate in that regard that we had a lot of experience doing interdisciplinary learning.
Speaker: And it's interesting reflecting back on those models that you just shared that, you
Speaker: But really what you're learning when you're doing interdisciplinary content is less about rote memorization or worksheet-driven learning that you would see in a more traditional subcutariat class because you can't have all the answers in an interdisciplinary classroom.
Speaker: Your whole goal is to accomplish some kind of objective, like to make something or to ask questions.
Speaker: And think about critical questions, which means that you're all going to be finding different types of information.
Speaker: You're going to be able to critically source that, find it, collaborate on it, and then reflect on what that means to you.
Speaker: It just leads to more interesting things happening and more engagement across the board than just going through the standards as you normally would.
Speaker: You're discovering it or having that inquiry-based education as you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's interesting is Bista actually refers to that in that article I was talking about.
Speaker: It's called The Beautiful Risk of Education, which is that subjectification part, because that's the part that resides in the minds and bodies of students that you really can't control at the end of the day, what it is that they're taking away from your course, what that's going to look like in five or 10 years, how that information is going to, what they're going to do with it, but then how it's going to impact them
Speaker: their personality, what they end up, you know, how they end up influencing the world as a result of that experience.
Speaker: So, you know, one thing that we have a lot of control over is perhaps that qualification part and even to some extent the socialization aspect.
Speaker: So schools increasingly, you know,
Speaker: control that qualification aspect to really double down on think of the number of content standards and all those kinds of things to prepare students for a lifetime of personal success or to be lifelong learners or whatever.
Speaker: And and Bista says, well, we have to step back and recognize that the beauty of education, the power of education is in like
Speaker: the discourse between the students and the teachers.
Speaker: It's discursive, he says.
Speaker: It's not a fixed, closed, deterministic system of inputs and outputs.
Speaker: So yeah, the interdisciplinary model just kind of makes sense if we're going to embrace that beautiful risk.
Speaker: We don't really know what students are going to take away anyway.
Speaker: We might as well just embrace it and have the opportunity to do so.
Speaker: Nick, do you want to talk about what your experience was like in the classroom learning interdisciplinary?
Speaker: Because yours is kind of the opposite of mine.
Speaker: Mine was very much focused on like connecting with the other teachers and being able to modify that schedule very easily because I taught a very small school.
Speaker: But you taught at a large public school that just it's a little more bureaucratic than where I was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What was that like?
Speaker: Well, my take was always, so I implemented this in my senior economics class, which was a semester-long course that was required for seniors.
Speaker: And I thought, my goodness, what a huge waste of time if all kids get out of my class is preparation to what?
Speaker: Become a business major in college or to prepare them for micro or macroeconomics at the university level, of which I
Speaker: You know, what percentage of students graduate from high school and go on to do those things.
Speaker: So for me, after teaching the class for really like about a year or two, and of course, by then that was like teaching it two to four times, you know, for a semester class, I was like, this ain't it.
Speaker: because here you have seniors who are at the pinnacle of their school experience.
Speaker: And what are they doing?
Speaker: The same thing, right?
Speaker: Worksheets, practice, tests, learning about the price elasticity of demand, doing all these formulas, whatever.
Speaker: I'm going like, what a waste of time because they're never going to, the vast majority of them are never going to need or use this information again.
Speaker: And if they want to become economics and business majors, well, they will have all the opportunity to do so when they get there.
Speaker: So I thought, let's carve out some time to actually do some interdisciplinary work.
Speaker: And at that point, it really wasn't through that explicit framework.
Speaker: I was like, we need to do something else.
Speaker: Like, we need to build a bridge between this as like the capstone of your school experience and then the rest of your life outside of school, because here you are.
Speaker: You know, four or five months away or maybe even weeks away from doing that.
Speaker: What is it about the world that you want to connect to become a part of?
Speaker: What is it that you haven't been able to learn throughout your school experience that you want to take some time to do here?
Speaker: And really, that was the only requirement.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: for that project was you have to make some kind of community connection.
Speaker: You have to ask and answer your own question.
Speaker: You have to have an audience for that because authentic work generally has an audience.
Speaker: So whether you were going to write about it, well, you have to have somebody read and give you feedback.
Speaker: If you're
Speaker: You could make it, you know, there's a lot of multimedia presentations in here to a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of kind of like stand up presentations.
Speaker: So kids had to have an audience.
Speaker: We need to learn from each other in here as well.
Speaker: And those projects were like the coolest.
Speaker: They're like the most rewarding part of school.
Speaker: I had kids just take them in a million different directions.
Speaker: And of course, they're not anything that I could have like pre-planned.
Speaker: I couldn't have pre-planned for a group of senior girls to want to go spend time at like the old folks retirement home and decorate it for the Christmas holiday and go spend a half day with them, talking with them, you know, doing all that.
Speaker: I couldn't have made that project work for them.
Speaker: That is something that they wanted to do.
Speaker: I just gave them the time and, you know, leveraged my ability to get them out for a half day to go do that stuff.
Speaker: A lot of kids used it as time to explore career opportunities or to...
Speaker: you know, bring in family connections and talk to their parents and interview them for different things or, you know, learn about.
Speaker: I had one group of students learn about like how economies work in video games.
Speaker: So they took some of the same same content things that we had learned about in economics and they took it a step further and was like, hey, how do video game economies work?
Speaker: Because those are yeah, it's like a whole other aspect of things.
Speaker: So, yeah, it was it was just a really cool way that ultimately ended up being interdisciplinary, but bringing in the world and the school and the world outside of school into that disciplinary context and giving students the freedom to stretch their legs in a little bit.
Speaker: I think that's such an important point because it gets to the heart of what it is that we focus on, which is systems-based thinking.
Speaker: Interdisciplinary learning is not a step-by-step guide.
Speaker: It's going to look different depending on your context, who all is involved in the process of the decision-making, and also just what the kids want.
Speaker: There are some contexts in which interdisciplinary learning is just an open-ended PBL project within one classroom.
Speaker: There's a PBL context where it's truly interdisciplinary in the sense that there's five different teachers in the same room together teaching about something and learning together.
Speaker: It could be super teacher-focused where the teacher is the one presenting all the information, but it's interdisciplinary in scope.
Speaker: Or it could just be entirely student-driven and they're the ones discovering it.
Speaker: There's not necessarily a gold standard for this, but there is a gold standard in terms of the
Speaker: elements like community driven learning, students having the ability and say to determine what it is that they're going to do.
Speaker: making it as hands-on and interactive as possible and inquiry-driven.
Speaker: And that could lead into a more teacher-centric approach or a more student-centered approach.
Speaker: It really just depends on what it is that everybody wants.
Speaker: And what I like about that is that means that no matter who you are and what circumstance you're in, there is a way to incorporate interdisciplinary learning, no matter your experience level or the context that you find yourself in.
Speaker: There's something there.
Speaker: Well, that's what's so interesting, right?
Speaker: To kind of pull a thread between all of this and really maybe harken back to Bista's beautiful risk of education, that the center of that interdisciplinary work
Speaker: Um, at the center of subjectification is a questioning attitude and like giving kids, right?
Speaker: Not only the opportunity, but also the tools, the toolkits, the frameworks, the, the ability, the capability to be able to do that, but also the freedom to be able to ask and answer those questions and kind of follow those roads wherever they might lead.
Speaker: Um, and what's so cool and powerful about that is, well, once you do that once, like you're set, you know, you've learned how to learn and there's not really a need, um,
Speaker: You know, outside of wanting to gain certifications and kind of in that qualification range to to, you know, to have a teacher driven learning in that context.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's really freeing, too.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's all about that risk taking.
Speaker: We we talk about a lot in our own PD to embrace the beautiful chaos, to dive into the fact that when you first start doing this type of stuff.
Speaker: You have a change both in the content, so the qualification angle, if you want to use Biesta's language, where you are exposing folks to new types of things, and it means that you might not have all the answers, which is a very scary feeling as a teacher if you aren't used to that.
Speaker: But there's also the socialization side of things, which is if you take a bunch of kids and tell them, hey, you're going to go explore something on your own, you're going to be doing different things and it's going to be super open ended and a challenge.
Speaker: It's going to be difficult to manage that initially because kids are going to be all over the place.
Speaker: Either they're going to be not used to the freedoms.
Speaker: They're going to be adjusting to that.
Speaker: Maybe they don't have the answer right away.
Speaker: So they're going to be frustrated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe they are annoyed with you changing up the teaching style from other teachers in the building.
Speaker: But those are all normal things that over time in our experience lead to very fruitful results where kids, I mean, this is the way that people just naturally learn is by going out and tackling problems.
Speaker: So after that adjustment period of getting away from the very school model towards this interdisciplinary hands-on model, you'll see some awesome results.
Speaker: And what I think is really interesting to come back to that issue of standards is, right, I think about the course of a, in the course of a day, a student in a traditional disciplinary structured school day might have on a block schedule four or five classes on a normal schedule, maybe up to seven or eight periods a day.
Speaker: thinking of all the different standards they're going to have to try and hit, the amount of cognitive load that they're going to accumulate in there too.
Speaker: And this might be a good time to bring in our buddies, our partners, our colleagues at the holistic think tank who have actually come up with a list of interdisciplinary standards.
Speaker: So I don't know, Chris, if you want to talk a little bit about who they are, what's our role in that, and we can maybe talk through a couple of these interdisciplinary standards.
Speaker: Holistic Think Tank is a Polish nonprofit organization that was founded, I believe, in 2021, maybe 2020.
Speaker: They are working on what they call an interdisciplinary subject.
Speaker: This is a globally focused.
Speaker: They've sent researchers all over the world to learn about what it is that schools want and what it means to learn well.
Speaker: And they determined that, well, what it's going to be is going to be a human-centric interdisciplinary curriculum with the overall goal of
Speaker: basically destroying the silos.
Speaker: They're thinking really big, get rid of all of the singular subject classes and make one interdisciplinary subject course.
Speaker: Now they also recognize that's not necessarily feasible in the short term.
Speaker: So they are helping teachers out by making and providing interdisciplinary lessons, curriculums, frameworks to help schools start to take on these challenges.
Speaker: And then maybe perhaps in
Speaker: you know, the long-term transition to a more interdisciplinary approach across the entire building.
Speaker: And Human Restoration Project in 2021 was awarded their first grant alongside the Fab Foundation and the University of Sheffield to create interdisciplinary lessons, projects, and frameworks to contribute to this endeavor.
Speaker: And as a result, we created, what was it?
Speaker: 41 lessons.
Speaker: Is that right now?
Speaker: I think it was 46.
Speaker: I think it was six.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we've created 46 somewhere around there, uh, some amount of lessons that are aimed at all of the subject areas.
Speaker: These are big idea questions like we've been describing so far and we'll get to here in a minute, uh, that could be tackled from any subject perspective.
Speaker: And for each one of those lessons, they're mostly hands-on or discussion-driven activities that you could implement in your class, middle school, maybe lower high school, or maybe even upper elementary with some editing.
Speaker: And we've also provided frameworks for all of those subject areas to put their own spin on it.
Speaker: Because we know that teachers are going to end up modifying the lesson plans anyway.
Speaker: And we know that.
Speaker: So we've provided jumping off points for different subject areas, as well as jumping off points to take it further through PBL multi-week or multi-day activities, kind of depending on where you're at and what you're doing.
Speaker: And we're super excited for that to release.
Speaker: And with that said, if you're listening to this, I believe the day that this comes out the following week.
Speaker: So March 4th is the first holistic think tank summit in Columbus, Ohio.
Speaker: It's on the Ohio State University's campus, my all mater.
Speaker: Uh, it's from 10 to 5 PM full day, full breakfast and lunch provided entirely free conference.
Speaker: If you know anyone that is in the central Ohio area, it'll be super cool.
Speaker: Uh, we're talking about interdisciplinary subject stuff.
Speaker: We're talking about how teachers can get involved, what it means to teach in this way.
Speaker: We'll have hands-on activities for you all to try.
Speaker: And the keynote speaker is Pazi Solberg.
Speaker: the guy probably most well-known for innovating the Finnish model in the 2000s when Finland became like the hot talk of the town with their high...
Speaker: with their high test scores on global test averages while simultaneously being a very, I guess, human-centered school system for everything from breaking down those silos of classrooms to promoting more project-based learning to even lessening the school day and focusing on student well-being.
Speaker: So that'll be a pretty cool event.
Speaker: Again, that's Saturday, March 4th from 10 to 5 p.m.
Speaker: at The Ohio State University.
Speaker: And we will have links and everything else on the video somewhere here on the screen.
Speaker: And then in the podcast description there, of course, you can find the link.
Speaker: It's all over our social media.
Speaker: If you follow us anywhere at Humor as pro, it's there as well.
Speaker: So you can find the event bright because you need to register.
Speaker: It's free registration, but we have a cap.
Speaker: So we need to keep an eye on how many people are registering.
Speaker: And one more thing regarding that, the interdisciplinary subject and all the resources that Holistic Think Tank are creating alongside us is open access.
Speaker: It's all available for free.
Speaker: There's not any cost attached to any of this stuff.
Speaker: You'll just be able to download it.
Speaker: We're not sure when that download link will be made available.
Speaker: It will be made available soon, but they do want teachers to contribute to that as well.
Speaker: So if you're a teacher who does a lot of interdisciplinary subject stuff, whether that be within your own classroom or cross classroom, go on the holistic think tank website.
Speaker: We'll have a link for it in the show notes.
Speaker: They have a call for proposals to submit your ideas.
Speaker: You can submit things you've already done.
Speaker: You could submit new ideas that you maybe want to think about and they'll pay you for it.
Speaker: So not only is it released for free, but you can get compensated for the work that you've created.
Speaker: Nick, do you want to walk through a little bit of what that looks like?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Holisticthinktank.com if you want to get involved with that.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Essentially, when Holistic had approached us about creating this interdisciplinary curriculum, they had already sort of generated this document.
Speaker: It was called What Schools Ought to Teach.
Speaker: And as Chris had alluded to, tearing down those silos and really replacing them with these big overarching sort of themes and ideas that are really the meat of the interdisciplinary inquiry.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so I'll just walk through a couple of these big picture ones, but then each one has sort of a
Speaker: a smaller, more detailed interdisciplinary idea in there as well.
Speaker: So when we say that we had designed 40 plus lessons around this, each one was really targeted towards one of the sort of sub themes or the sub standards that were in this interdisciplinary subject.
Speaker: So yeah, some of the IDS ideas
Speaker: And if you hear us refer to the IDS from now on, this is what we're talking about.
Speaker: We've been deep in this for well over a year now.
Speaker: But some of them include how to confront themselves with challenges, how to function in relation to the world and nature, the ideas of science and scholarship, how to function in society, aesthetic and cultural awareness, how to function in variable contexts and environments, how to function in relation to the state.
Speaker: Entrepreneurship plays a role in this as well.
Speaker: How do you function in an economy, particularly the predominant Western capitalist economy of the vast majority of the world?
Speaker: Interpersonal communication and self-development.
Speaker: So those big picture ideas are really the meat, the heart at what our interdisciplinary lessons we're really getting at.
Speaker: And that is a perfect segue only a half an hour in to actually dive in to the meat of this, which is we thought it'd be fun just to walk through our top three interdisciplinary learning ideas.
Speaker: What we mean by that is Nick and I have been creating these lessons over time.
Speaker: We also obviously were classroom teachers.
Speaker: We did a lot of this kind of cool stuff.
Speaker: And as we've been talking for the last really half year or so now that we've exited the classroom.
Speaker: There's not a day that goes by where Nick and I are like, damn, we could be teaching this.
Speaker: That sounds really cool.
Speaker: That sounds way cooler than what I'm doing right now.
Speaker: And we just want to write down a few of those things to both promote the IDS because a lot of the stuff is found in the IDS, but also perhaps to give teachers ideas on things that might be interesting to tackle with an interdisciplinary lens within their own context.
Speaker: So here it is.
Speaker: Our top three interdisciplinary learning ideas.
Speaker: Nick, you'll take the start.
Speaker: Oh God, don't bring him back.
Speaker: Or at least if you do, you have to include him in the sound file for once.
Speaker: So for me, I always seem to return to the scene of the crime for some reason.
Speaker: So recently we had an author and a teacher, current teacher, Sam Shane, publish a piece with us, which you can find on our writing page, about how he was not rehired at his school for quote unquote teaching politics.
Speaker: This was back in 2021 when he taught Eli Saslow's Rising Out of Hatred, The Awakening of a White Nationalist.
Speaker: And
Speaker: I have the book.
Speaker: I have not read it yet, but perhaps it's something that other people are aware of and have read.
Speaker: So Sam had taught this book and that sort of started this cycle that eventually led to him not being rehired at this school.
Speaker: And you can find his story on our site.
Speaker: But listeners will also know that I went through something very similar that same year when I was teaching and discussing
Speaker: Context of January 6th, later on white nationalism in the context of my AP course that, you know, had lingered inside this social political context in the state of Iowa, leading to my resignation in 2022.
Speaker: So at the end of Sam's piece, I had to pull this quote because I thought this was kind of important to situate the interdisciplinary and then my choice here.
Speaker: But he says, quote, we must tell our youth the truth, educate them about the world and prepare them to inherit society with a more humane and sensible vision for the future.
Speaker: For any future worth living depends on it, end quote.
Speaker: So at that intersection, I think of history, sociology, even like marketing and branding, political science is radicalization.
Speaker: So that would be like my, in no particular order, but I would love to just teach a lesson or a course specifically
Speaker: At its core, it's interdisciplinary, right?
Speaker: Like this topic of radicalization, because, you know, it deals with social media and algorithms and how, you know, maybe the YouTube funnel kind of, you know, channels people from more mainstream to more radicalized content, right?
Speaker: How Facebook radicalization works, how, you know,
Speaker: radical extremist groups, you know, use marketing and branding ploys at marginalized people on the outskirts of society to try to bring them into these movements.
Speaker: So really, we'd look at like, how does radicalization work?
Speaker: You know, like what's a framework that we can have for intellectually understanding that?
Speaker: How do we spot it in the wild?
Speaker: And of course, all the while, hopefully like inoculating ourselves from
Speaker: from extremism, dehumanization, and those kinds of things.
Speaker: How do you know when you're being sold on these ideas?
Speaker: Then, of course, the other part of this that I'm really interested in that we'll probably talk about in our edgy futurism series is de-radicalization.
Speaker: When you have family members, community members, et cetera, there's a whole body of research and organizations doing that work of de-radicalization, whether it's from chauvinistic, Manosphere-type Andrew Tate content, or whether it's radical religious movements from around the world.
Speaker: How do you integrate people back into society?
Speaker: of course, like racist organization or, you know, all these other kinds of things.
Speaker: It's just a fascinating sort of psych, there's a psychological element of this too.
Speaker: So I thought like along the way, we could investigate all of those ideas, but also look at it through the lens of case studies.
Speaker: So pick some case studies throughout the world and
Speaker: and look at those things, maybe bring in some people to either interview or to, we could zoom in with people who have gone through those de-radicalization experiences, whether from like prison gangs and how did they get reintegrated back into society after prison?
Speaker: Or if they were a member of a religious extremist organization in the United States, how did they eventually leave that and get integrated back into society?
Speaker: So those are kinds of the questions
Speaker: That I that I'm looking at and kind of related.
Speaker: This is not a separate thing, but I've always wanted to teach a standalone course that is like issues in modern nationalism.
Speaker: That was always like my favorite unit to teach.
Speaker: It's kind of a related thing.
Speaker: But basically bringing together humanities and current events turn that into an active investigation on those things, too.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: That's what I got for my, we'll call it the number three, radicalization and de-radicalization.
Speaker: What do you got?
Speaker: You know what's interesting?
Speaker: As we were talking, I think we've talked about this before, maybe off air, but it's probably my favorite thing I've ever taught.
Speaker: So the most successful thing I've ever taught.
Speaker: But my third or fourth year teaching, I remember I was assigned to teach a sociology course.
Speaker: Um, and I had no experience teaching sociology and this was like a, basically a no credit course.
Speaker: It, the standards were very flexible and I could do almost anything.
Speaker: And it was with, I want to say like 10 kids, maybe, um, most of whom had nowhere else to go.
Speaker: Like they had, like they either had completed all their credits and they were super ahead of the game and they were just like trying to get in school working hours.
Speaker: Or they were at the verge of being pushed out of school to various other things.
Speaker: The idea was like, well, talk some into Chris's class because then I don't know, there'll be more engaged.
Speaker: Not to like toot my own horn, but I think that was the idea.
Speaker: We opened up that class and I had just brainstorm a list of like, what are things people talk about when it comes to sociology?
Speaker: And I can't remember everything that was on there, but it all came down to the fact that I had written on there cults.
Speaker: And yes, that's always been super popular, especially like on Netflix and stuff.
Speaker: I mean, it was Jonestown.
Speaker: Yeah, Jonestown and all like the various different like cult like organizations here and abroad.
Speaker: So the kids got super into that idea and we built, we ostensibly built the curriculum together.
Speaker: Speaking about interdisciplinary learning, we found a bunch of science, like science articles on like, how is it that people get like radicalized and thinking this way?
Speaker: Why do they think about it this way?
Speaker: Uh, kids researched, like, where do these things happen?
Speaker: Uh, they were very much obsessed with, I can't think of it off the top of my head right now, but there was like a Japanese, uh,
Speaker: cult that like ended up like blowing up this like apartment complex with a helicopter.
Speaker: God, I don't really know much about this anymore.
Speaker: It's been a while, but regardless, we did this whole thing on Colton that culminated.
Speaker: And again,
Speaker: Don't judge me on this.
Speaker: So I decided that, man, we should do a project where we like make a cult.
Speaker: But like I did it in like a really like tongue in cheek way.
Speaker: So not spiritual, not religious.
Speaker: I wanted to kind of allude to the fact that a lot of the ways in which like corporate points schemes work is very similar to cult like behaviors.
Speaker: So for example, like people obsessed with their Starbucks, like gold stars or Nike running points or like all those different, different things.
Speaker: So we made, um, I guess now I look back on it, ironically, almost a PBIS system.
Speaker: It was called like the positive kids club or something.
Speaker: And the whole idea was, is that instead of this being a sociology class, it rebranded as like this, it was like a smiley face and it was all about doing good things for other people.
Speaker: And you would get points that would then rake up and enter you into a raffle.
Speaker: And this kid brought in a box.
Speaker: It was an empty box with textbooks in it to make it heavier of a Nintendo Switch.
Speaker: And this was like when Nintendo Switch first came out.
Speaker: And the idea was, well, the more good things you do, the more points you have.
Speaker: And therefore, you can then win this Nintendo Switch.
Speaker: It is PBI, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, PBIS.
Speaker: And they went around the school and they put up like signs and they described it.
Speaker: They had a QR code that like went to ads to like learn more.
Speaker: It went on the school announcements.
Speaker: Pretty much everyone got involved at some point.
Speaker: But amazing.
Speaker: In true cult like behavior, I kept pushing them like, well, how far can we make people do things within, you know, I monitor to make sure they get too weird.
Speaker: But like we got a kid to run around the school for points.
Speaker: We had the kids set up that admin did not like this, but I thought it was very funny.
Speaker: We had the kids set up a poker game with play money in the bathroom.
Speaker: And then we were like trying to like encourage kids to come in to earn extra points.
Speaker: Like we were just trying to push like what's the weirdest thing that's like not super shady, not super weird that we could convince kids to do just because they wanted to make more and more points.
Speaker: And it was almost a little too easy to the point that we never finished it because it started getting so weird that I was like, this is like actually kind of creeped me out.
Speaker: So we stopped it.
Speaker: Um, and like, you know, they, they talked about it.
Speaker: We had an expo night and the kids talked about how they made this like weird cult thing.
Speaker: And some kid ran around the school because he wanted more points because the other is going to win a Nintendo switch.
Speaker: Um, so yeah,
Speaker: All of that to say, that was like probably the most interesting thing I've ever taught.
Speaker: And it's all student driven.
Speaker: It was truly interdisciplinary learning.
Speaker: It was inquiry based.
Speaker: And yeah, it's it's a fascinating topic.
Speaker: Well, that's, I mean, you know, one of the favorite classes that I ended up taking in college was actually on youth gangs, which, I mean, that's another form of radicalization, right?
Speaker: But it maybe brings in more of like a socioeconomic, like the social incentives or the, you know, economic disincentives and those kinds of things too.
Speaker: And, you know, I was hearing from our professor's experience and he actually brought in gang members past and present to, you know, hear about how they, what led them to join a gang or their experiences in the gang.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: If they left, why did they leave?
Speaker: How did they get out of those kinds of things?
Speaker: And, you know, there is just like that deep seated human sort of attachment to needing to be part of community and or the rejection of people that they perceive as having been like slighted them or something.
Speaker: So there's kind of a push and pull factors that lead you into that.
Speaker: Yeah, it just is a fascinating lens.
Speaker: So so cults.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Be part of any sort of de-radicalization.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: look as well.
Speaker: Also, so many like good free YouTube documentaries.
Speaker: I remember we would just like Google these and just watch them for like weeks.
Speaker: It was super interesting.
Speaker: And it also helped kids.
Speaker: So one more thing about this.
Speaker: I remember one of the kids in the class.
Speaker: This is now an episode about cults.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There was a kid who emailed me
Speaker: Like this was years after they had graduated, whatever.
Speaker: And they had said that that class impacted them so much because they themselves, I can't remember if it was them or one of their friends, had become involved with like basically a religious cult.
Speaker: There's a religious cult here in Columbus called Xenos, now called Dwellve.
Speaker: I think I think it's what or dwell maybe used to be called Zenos, though, and it's very similar to like a Scientology type ordeal.
Speaker: It's they basically recruit young people, primarily college students to live in these like just packed to the mass apartment buildings and then have them provide them with money.
Speaker: And they kind of ripped them off.
Speaker: And this kid, again, I can't remember if it was them or someone else, had gotten involved in it.
Speaker: And they remembered back to that lesson.
Speaker: And they found a documentary that we watched in that class and shared it.
Speaker: And that's like what stopped it.
Speaker: Like they de-radicalized as a result of going through de-radicalization training.
Speaker: Oh my gosh.
Speaker: Super, super interesting.
Speaker: But yeah, if you're ever in the Columbus area, it's still here as of recording.
Speaker: Again, I think it's called Dwell now is the rebrand.
Speaker: And they made it a little bit more friendly.
Speaker: Anyways, I'll talk about my number three so this episode doesn't go on talking about cults.
Speaker: So my number three in terms of interdisciplinary learning, like lessons, projects, et cetera, is it's kind of overplayed at this point for us because I feel like we're talking about it all the time and you really can't escape it if you're on social media.
Speaker: But it would be so interesting to talk about AI, AI ethics, chat GPT.
Speaker: And diving into not only how do you use the tools, because I think that is inherently interesting.
Speaker: You could just talk about how you use them.
Speaker: But I think it's a lot more interesting to talk about the philosophy of it and like what it means for society at large, how it could right now or in the future, for example, exploit workers.
Speaker: What does it mean to exploit AI if you want to get super weird, like Deus Ex type stuff talking about like at what point is it sentient?
Speaker: I think about like, could you incorporate like do androids dream of electric sheep by Philip K. Dick or like things like that?
Speaker: You probably wouldn't incorporate Westworld, but that's what it makes me think of.
Speaker: Probably not appropriate for school, but that that's a really good example of like talking about AI sentient, sentience and ethics.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like how interesting would it be to have an interdisciplinary learning course where you start off by talking about using AI, the practicalities of it, how it affects humans, but then twist that entirely in 180 and talk about like, well, what if the AI is sentient?
Speaker: Like what are the ethics then?
Speaker: And how do you know?
Speaker: It gets super weird about it.
Speaker: And just like leaving that question open-ended.
Speaker: I just think that'd be so interesting.
Speaker: It's honestly so prescient now, but I used to start my economics class.
Speaker: This was like day one.
Speaker: I would introduce this idea of technology and automation and AI.
Speaker: And it was wild because I would always use this video from Quartz.
Speaker: Now it came out in 2017 now.
Speaker: But the title was Automation and AI are Destroying Jobs, Not Work.
Speaker: And it was on that exact same idea of like, hey, you're going to have to learn how to work alongside and with these technologies.
Speaker: They're not going away.
Speaker: They're only going to get more advanced.
Speaker: And now that video, it didn't even assume to know about something like ChatGPT or MidJourney and all those other kinds of things.
Speaker: But I always remember a quote from one of the researchers in there where she goes, AI is just a tool.
Speaker: AI did not fall from the sky.
Speaker: We got to learn how to work alongside it.
Speaker: And then we would always watch this video.
Speaker: from the Guardian from seven years ago now, it's called The Last Job on Earth, Imagining a Fully Automated World.
Speaker: And I would just get kids to think like, okay, basically take everything that you know about what you think you understand about the world of work or technology or jobs outside of school right now and just throw it out the window.
Speaker: Let's just challenge this on day one and then use that as the framework for jumping off
Speaker: And the thread throughout the whole economics course ended up being interdisciplinary because we're having to think about, right, the impact of science, technology, innovation, public policy.
Speaker: We would bring in, hey, how does self-driving cars impact this?
Speaker: How does, you know, how does if this sector is automated, how do these advances in, oh, shoot, what are like the robot dogs and all the stuff that's going out of Boston, you
Speaker: I know what you're talking about.
Speaker: I can't think of what I'm talking about.
Speaker: Yeah, all those things.
Speaker: So I would bring those out because it has connections everywhere.
Speaker: But it's like the ultimate interdisciplinary thing because it's like how does science, technology, innovation change the way that we live, change the way that we work, interact, change the way that our political system functions?
Speaker: How does it do all those things?
Speaker: So I always felt like now it feels, I feel vindicated, but like that was just such an important lens to put on top of the class.
Speaker: It's like, we're not here to learn about these economic standards.
Speaker: Those are going to be a means for us to understand our relationship to all these multivarious factors.
Speaker: It's changing all the time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It blends together STEM and the humanities.
Speaker: Like that truly is bringing together math, science, English, social studies, and even like philosophy, economics.
Speaker: Like you're, you're diving into other like off branches of all these different concepts.
Speaker: I remember I did, I'll describe this briefly.
Speaker: We used to have these things called breakouts, which were primarily teacher driven.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: Things that we would just explore throughout the day.
Speaker: So we'd have like a 45 minute breakout where we would just come up with a bunch of random ideas and we teach about it.
Speaker: So some of the breakouts were like very silly, like someone taught about the WWE and like they watch matches and talk about like how it mirrors soap operas.
Speaker: I actually did a soap opera breakout.
Speaker: That's a story for another day.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: It was so much fun where the kids made a soap opera, but yeah,
Speaker: One of the ones that I loved, and to be honest with you, it didn't work very well because maybe I just didn't know what I was doing and just like the formula of it.
Speaker: But I did science fiction and philosophy.
Speaker: And it's interesting to know how much kids are interested in talking about these types of like existential ideas about AI, about humans, about like the future of the world.
Speaker: Kids love to dive into this stuff and they're willing to tackle some pretty complex and nuanced stuff.
Speaker: We read Baudrillard when we were talking about the matrix.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure I showed clips from the matrix and show clips from the animatrix, which
Speaker: the prequel that kind of explains the whole thing, the school friendly clips.
Speaker: And we talked about like, well, what does like there's a scene in the animatrix where basically like the AI rise up because of how they're exploited by workers for taking their jobs.
Speaker: And we talked about like, well, what is that parallel today?
Speaker: Because that's in and of itself interesting from a social studies angle.
Speaker: But then the philosophy again of like, what does it mean for something to be sentient and to think on its own?
Speaker: And kids love that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you could do that.
Speaker: That's a no brainer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Now you'll notice a pretty common theme here amongst all of my things, but this actually came from watching a Netflix documentary called Behind the Curve.
Speaker: Have you watched this, Chris?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: It's about flat earthers.
Speaker: And it came out, I don't know, maybe like 2018, 2019 or whatever.
Speaker: But the premise is so awesome because it's like a humanized view on why people believe weird things.
Speaker: And they follow one of the more prominent flat earthers of that time period and a bunch of other conspiracy theorists.
Speaker: And really, they are the subject of the documentary, like their lives, how they got into it, the relationships that they've built as they've moved through this are really a central theme.
Speaker: you know, the, the conferences that they host and all of the, the wacky characters kind of along the way.
Speaker: But the point is not to make fun of these people, right.
Speaker: For being flat earthers or being conspiracy theorists and all these things really like humanize and help us understand that, that fundamental question.
Speaker: Again, that big picture theme, why do people believe weird things?
Speaker: And along the way they have scientists and other people too, who obviously, you know, be on the other side of the flat earth issue, but the,
Speaker: we understand that the way to get someone to change their mind isn't to beat them over the head with facts and figures and all those other kinds of things, right?
Speaker: So really their role in this is to, you know, how do we help build the relationship?
Speaker: How do we help provide these counter narratives?
Speaker: And so I think it's an offshoot of that radicalization part because I think those are kind of,
Speaker: Those are different, but they're not mutually exclusive, right?
Speaker: Because when I think of flat-eartherism or when I think of hollow earth or any of these other, we didn't land on the moon, some of those other things are kind of like harmless conspiracies, but they get at some of those same fundamental things.
Speaker: So with this, I kind of imagined it would be like an open inquiry into maybe more of those cognitive traps and like our own biases and
Speaker: some of the things that, uh, that cause us the social incentives, media literacy, you know, that cause us to believe any number of political conspiracy theories, um, you know, about JFK assassinations and all these, it kind of be a more lighthearted.
Speaker: I mean, I just said the JFK is that it's not lighthearted, but you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Like, like it's not, you know, dealing with extremism and radicalization and violence.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: But it would be more than just a lesson on like how to create debate bros.
Speaker: Because again, we know that that stuff doesn't work.
Speaker: So it's like, how do we actually engage in these conversations and dialogues?
Speaker: How do we, how do we humanize other people and recognize we're all vulnerable as humans to conspiratorial ways of thinking about anything in our lives?
Speaker: Cause we're, we're pattern making machines and, you know, we try to apply heuristics to a variety of different situations where they may not be applicable, but yeah,
Speaker: What if anything should or could we do about it?
Speaker: And I just think it kind of comes out of I would always offer at the end of the AP testing kind of like a range of options for kids to choose from, you know, like, hey, we're done with the test.
Speaker: We don't have anything else AP related to learn about.
Speaker: So like, what can we choose from?
Speaker: So after I watch that behind the curve documentary,
Speaker: I totally, I built like a little mini unit that kids could choose.
Speaker: And there was one year where kids loved it.
Speaker: Like we dove into, we watched the full documentary.
Speaker: Um, you know, we, we learned about the backfire effect.
Speaker: We learned about all these other, you know, cognitive biases that were kind of rooted in it.
Speaker: We looked at Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit.
Speaker: Um, and it kind of is like an introduction to all of those factors.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And it was really cool.
Speaker: And really the ultimate, the kind of end goal with that, because with all those end of year projects, you have to have like a product was really just like writing a synthesis of really a paper on that question.
Speaker: Hey, why do people believe weird things?
Speaker: And really like,
Speaker: I remember, too, like being real vulnerable and like talking about like, what are the weird things?
Speaker: Let's talk about the weird things that we believe.
Speaker: You know, we're putting these flat earthers on blast, but what are like the weird things that we would be, you know, super vulnerable about in our stuff?
Speaker: And how can we kind of see through these and how could we be dehumanized?
Speaker: How could we fall deeper into those holes?
Speaker: And I'll be really, I'll be vulnerable with you in this moment as well.
Speaker: And say like the thing I always shared with students is like, it's, it's, it always has been kind of mind blowing to me and maybe just shows my ignorance, but like to believe that we, that like time is a, is a finite thing, right?
Speaker: We're constantly getting more of it in the universe, right?
Speaker: Like we're always living on the frontier edge of time and the universe is always acquiring more time.
Speaker: I just think that that's such a, an odd thing.
Speaker: Of course we know time is also relative.
Speaker: So yeah,
Speaker: The linearity of time in our experience of it is not really like a conspiracy theory, but that might be a weird thing that just doesn't fit into most people's experiences of the world.
Speaker: I'm constantly thinking about how could we possibly be living at the frontier of time, or what's the relationship of time to our experience in the universe in the grand scheme?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, that just opens up a big conversation about all kinds of, you know, weird stuff with kids.
Speaker: You're like, hey, human beings are weird.
Speaker: Like, let's celebrate that weirdness and let's recognize when, you know, when we're kind of taking this too far, when we're being dehumanizing, when's all this and kind of it's a celebration and, you know, an investigation into why we believe weird things.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Spin off of that.
Speaker: Um, shout out to Jennifer, one of my co-teachers.
Speaker: I didn't teach this, but, but she teaches it and I always thought it was super cool.
Speaker: Um, which is what happens when you take the conspiracies too far and you start to act on them.
Speaker: Um, she, as a biotechnology teacher teaches about biohacking, uh, which is a, there's a documentary about this on Netflix as well.
Speaker: I think there's a YouTube one too.
Speaker: That's pretty good.
Speaker: Where, um,
Speaker: Essentially, people who are professional chemists many of the times, like these are like high level folks who have studied a really long time to do these things.
Speaker: Some of them are not.
Speaker: They basically are like manipulating genes, different types of proteins.
Speaker: Like I don't really understand it, but they they're using injections to shape the way at which their body produces things, whether that be through cybernetics.
Speaker: So like controlling electronic devices or like controlling their health and well-being with the idea like I won't get cancer.
Speaker: I'll live longer.
Speaker: There was a YouTube video that just came out by this this billionaire who's trying to extend his life.
Speaker: I don't know if you've seen this.
Speaker: It's like a five minute thing.
Speaker: He produced it, which makes it even more funny to me.
Speaker: But he's like awesome, basically dedicating hours of his life every single day to being anti aging with the idea that he'll always be 30 years old.
Speaker: I think he's 50 and he looks 50, but he says his body is like he's 30.
Speaker: And he thinks that this is like cutting-edge research where he'll live, he'll be immortal using his vast swath of funds.
Speaker: And biohacking in general is a really interesting concept to explore because it gets to the extremes of the conspiracy, but it's rooted in some actual scientific theory.
Speaker: And it dives into why is it that regulation is a good thing?
Speaker: and how like the, the concept of big government is not always a bad thing.
Speaker: There are reasons why we have, um, procedures and regulations and, um,
Speaker: and things of that nature.
Speaker: While simultaneously, it also gets an interesting discussion about like distributions of wealth and what you can afford to do to yourself and how like you can experiment if you have the ability in nature to.
Speaker: Well, there's there on the sci-fi extreme of that, that movie Elysium with Matt Dana, right?
Speaker: Where they, where they keep that technology and like an off world, off world kind of thing.
Speaker: And then of course all the poor people are left on earth to kind of fend for themselves.
Speaker: I taught that.
Speaker: That's fascinating.
Speaker: FYI.
Speaker: I taught that every year in government.
Speaker: I showed the first like 15 minutes because it's perfect.
Speaker: I mean, the movie is literally about immigration and like border crossing.
Speaker: Just told the sci-fi one.
Speaker: Yeah, there's like an action.
Speaker: Yeah, sci-fi action film embedded in there.
Speaker: But I think too, like at this most human element, right?
Speaker: Policy stuff aside, it's like those conspiracies really speak to our anxieties.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like we're scared of getting old and scared of dying and we're scared of not being in control or we're scared of just like these capricious forces having enormous amounts of control over our lives that we push up against if we try to deviate from them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So some of that stuff is just built into the ways societies and economies are organized.
Speaker: There doesn't have to be a grand conspiracy to explain that.
Speaker: But, you know, it's an easy solution to say that it's X, Y and Z people.
Speaker: You know, members of a certain religion or members of a certain race or members of a certain political party.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Have all been blamed throughout history for, you know, controlling the puppet strings of all these grandmasters.
Speaker: It's the Illuminati.
Speaker: It's the whatever.
Speaker: You know, so people want to feel like they're pulling behind the curtain and saying, I know, I know really what the secret is.
Speaker: I'm not, you know, just some disempowered person who's kind of on the recipient of this crappy thing.
Speaker: you know, social, economic, political system.
Speaker: I'm in, I'm the grand master.
Speaker: I figured out the grand plan.
Speaker: So yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I just think there's something kind of, it's almost like a lighthearted kind of thing that kind of is more unifying than, than I think dividing, but sure.
Speaker: And before I mentioned that, just briefly, I think it's worth noting that,
Speaker: A lot of folks used to ask me all the time, like, well, where do you come up with all these crazy ideas?
Speaker: And really, it's just a matter of starting with the interesting thing first.
Speaker: Forget the content standards for a second.
Speaker: I don't think about the content standards.
Speaker: I watched a documentary.
Speaker: I played a video game.
Speaker: I went and saw a play.
Speaker: I went to an art museum and I was like, man, that's super cool.
Speaker: I want to do that and talk about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then I would take it to the kids and ask them like, Hey, is this cool?
Speaker: And nine times out of 10, they'd say yes.
Speaker: Um, I was never a big fan of like attempting just to do what they were interested in because I wasn't always interested.
Speaker: I couldn't make a unit about Fortnite.
Speaker: I've even when it was like super popular.
Speaker: Cause I don't like Fortnite.
Speaker: I don't think it's fun.
Speaker: It's a partnership.
Speaker: Um, and certainly I would let things like they would bring things to the table as well.
Speaker: And I'd be like, Oh, that's kind of cool.
Speaker: Let's talk about that.
Speaker: Um, yeah,
Speaker: But it was about starting with that and then pairing the content standards in later.
Speaker: Because at the end of the day, your content standards are only as relevant as what the real world things are out there.
Speaker: And at least in my experience, it was relatively easy to take especially like the big overarching standards and apply them and fit them into the
Speaker: the interdisciplinary stuff.
Speaker: For example, if we were teaching something about biohackers, I would just bring in all of the standard social studies stuff and toss it in.
Speaker: We could talk about Luddites.
Speaker: We could talk about the industrial revolution and growth of technology.
Speaker: We could talk about healthcare and why it is that people are turning to these types of things and why it's so expensive, that kind of stuff.
Speaker: Um, it's very easy to integrate the content standards once you have an interesting premise, um, because it builds into something greater.
Speaker: And that way you can say like, Hey, this is going to help you out with whatever it is, the, whatever project you're working on.
Speaker: Let's talk about this for like 20 minutes and then chances are kids will learn more.
Speaker: Or like, yeah, like with the conspiracism, it's not like, say, if you had a psychology class and you're just like, well, today we're going to memorize the parts of the brain, right?
Speaker: That's going to be a huge lift.
Speaker: But if you frame it in like an interesting, right, inquiry-based way, why do people believe weird things?
Speaker: Then you can explore all of the bigger context and then say like, well, what is it about the human brain that causes us to want things to be this way?
Speaker: And you're like, okay, here's the elements of that.
Speaker: That's going to be much more likely to stick and be a lot more
Speaker: you know, enjoyable and engaging experience for kids than the one where it's like, just take the map of the brain, remove it from all of its, you know, situated context, et cetera.
Speaker: And just be like, memorize the parts, kids.
Speaker: It's going to be on the test.
Speaker: Like, exactly.
Speaker: It's, it's weird.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The research tells you that kids that take tests that are,
Speaker: that are learning in an inquiry-based way do the same or better in terms of points, but they get more of the higher level questions correct.
Speaker: The critical thinking questions as opposed to the memorization questions because they drilled less, so they don't know if maybe as many of those things that you could just look up, but they do a lot better when they need to interpret something or think in a deep critical manner, which in my opinion is much more important to the real world.
Speaker: Let me share my number two.
Speaker: So my number two, which is actually an IDS lesson.
Speaker: So I just...
Speaker: completely took this out of there because I I've done this project actually multiple times within our own classroom.
Speaker: One time, this is a very cool lesson.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right before COVID shut down and caused us to go online, which we were like building this project as it happened.
Speaker: And then we did it again.
Speaker: My last year teaching, which is talking about city planning and community designs.
Speaker: That's something that personally interests me a lot.
Speaker: I was always like SimCity was my game.
Speaker: I still love SimCity, Cities Skylines.
Speaker: I love simulation games.
Speaker: I always find it fascinating to travel to a new place and see how the roads are laid out, how the sidewalks work, or if there's a lack of sidewalks and why that is.
Speaker: You guys got to drive with Chris in a new place.
Speaker: It's a whole experience.
Speaker: It's wonderful.
Speaker: So it's really interesting.
Speaker: And it just released, there's a Netflix series called The Future Of, which is okay, but it's perfect for a classroom environment.
Speaker: It's like 15 to 20 minutes.
Speaker: I'm just talking about what is like the near future, far future, current future of a topic.
Speaker: And they talk about city design in there.
Speaker: And they talk about how like, well, maybe eventually we'll grow our city like out of like fungi or trees.
Speaker: And it just gets like really crazy.
Speaker: And that kind of stuff is just inherently interesting to me.
Speaker: And I found that when I talk about with kids, because many kids grew up on Minecraft, Terraria, even like Roblox and things of that nature, they're building Lego like back in the day.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's something that is kind of interesting to build stuff, right?
Speaker: So we always crafted projects or units or lessons about building that city of the future.
Speaker: Last year I taught, we did a project where we found a bunch of Lego and we had kids learn from city planners.
Speaker: One of our co-teachers knew a city planner and she came in and answered a bunch of questions.
Speaker: We
Speaker: We researched what cities look like around the world, and we looked at future city plans from the past as well as the future.
Speaker: So what people thought future cities were going to look like in the 1850s, what they think that's going to look like now.
Speaker: A lot of circles.
Speaker: People really like their circles.
Speaker: And we took all those concepts and said, well, what would it look like if you build a city like this?
Speaker: We had the kids build these cities, but then we would present them with various scenarios.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: co-teacher and I would sit down and we would like analyze the cities and go like, well, what would happen?
Speaker: Like they don't have like any police force.
Speaker: They don't have any community rehabilitation.
Speaker: Like they have nothing if someone does something wrong.
Speaker: So we would go in and say like, well, here's your scenario.
Speaker: Someone murdered someone super dark, but it's true.
Speaker: Like this just happened.
Speaker: What do you do?
Speaker: And then like, maybe like, well, we'll sentence them to death.
Speaker: They're like, don't look, we'll say something like super extreme.
Speaker: And over time,
Speaker: they built these dystopian, terrible places to live, which gets into a really interesting philosophical question of if you build a utopia, you'd get a dystopia.
Speaker: But also, some of the groups didn't take it as far, and they would research how do people deal with these things.
Speaker: It makes people question why does the United States do some of the things the way that they do them.
Speaker: And we also talked about gentrification, which is a big part of it.
Speaker: Well, what used to be there?
Speaker: You can walk around your own community.
Speaker: I taught in a school that was gentrified.
Speaker: It was literally like a gentrified building.
Speaker: And talking about how do you do gentrification well?
Speaker: Can you do it well?
Speaker: How do you invite folks to those conversations, et cetera?
Speaker: So that was always just a really interesting thing.
Speaker: And there's things you can do on one day with that, and there's things that you could spend an entire year building stuff with.
Speaker: Yeah, because urban planning is, again, at the intersection of technology.
Speaker: Like, what do we have, the materials, the tools, the ability to create?
Speaker: And then there's the social thing, too.
Speaker: Like, who is displaced if we build this thing here?
Speaker: Or what part of the community does this serve or that other building?
Speaker: What is the role of, you know, government in providing public services?
Speaker: Those are policy questions or ideological questions.
Speaker: Those are social questions.
Speaker: And yes, like urban planning has has all those things.
Speaker: You look at the outcome of how cities are built and ask questions about what they value or who they value or, you know, all those things, too.
Speaker: We're kind of seeing that now with this walkable cities kind of movement and.
Speaker: you know, the future of what e-bikes and electric cars and things and kind of asking those questions about what we want the future to look like.
Speaker: Since we can see that the one that's dominated by combustion engines and car infrastructure is a dead end.
Speaker: Just one more lane.
Speaker: Just come on.
Speaker: Just give us one more lane.
Speaker: It's going to grow to infinity.
Speaker: So, yeah, kids, it's you couldn't you could find an article from the last 24 hours that deals with that topic to situate it in the real world.
Speaker: And then, right, get kids working to understand that.
Speaker: And plus there's careers in that.
Speaker: You know, there's careers in the technological aspect.
Speaker: You can get a career in public policy.
Speaker: You can become an urban planner.
Speaker: You can, you know, be in construction.
Speaker: You can be in all those kinds of things.
Speaker: So it gives kids a future to see themselves as well.
Speaker: So getting that into that reflective space.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: In terms of college and career readiness, I mean, it's much more applicable to understanding the concepts that you're going to tackle in college and in your career than anything that you would in a more traditional unit by unit class.
Speaker: Let's move into...
Speaker: Now, speaking of college and career readiness, this is actually something that I've got a lot of feedback on from former students of mine.
Speaker: You know, when I have them as seniors or sophomores, they're only, you know, a few years out of college, if they're at all, who will either come back and had come back and talk to me or emailed me later on to say, like, Covington, this thing that you did in your class was
Speaker: was exactly like my college experiences now.
Speaker: Like this prepared me, this is their words, this prepared me to be in college more than any kind of content would.
Speaker: And that's exactly what I was talking about when you had asked me about the way that I had approached PBL in my class, which again,
Speaker: not intentionally interdisciplinary, but, you know, had the effect of being that because it opened up the world to kids to, you know, a way of thinking and a way of inquiry, which we had mentioned at the beginning with that framework is all of those factors, critical thinking, collaboration, and reflection all create a questioning attitude.
Speaker: And so really when I opened up my, my classrooms for project-based learning, it was really with that framework in mind, they could learn and do whatever they wanted to do.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But they just had to answer a basic series of questions, right?
Speaker: What do you want to do?
Speaker: How are you going to do it?
Speaker: With whom, right?
Speaker: Are you going to collaborate or not?
Speaker: Do you need to collaborate or not?
Speaker: For whom are you going to do this?
Speaker: You know, it's just, just for, you know, your own personal curiosity.
Speaker: Does it connect to some future thing that you want to do?
Speaker: Do you want to help build a better world for, you know, a disadvantaged,
Speaker: kids?
Speaker: Or, you know, do you want to help out homeless veterans?
Speaker: Whatever the case might be.
Speaker: What will the impact be?
Speaker: So kind of evaluating on the future of the project, what tools or resources will you need to be successful?
Speaker: And how will you know when you've gotten there?
Speaker: Like, that's a lens of thinking about the world that you can apply to anything from
Speaker: Baking cookies.
Speaker: You know, like I want to make cookies.
Speaker: I don't know how to make cookies.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, what kind of cookies do I want to make?
Speaker: Do I need somebody to help me make the cookies?
Speaker: Am I making them for me?
Speaker: And am I making them for my friends, for my kids, for my parents?
Speaker: You know, what tools or resources am I going to need to make the cookies?
Speaker: How will I know what I've gotten to, you know, apply it to any culinary lens, apply it to any technological lens, apply it to, you know, any kind of sociological lens.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: But I think like in my ideal, that's what that huge open-ended inquiry would be because it's necessarily, again, it's preparation for the rest of your life outside of school where you're not going to have a day-to-day kind of structure in what it is that you're doing.
Speaker: I mean, the nonprofit work that we do now is...
Speaker: we're constantly shifting gears and taking on tasks that, you know, we normally would not otherwise do.
Speaker: But we're like, hey, yeah, I think we could do that.
Speaker: Let's learn about what it is that we're doing.
Speaker: How is it that we're going to be able to meet these people's needs?
Speaker: You know, how can we do all that?
Speaker: So we've stepped into a million different directions.
Speaker: We weren't
Speaker: YouTubers before this, and now we create YouTube content.
Speaker: We weren't a lot of things we've learned by doing in that moment.
Speaker: And so again, I come back to the feedback that I got from my graduated students to say like, that was more preparation than the content.
Speaker: it was a way of thinking about challenges and an inquiry-based mindset that allowed them to be more successful in the open-ended world of college, university, where you're not led around by the wrist and told what to do and when and how, kind of have to think on your feet a little bit, or you're given more opportunity to explore more inquiry.
Speaker: I still remember a lot of the really cool work that I did in my career
Speaker: for my history degree, was a lot more of that open-ended stuff.
Speaker: I remember I had a Chinese history course, and we had to pick a topic to research that got us working in archives and working with primary and secondary sources, which I'm not a reader of any Asian languages.
Speaker: So that was kind of the interesting part was bringing that back to my professor, that collaboration there.
Speaker: But I still remember I wanted to look into the rise of brewing beer in Asian countries because that's like a European thing.
Speaker: How did that arrive?
Speaker: The question for me was how did that arrive now?
Speaker: In Japan, there's Japanese breweries, there's Chinese breweries that brew their own beer for their own local markets and then for markets abroad.
Speaker: What's up with that?
Speaker: So I had to learn about the history.
Speaker: How did brewing beer get to these places?
Speaker: How do they make that?
Speaker: What is the impact on the market here today?
Speaker: And do all of that.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: It's such a natural way of thinking about the world, but
Speaker: The framing in education is so much like, you know, like kids need to practice all of these skills and all of these abilities and kids need to practice their math facts and kids need to practice, you know, the retrieval practice for all that.
Speaker: When do they get to practice this lens of inquiry?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like when do they have the space and time to be able to do that?
Speaker: We always that's always pushed aside later on.
Speaker: Later on, they can do the inquiry.
Speaker: Later on, they can do the PBL.
Speaker: Later on, they can do all that.
Speaker: But they run out of time.
Speaker: Um, so I would just open up the space for them to just ask and answer self-generated questions, right?
Speaker: Open it up.
Speaker: And it doesn't even have to be successful.
Speaker: Oftentimes kids would get too ambitious.
Speaker: You know, oftentimes as we do as adults, um, they tried to bite off more than they could chew.
Speaker: They had to settle for a little bit less.
Speaker: And it was the start of something that was in, they planted a seed that was interesting for them to answer later on.
Speaker: So maybe they weren't super successful now, but that's a reflective moment for them to say, oh, I'm
Speaker: Well, now I know for the next time I enter this big project, here's actually what I might need to start off with and do.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: It's more it's more like practicing and flexing that those inquiry mindset, those inquiry muscles, then really it is about any amount of content.
Speaker: You can do that anywhere at any time.
Speaker: So just pure open ended wild stuff.
Speaker: Same.
Speaker: And I found that over time, I don't know if it's the same for you, but I really came to appreciate creative confines when it came to those open-ended projects.
Speaker: When I first started trying those within my own context, I said you could do actually anything.
Speaker: Like there was actually no confines whatsoever because sometimes when you read like self-directed learning theory, the implication is like, like, like some very school type stuff where you just do whatever.
Speaker: And I thought, well, that sounds great.
Speaker: But the wall that I would always run into is, is that at a certain point I can no longer have value steering that because I don't like, I don't even like know where to go with it.
Speaker: Like there isn't enough constraints on it that I can help steer them and help guide them towards a certain pathway.
Speaker: Even if it's something I didn't predict beforehand, I don't have the proper knowledge to even understand.
Speaker: even know where to go from there.
Speaker: And I think it's interesting to note that creative confines tend to actually have kids learn more.
Speaker: For example, like when I was teaching digital design, we would do something with a certain theme or certain genre, but that you could do whatever you wanted within that genre without being, without taking it too far, which is you have so many creative confines that it's like, pick what color paper you have, or, you know, you could have three, but you could also have five pictures in your collage.
Speaker: But instead it's like, hey, we're going to make a collage.
Speaker: I don't care what kind of collage it is.
Speaker: Here's a bunch of different examples of different types of collages.
Speaker: It could be a movie.
Speaker: It could be, but it needs to be a collage.
Speaker: It needs to have some kind of like mood or concept.
Speaker: And I want an artist statement.
Speaker: Okay, good luck.
Speaker: And then we would go through how different artists do that certain thing.
Speaker: We would learn how to do that.
Speaker: And then you would blend and kind of play with those rules, but you still had to meet the rules.
Speaker: And when you do that effectively, first off, you're probably going to learn more stuff because you're pushing yourself to think creatively around a boundary and it just helps focus you a little bit more.
Speaker: But also when it comes to the product, whatever it is that kids made, because that product is going to be relatively the same across different things, like they have the same framework, they have the same concepts.
Speaker: When you go to present it, it just looks a lot better.
Speaker: Um, and I, I, I always appreciated how it looked at the end, the aesthetic of it.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: And there's, there's the thing too.
Speaker: I'm, I'm making a connection now to what John Warner writes about in the writer's practice with writing is, you know, a lot of those prescriptive things that we put in place, um, it has to have this many paragraphs or it has to have this many pictures.
Speaker: It has to have a
Speaker: it really takes away the ability for students to understand why and how they're going to answer those questions and develop like their authentic voice as writers in the context of writing, right?
Speaker: So there are certain questions that you have to answer as a writer to like put yourselves in communion with your audience, right?
Speaker: How am I going to express this idea?
Speaker: Does it, you know, what punctuation would best, you know,
Speaker: Harry, the emotional weight that I want to look at here, what word choice, what, you know, does it need, how long does it need to be?
Speaker: And certainly there are these confines, but, but we're trying to, you know, get a message across.
Speaker: And often the, the prescriptions that we put in place are like faking it, you know, like, like Warner calls them writing related simulations.
Speaker: Well, that take that concept and apply it writ large to everything that you're saying in like, you know, an art class, it has to have this many pictures.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: maybe you're answering a question that an artist necessarily needs, you know, in the moment to do that, that might be a,
Speaker: a short term like thing to get kids to the next level, but then actually causes them to fail at the next step because then they won't have, they won't have gone through the hard part of figuring out why are three to five paragraphs important, you know, if they are, I don't know, or why are this many pictures, you know, an important barrier.
Speaker: They don't understand why, you know, necessarily artists take in those limits.
Speaker: So it's like having to kind of play within those really just help us understand, help kind of pull back the curtain and
Speaker: you know, to mention Baudrillard and the, uh, and the matrix maybe there earlier, but like, why, why is writing like this?
Speaker: Why is art like this?
Speaker: Why is music like this?
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: And again, that's that big interdisciplinary concepts, you know, like, Hey, why does music have 12 notes?
Speaker: Does it always have 12 notes?
Speaker: What about, you know, all these other ways in between.
Speaker: And then you start to have kids maybe write some music and be like, see, sounds like crap.
Speaker: Like, why don't we put some, why does this major key sound happy?
Speaker: Why does the minor key sound sad?
Speaker: Why,
Speaker: You start to just play around with the fundamentals and those are building blocks are going to help kids more in the long run than just saying, memorize these seven scales and then you'll pass because then they have no purpose for why those things exist or what they're meant to express in the first place.
Speaker: Tangent, but I was going to say it relates really heavily to something that a lot of kids would tell me in feedback forms initially made them very frustrated about my course, but over time they grew to appreciate, which is it allows you to discuss the minimums.
Speaker: Because I would sometimes put on there, speaking about the collages example, like you need to have a minimum of three pictures.
Speaker: So some kids would put three pictures and go like, well, it's done.
Speaker: And then I would give them feedback.
Speaker: I wouldn't write it like this, but I basically say it looks bad.
Speaker: Like it sucks.
Speaker: It's not good because making a good collage out of three pictures is very difficult.
Speaker: So like a kid would like write back or come see me and be like, well, McNutt, you told me.
Speaker: I only needed three pictures.
Speaker: I was like, yeah, you only need three pictures, but like, it's not, doesn't look very good.
Speaker: Like we're going to work on and make it better.
Speaker: Like we need to improve upon it.
Speaker: And then they go like, well, I mean, I was like, most of these don't have three pictures in the example.
Speaker: So like you might need to add a few more to make them look good.
Speaker: But were there a few kids that made some three picture collages that worked because they were all cut up and weirdly modulated?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And over time, kids get that.
Speaker: Over time, they're like, oh, my goal isn't necessarily to...
Speaker: obsess about the minimum guidelines.
Speaker: It's to use these as rules that when I'm crafting something, I know some boundaries.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, the ultimate purpose in a digital design class is does it look good and communicate a message?
Speaker: Yes or no?
Speaker: And it's highly subjective, but we kind of worked around that.
Speaker: And I kind of made that work.
Speaker: Well, and I mean, adults work within those those limitations as well.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's like the conversations like this between you and I are fairly rare on our content because they just are kind of seemingly ambling.
Speaker: We try to have much more tighter, you know, or scripted sort of interactions and content that we release because we know like, hey, our content has to have an audience.
Speaker: They want to be engaged with that.
Speaker: So let's you know, let's kind of beat them halfway on what we want to do and what they want to want to learn about.
Speaker: Same with like writing.
Speaker: You know, like it's very rare that you and I will contribute writing to other forums other than our own, where, again, it's a lot more loose and unlimited because it's our own platform.
Speaker: But where they're like, yeah, just write about whatever.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter how long or short or whatever it is, you know, or that you won't have feedback, even if you do meet those minimum requirements, you know.
Speaker: So, you know, you have to.
Speaker: you have to really go through that practice of like saying, look, what is it really that I'm trying to do and communicate?
Speaker: And how can I communicate that the best that I know how to do while maintaining, you know, like my voice, my integrity and meeting the needs of the audience that, you know, without them, I don't have an outlet for the things that I'm trying to do.
Speaker: So it's like, if I need to do that in 500 words, sometimes you have to do that.
Speaker: But sometimes in schools, we overdo that and we skip the part where then kids become critical, you know,
Speaker: thinkers about media and its production and how those barriers kind of play a role in what makes it work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They don't understand that we preclude the why and just give them rules.
Speaker: Um, so that's, again, an interesting part of the interdisciplinary lens to bring it back to the subject of this video and this podcast is, you know, like, Hey, let's actually just look at the rules.
Speaker: You know, why do people believe weird things?
Speaker: Why
Speaker: Why does music have 12 notes?
Speaker: Why, why does, why can you not make a collage with two pictures?
Speaker: And why is a collage with a thousand pictures generally a terrible idea?
Speaker: Why, you know, why would you maybe not want to make a YouTube video?
Speaker: That's an hour and 20 minutes of two dudes talking like,
Speaker: You know, it just, it is what it is.
Speaker: You just, you just explore those things.
Speaker: And sometimes you take those risks and other times you don't, but you learn about all along the way, you know, you're iterating on that why, or you're adding to the next time that you try something out, why you, or why not, you might want to do that thing.
Speaker: So let me wrap up with my number one.
Speaker: We finally made it.
Speaker: Oh, you haven't even gotten to yours.
Speaker: I haven't said my number one yet.
Speaker: So yours was open-ended, which I feel like is kind of cheating.
Speaker: So I'm going to use mine as an actual content area thing, which is something I alluded to earlier in the conversation at some point.
Speaker: And this is something I have not done.
Speaker: Some of my coworkers explored this, and I was always fascinated doing it in my own class, and I just never had a chance to do it.
Speaker: Because honestly, I didn't really know much about it until like relatively recently, which are tackling philosophical concepts in mathematics.
Speaker: I think that math and to an extent science tends to get left out of the conversation and interdisciplinary learning PBL context, not because it's not there, but because when we talk about things, it's just like, well, yeah, I can talk about that in social studies class.
Speaker: And it's like super easy.
Speaker: Um, Matt has so many different applicability applicabilities to the things that we've been talking about, but also has its own things that you could start with that are inherently interesting that dive into the other subject area.
Speaker: So what I'm thinking about are things like, um, there's this fascinating book I read, I think late last year, it's called zero, the biography of a dangerous idea.
Speaker: I read it actually after we had done a lesson on the concept of infinity for the IDS.
Speaker: And we found that book and we recommended it based off of just like all the reviews and everything.
Speaker: So I read that book and it is so interesting.
Speaker: It's all about how the concept or theory of zero is like got you persecuted by faith-based organizations because like how can zero exist?
Speaker: It like broke a bunch of code and concepts and previous formulas because it's very hard to explain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like it literally is hard for me to explain it.
Speaker: Um, in the exact same way that like explaining infinity is very difficult to explain.
Speaker: Like it, it kind of goes beyond our human rationale for a thing existing, but it's one of those things that people love to talk about in the exact same way that
Speaker: like math-based concepts of like when you're next to like a gigantic building, like interstellar style and like time slows down and like time is relative to the different paces, going back to what you were talking about before.
Speaker: When you dive into infinity, you're getting into parallel universe theory.
Speaker: Like if you have an infinite concept, then eventually you would duplicate and there would be infinite versions of every single thing that you ever do.
Speaker: There's so many different interesting concepts
Speaker: concepts when it comes to math and when you dive into the existential parts of it.
Speaker: Another good book that was co-taught at my school was always The Drunkard's Walk, which is a math philosophy book.
Speaker: It's like a pop-sci, like an Adam Grant type thing.
Speaker: Randomness rules our lives.
Speaker: Yeah, it's all about how like people piece together.
Speaker: Can I speak into your conspiracy idea?
Speaker: People piece together a bunch of like random things that they learn throughout time.
Speaker: And that's how they come to conclusions about the way things are, even if they are completely inaccurate.
Speaker: And sometimes like randomness leads us to having like brilliant ideas that completely change the world.
Speaker: And sometimes they lead us to just being like ignorant people.
Speaker: That book dives into like the why and how of the concept of randomness.
Speaker: Everything from like a gambler's fallacy to conspiracy theories to just like how science works and like experimentation.
Speaker: So all those concepts, like all that to say, interdisciplinary learning, starting with math as the basis has very interesting implications for the humanities, for science experiments and the like, where instead of going to the math teacher and saying, hey, can you make a math lesson out of
Speaker: But the problem is now, like, I know you could do this, but like, let's say that you were doing it on city planning.
Speaker: There might be a leap there to say, well, like I teach algebra two.
Speaker: I'm not really sure how to do that.
Speaker: You can.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You might because we already made the lesson, but it might be a bigger leap in saying like, hey, can we make a lesson about the concept of infinity?
Speaker: Because that is inherently a math based thing.
Speaker: And there's probably ways that we can tackle that together.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I know our friend, colleague, Sunil Singh would certainly put his stamp of approval on this idea, right?
Speaker: But it's like teaching math as a humanities class.
Speaker: Like, what does that look like?
Speaker: What is the human element of mathematics?
Speaker: You know, it's not, to some extent, it is, you know, an abstract thing that just exists out in the world and, you know, human beings are discovering it, but it also has, you know, huge, as you were just talking about zero, cultural implications.
Speaker: And
Speaker: implications that go into our architecture, our sense of religion, our sense of self, and of course, the story and the history of invention and all of that across time too, and still what is yet to be found.
Speaker: So we are constantly, if we are experiencing and expressing the world through mathematics, like that story is not done.
Speaker: There's not a period at the end of that.
Speaker: Like what is left to be told in that part as well?
Speaker: So yeah, like who are the people and the peoples and the cultures and the communities and all that they came up with?
Speaker: with these ideas, not to bring it back to social studies, which I'm totally, I'm totally doing, but you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: Like there, there is an interdisciplinary story to be told there that, yeah, I did not, I did not experience, I experienced that primarily through physics.
Speaker: Like I really loved, I, I almost did not graduate high school because I was lacking in my math credits, but I had an A in physics and I,
Speaker: My lowest grade throughout my entire college experience was in my required math class that I had to take because I was so lacking in, you know, I couldn't like test out of any of those things.
Speaker: But then I also took intro like physics class, a couple of physics class from my gen eds, some of my best classes.
Speaker: I just like the concept, thinking conceptually about those things was much more powerful to me than, you know, the raw algebra, which has always seemed like it was always taught just from like the
Speaker: the perspective of formulas and all and, you know, doing the worksheets and things that were not particularly engaging for me, but attach that to a story or attach it to, right, the question of like, what happens if I drop this thing, right?
Speaker: It's on a wire here.
Speaker: What's it going to do?
Speaker: Like, right, kind of tell the story of these objects and how those impact our world.
Speaker: It's like so much more fascinating.
Speaker: And there's math to describe all of that stuff.
Speaker: So yeah, that's, that, that would be, I would take that class or I would, I would appreciate that lesson, Chris, about philosophical concepts in that.
Speaker: So yeah, if you never wanted a 90 minute conversation between two teachers about interdisciplinary learning, I think you've gotten it, but this might be also be one of the shorter MindFood episodes.
Speaker: So thank you so much if you made it this far for joining us for this episode of MindFood.
Speaker: And of course...
Speaker: If you want to join us in Columbus on March 4th to continue the conversation, to really get into the weeds with an international cohort, an international group of educators, of researchers, of high schoolers,
Speaker: higher ed, you know, K-12 from the UK, from across the United States.
Speaker: Join us in Columbus at The Ohio State University on March 4th.
Speaker: And you can register for that event on a link that's either somewhere in this video, somewhere in the link in the show description there.
Speaker: And of course, be on the lookout for materials that we released related to the IDS, that interdisciplinary subject, those lessons that we talked about throughout the rest of this episode.
Speaker: And of course, thank you so much for listening.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Thanks all.
Speaker: Let's restore humanity together.
