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We Are Worldbuilders: A Narration
101 Plays57 minutes ago
Progressive education is a world-building project rooted in the radical hope that schools can become something fit for human beings.
This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It, by Ginie Servant-Miklos, and we’re inviting you to join us. Visit humanrestorationproject.org/book-club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author, for a Q&A on July 31. I’ll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on Open Access through Bloomsbury. Hope to see you there!
The HRP team has been on the road for 3 of the last 4 weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership, and I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI-Shirley. At the time of recording, I’m headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency. This is all to say I don’t have an epic 90 minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week, but what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, it’s called We Are Worldbuilders. See you in two weeks!
Pedagogies of Collapse, Bloomsbury Open Access
We Are Worldbuilders, Nick Covington
Additional music credits: Dandelion by | e s c p | https://www.escp.space | https://escp-music.bandcamp.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Club Invitation
00:00:12
Speaker
Hey there, Nick here from the Human Restoration Project podcast. This summer, HRP is reading Pedagogies of Collapse, a hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it, by Jeanne Servant-Miklos, and we're inviting you to join us.
00:00:26
Speaker
Visit humanrestorationproject.org slash book dash club to sign up for our summer book club, where we'll meet to discuss the ideas and implications of Pedagogies of Collapse and be joined by the author for a Q&A on July thirty first I'll include a link to the book in the show notes, which is available on open access through Bloomsbury.
00:00:47
Speaker
Hope to see you there.
HRP Team's Educational Travels
00:00:51
Speaker
The HRP team has been on the road for three of the last four weeks. At the end of April, we were on the ground working with Third Coast Learning Collaborative Schools in Michigan. Last week, we were in Boston for school visits, meeting with folks at the Boston Museum of Science about an upcoming grant partnership.
00:01:08
Speaker
And I went to prison with Jennifer Berkshire to sit in on her journalism class at MCI Shirley. At the time of recording, I'm headed to Ohio to present student listening reports to school districts who held focus groups this year based around student agency.
00:01:24
Speaker
This is all to say i don't have an epic 90-minute conversation or hour-long topical deep dive for you this week. But what I will offer is an audio reading of the opening piece from our revised Progressive Education Primer, which will be out later this year.
Audio Reading: 'We Are World Builders'
00:01:40
Speaker
The piece is called We Are World Builders. And I'll see you in two weeks.
00:01:53
Speaker
A generation ago, in the parable of the sower, visionary science fiction author Octavia Butler imagined the future of the United States of America, our present, as a country descended into chaos.
00:02:06
Speaker
predicting disastrous impacts of social inequality, climate change, and the collapse of government institutions. Despite living through the worst tragedies a human can face, the protagonist leads a small band of traumatized people toward an imagined hopeful future, embracing change as a constructive force to build something different.
00:02:27
Speaker
Several years later, Butler had an interaction with a college student who asked whether Butler believed in her doomed predictions about America's future.
Octavia Butler's Insights on Dystopia
00:02:36
Speaker
Butler's response was rooted in the study of history shaped by a pragmatic humanism.
00:02:42
Speaker
I didn't make up the problems, she replies. All I did was look around at the problems we're neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.
00:02:54
Speaker
Relieving the student's concern about the trajectory of her dystopian predictions, she offers, there's no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There's no magic bullet.
00:03:04
Speaker
Instead, there are thousands of answers, at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be. As Octavia Butler recognized, world building is not just a project of science fiction.
Education as World-Building
00:03:18
Speaker
Through intention or its absence, built by us or for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day. So is our work in education a world-building project.
00:03:34
Speaker
Through the structures and systems we create and the pedagogies and practices we cultivate, we can either foreclose possibility, concede to inevitability, or become builders of a better imagined future.
00:03:47
Speaker
This was also John Dewey's charge from the ascendant fascism of his time, the very period that informed Butler's fictional dystopia to our own today. Few people in 1937 could imagine what the next decade held for them.
Dewey and Watson on Education and Democracy
00:04:04
Speaker
That same year, Dewey, a founder of progressive education, and his colleague Goodwin Watson co-authored an essay titled The Forward View, A Free Teacher in a Free Society, in which they described the relationship between education in the struggle for power and the shape of their world.
00:04:24
Speaker
If there be any teachers who chose this profession because they imagined that in it they might stand securely aside from the turmoil of battle for power, they wrote they will probably find the next decade or several decades very dismaying.
00:04:40
Speaker
National identities curdled around rigid hierarchies, and where they weren't dismantled, schools and state-sponsored clubs became closed sites of fanatical ideological reproduction for the students and teachers alike who remained.
00:04:56
Speaker
Some of the most highly educated and ambitious people of the 20th century put their education to work building an infrastructure of deliberate dehumanization that began with law and terminated in death squads, gas chambers, and gulags.
00:05:12
Speaker
Fearing this transformation would come to the United States, Dewey and Watson challenged our collective purpose in their clear-eyed vision of a free education for a free society, rooted in social cooperation and thriving democratic practice, sustained by active interdisciplinary inquiry and shared experience, and with teachers, students, and schools as its living, beating heart.
00:05:38
Speaker
Or, as they put it bluntly, a free education is incompatible with fascism. They understood that the worlds of possibility we build through our work in schools become the shared world in which we live, and the ways we learn become the ways we are.
Current Threats to Education
00:05:58
Speaker
Today, Dewey's ideals of a free education face a dual threat. Overt censorship by would-be authoritarians and the more insidious distortion of education as an economic transaction.
00:06:12
Speaker
While authoritarian political threats to a free education can be seen in the gaps on library shelves, the infiltration of economic values into education risks reducing human beings to human capital in policy and practice.
00:06:28
Speaker
Through privatization, children and parents are treated as consumers of exclusive education products instead of citizens with rights to a free, appropriate public education.
00:06:40
Speaker
The demands of testing in core content areas narrows the curriculum and devalues arts, world languages, and specials, what we might otherwise call the humanities.
00:06:52
Speaker
Treating public schooling as primarily a workforce development project also leads to troubling conclusions about what it means to be educated and who gets to have an education.
00:07:03
Speaker
What good is it to Walmart or Amazon if their employees read poetry in their spare time or understand American history? Ask Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. What use is it for the affluent class if lower- and middle-income earners can paint or play an instrument?
00:07:21
Speaker
College and career readiness even trickles down into early childhood and elementary grades, where developmentally appropriate learning through play gets displaced by direct academic instruction.
00:07:33
Speaker
At every step, schools get punished for serving already underserved communities. Teachers get told to do more and more with less and less, and children get put into boxes, where they are subsequently measured and tracked as outcomes on a data wall.
00:07:50
Speaker
And what are the outcomes of an education system so closely aligned to economic values? A 2022 Gallup survey reported K-12 workers had the highest rates of burnout of any industry in the United States.
00:08:06
Speaker
In another national survey of over 21,000 students, tired, stressed, and bored were the most common words they used to describe how they feel at school.
00:08:16
Speaker
And in an in-depth follow-up, 75% of all feelings students reported were negative. Even the rate of child suicide increases dramatically during the school year compared to the summer months.
00:08:30
Speaker
If the purpose of a system is what it does, the purpose of American schools would seem to be to inflict unmanageable levels of stress, burnout, and disengagement on the adults and children who encounter it dayto day to day.
00:08:43
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But it doesn't have to be that way.
Intrinsic Value of Diverse Education
00:08:46
Speaker
Much of what we value in our children's education, it is essential to our mutual health and well-being, resists a precise dollar amount or direct connection to future earning potential.
00:08:58
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We're musical, poetic, artistic, historical, and often joyously inefficient tinkerers just as much as we are participants, willingly or not, in the economic and political systems of our times.
00:09:11
Speaker
And which practices in school communicate to kids and adults that our spiky, messy, complicated humanity is a group project worth taking on? In an age where generative AI can do just about anything quickly and efficiently, if we want students to do more than prompt AI-generated essays to be fed into the robo-grader back and forth forever, we must start by openly asking, what is worth thinking, writing, learning, and discussing?
David Orr on Environmental Education
00:09:41
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What are we going to build with this time we have together?
00:09:48
Speaker
The stakes of schooling grow even greater as we consider the damaging relationship of our economic and political systems to the sustainability of the planet. Environmentalist David Orr insists that all education is environmental education.
00:10:03
Speaker
The planet needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane, he argues. and that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
00:10:17
Speaker
We must be vigilant that even progressive pedagogies engage critically with social and economic systems, with distributions of power and their relationship to our environment, not merely to reproduce them in the classroom.
00:10:32
Speaker
And if you feel like this is a lot to take on by yourself, you're right. And organizers Kelly Hayes and Maryam Akaba remind us that life will be a scramble, but we will not scramble alone.
00:10:44
Speaker
Together, we will fight for this world to keep it. The present borders of the real world, the limits of our grammar of schooling, and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining.
Innovative Teaching Practices
00:10:58
Speaker
But these constraints are not the result of natural law, and there's nothing inevitable or inherent about them. Where world-building predominates, inevitability gives way to possibility, and stultification gives way to reimagination.
00:11:15
Speaker
Teaching is a radical act of hope, history professor Kevin Gannon urges. It's an assertion of faith in a better future, in an increasingly uncertain and fraught present.
00:11:27
Speaker
It is a commitment to that future, even if we can't clearly discern its shape. Not only is it possible to act on that radical hope to change the grammar of schooling, that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured schools.
00:11:44
Speaker
In electives, clubs, and extracurriculars at the periphery of the school day. Where students may not identify as math kids and brag about their latest test score, they'll proudly wear jerseys to class on game days, feature their art club mural at the school entrance, and diligently practice their upcoming speech performance over lunch.
00:12:06
Speaker
What these spaces offer aren't fads or gimmicks, but as Dr. Sarah Fine explains, the hallmarks of a learner-centered system, trust, safety, and authentic care, where learners and educators co-design coursework.
00:12:21
Speaker
Each of these hallmarks can be used to transform the core experience of school, and it's a commitment best taken in solidarity with the students we teach. To build trust, students must be trusted.
00:12:34
Speaker
To build safety and authentic care, they must feel safe and cared for in their full, authentic selves. Anyone who has spent time with children understands, like it or not, they are world builders.
00:12:48
Speaker
Near the end of Octavia Butler's parable, in the year 2027, after fleeing another tragedy, our band of survivors weighs the risks of settling down and starting their community anew.
00:13:01
Speaker
Allie, a young woman who burned her house down to escape her abuser, opens herself to the invitation. I want to build something too, she
Collaborative Efforts for a Hopeful Future
00:13:09
Speaker
offers. I never had a chance to build anything before.
00:13:14
Speaker
And as the group coalesces around this seed of hope, discussing the logistics of shelter and planting a winter garden, a man in the group, a father and former slave, adds that he's built slave cabins before, but he's eager to build something better, something fit for human beings.
00:13:32
Speaker
And so we too must ask about our work in communities, in schools, and with young people, even in the face of disastrous loss and an uncertain future. What is it about the world that is worth building?
00:13:46
Speaker
And are we dedicated to the work of building that better world alongside them?
Call to Action and Resources
00:13:59
Speaker
Thank you again and for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
00:14:10
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.