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Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation w/ Ryan Sprott
7 Plays11 days ago
Our conversation today is with educator, author, and Director of National Faculty at PBLWorks, Ryan Sprott, about one of the most contentious topics in education today, that is Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation: A Memoir and Primer for Pedagogical Transformation, which is also the title of his self-published book. In this conversation we be talk about his experience teaching an inquiry approach to teaching contentious topics. In part time project-based inquiry, his students in Texas, of all places, engaged with some of the most difficult open-ended, wicked questions around, as Ryan refers to them, “A question to open hearts and minds”–
What is the purpose of a border and what has shaped your answer to this question?
How can we improve energy policy and what has shaped your answer to this question?
And what is the purpose of school and what has shaped your answer to this question?
Students visited the Texas border with Mexico, worked with immigrant aid organizations and hosted dialogue with Border Patrol agents. They visited Texas oil fields to speak with oilmen on the ground, engaged in interviews, documented their experiences in field journals, created collaborative community art projects, and so much more. You’ll hear student testimonials about how they came away transformed forever by the experience.
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Transcript
The Border Patrol Encounter
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But this conversation that we had with the Border Patrol with the students was much different.
00:00:03
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It was like a scared straight presentation about why students shouldn't join the cartel, basically.
00:00:11
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And it was, I would say the tone was belittling to students, you know, and it wasn't what we had requested.
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We had requested a dialogue, not a presentation.
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And it was a lot of propaganda.
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There were pictures of people being arrested and militarized helicopters and a lot of things where I was just like sitting there.
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And at many points, I wanted to interrupt the conversation and jump in because I wanted to protect students.
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But I didn't know what to do, honestly.
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So I just sat there and I was at the front of the room.
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I couldn't see how the students were receiving it.
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And at the end of this presentation, he said, you probably don't have any questions, do you?
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And I felt it.
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I felt a whoosh of hands come up.
Introduction to the Human Restoration Project Podcast
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Hello and welcome to episode 169 of our podcast here at Human Restoration Project.
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My name is Nick Covington.
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Before we get started, I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Anna Wentlund, Kevin Gannon, and Kimberly Baker.
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Thank you all so much for your ongoing support.
Interview with Ryan Sprott
00:01:17
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Our conversation today is with educator, author, and director of national faculty at PBL Works, Ryan Sprott, about one of the most contentious topics in education today, that is, teaching contentious topics in a divided nation, a memoir and primer for pedagogical transformation, which is also the title of his book.
00:01:36
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In this conversation, we'll be talking about his experience teaching an inquiry-based approach to teaching contentious topics.
00:01:43
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In a part-time project-based inquiry course, his students in Texas, of all places, engaged with some of the most difficult, open-ended, wicked questions around, or as Ryan refers to them, questions to open hearts and minds.
00:01:58
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What is the purpose of a border, and what has shaped your answer to this question?
00:02:03
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How can we improve energy policy, and what has shaped your answer to this question?
00:02:08
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And what is the purpose of school, and what has shaped your answer to this question?
00:02:14
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To accomplish this, students visited the Texas border with Mexico.
00:02:18
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They worked with immigration aid organizations and hosted dialogue with Border Patrol agents.
00:02:23
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They visited Texas oil fields to speak with oil men on the ground, engaged in interviews, documented their experiences in field journals, created collaborative community art projects, and so much more.
00:02:36
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You'll hear student testimonials about how they came away transformed forever by the experience.
Ryan's Educational Background
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Ryan, thank you so much for joining me today.
00:02:44
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Well, thank you, Nick.
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It's great to be here.
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So for listeners who may not know who you are and what the educational journey that led you to teaching contentious topics in a divided nation, can you speak about yourself and what brought you to this today?
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I think that the best description that I can have of my work is I refer to myself as a teacher from West Texas.
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I've held a lot of different roles in education, but I think that everything that I approach is still through that lens as a teacher trying to do good work in education.
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in a place like West Texas.
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And so I started my career in a town called Big Lake, Texas, a very small remote town.
00:03:28
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A couple of things to know about Big Lake, Texas.
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There is no lake.
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It's a super, super dry area.
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It's in the middle of the Permian Basin, which is
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one of, if not like the leading producer of energy now in the world.
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And so it was an oil field community, oil and gas.
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A lot of the students and families worked in the oil and gas industry out there.
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Big Lake, Texas for some geographical, to tell you how geographically remote it was at 70 miles from the nearest Walmart or McDonald's.
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And so it was, you know, a very rural, very conservative, politically conservative community.
00:04:06
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And I worked there for five years, not that far from where I grew up in San Angelo, Texas, which was more of a ranching community.
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I worked there at Reagan County High School.
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It was the only high school in the entire county.
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And then I moved to San Antonio, Texas, where I pursued my doctorate in educational leadership.
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And in that role, I...
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I had a really interesting experience really diving deeply into very different fields.
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One was like participatory action research, which is really grounded in critical pedagogy.
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And then my other role was working as a research assistant in what's now referred to as education, big data.
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So looking at like large groups of quantitative and doing large scale quantitative analysis and
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thinking about efficient systems.
The Appeal of Contentious Topics
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And so these two very different experiences very much shape the way that I think about education and have lifted up many questions for me, as well as I've gone through this journey.
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After that, I worked at an incredibly diverse elementary school in San Antonio for a little bit, public school.
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And then I served eight years at the International School of the Americas, which is an open enrollment
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public school, which I'll talk a little bit more about.
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I've served as an instructional coach in downtown San Antonio at a public school.
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And then, as you mentioned, I currently hold the role as Director of National Faculty for PBL Works, where I get to support our wonderful facilitators out in the field who are doing work to help teachers build project-based learning experiences for their communities.
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So that's kind of a long intro of who I am, but I think that it
00:05:52
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It's important to know that as I talk about why contentious topics are important to me and kind of how it has shaped the way that I think about contentious topics.
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So there's a couple of things about my journey and contentious topics that I want to share.
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One is that I found working across political spheres and schools that have communities that are maybe really far left or far to the right is that across the board,
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students are drawn towards contentious topics because one is they're super complex and students are interested at digging into complexity and they have a tremendous capacity for handling
Challenges in Education: The Efficiency Model
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complexity.
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I think in many ways, a stronger capacity than adults do.
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That's one of the reasons.
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Another reason is that there is a desire to do just important work.
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And these topics are things that are
00:06:47
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affecting their lives right now and are very much affecting the world that they will inherit.
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And so that's an important part of it as well.
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I found that across the board that parents are supportive of anything that builds critical thinking skills in students for the most part.
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I mean, there's a few exceptions, but for the most part,
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Parents really want teachers to build students' capacities to think well.
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They're less interested in teaching students what to think, more interested in supporting students in how to think.
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That's another kind of unifying thing.
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And then the last one I would say is that, and this may not be like a popular opinion, it may not be a universal experience, but in my personal experience, the biggest obstacle for teaching contentious topics to me has always been this efficiency model of education, not necessarily like divisive political rhetoric, because as teachers were so often pushed to move forward, to go fast,
00:07:50
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to push students towards some sort of standardized outcome and to actually build students thinking that there is a right answer on complex questions and to arrive at that answer quickly is something that is good and valued.
Disrupting the Efficiency Model
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I wanted to use teaching contentious topics to disrupt what I see as like a really pervasive and insidious problem in education where there's just not much room for allowing for uncertainty, allowing students to be okay with not knowing the answer to a difficult question.
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And because people...
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grasp to contentious topics in really strong ways, I thought that this was the perfect place to push against that efficiency model and allow for more space of ambiguity, more space of exploration.
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These topics, like as I'll talk about them more and more,
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My intention behind this is never to have students land on a particular understanding.
Innovative Teaching at the International School of the Americas
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Sometimes we finish a year of study on a unit, and I don't even know where students stand on it.
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But I do know that they have deepened and expanded their capacity to think about a complex question in really meaningful ways.
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And they've been stretched in thinking about how people come to a topic based on their own positionality, their own experience.
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Those are some of the reasons that it was important to me.
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The other thing, just real quick, was that I didn't spend a lot of my time teaching contentious topics as a teacher.
00:09:19
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Most of the time I was teaching things like the Han Dynasty or early in my career, like the Lord of the Flies or whatever, right?
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Like that's what I was doing.
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And this probably spent, was like, if you add it all up, I don't know, between one to 5% of my time was in contentious topics, but always the most valuable experiences for students were when we dug into these things of meaning and
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where we carved, somehow carved out space to do this.
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And for me as a teacher, it was the most important, like growing thing for me to hear and listen to students' experiences around these and learn alongside them.
00:09:52
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And it's so powerful just to hear you recount the importance of teaching contentious topics and sort of remarkable too to hear how you're saying, even though it may not be an intentional outcome of the systems of efficiency, it's still where the system of efficiency pushes people towards certain answers or certain ways of thinking or certain pedagogies within the realm of contentious topics or so-called divisive topics that
00:10:20
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tend more towards one-off debates as opposed to like deep and meaningful discourse that brings in a lot of perspectives.
00:10:28
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And so it's really interesting to hear you say that one of the biggest motivations was not necessarily, it wasn't an explicit political agenda so much as it was disrupting those efficiency measures that push us into ways that are counterintuitive and counterfactual to the goals of education, which is to broaden our perspectives and experiences.
00:10:48
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Can I add something real quick?
00:10:51
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Of course.
Integrating Inquiry-Based Models
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with like very little authentic investigation, might that be a symptom of this larger system that we have?
00:11:13
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And so I really want to push against those things in order to hopefully explore different options to build people capacity just to sit with uncertainty a little bit longer as they explore these topics.
00:11:29
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Yeah, there's just so much to be said about an environment today, be it media or political discourse or other things that privileges and values the quick answer.
00:11:40
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If you get on national television, you say, I don't know, or I'm not the right person to ask about this.
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Talk to somebody who's closer to the issue in their experiences or somebody who has a more nuanced perspective.
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Well, they're not going to get airtime again.
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So it's sort of a self-selection process of certainty begets certainty and
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Ultimately, it's just sort of a hollow facsimile of all of those things because you're not actually arriving at certain answers.
00:12:05
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You're just projection or the performance of those things when really meaning and understanding comes through recognizing your own uncertainty and grappling with different perspectives around those same issues.
00:12:18
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I wonder if you could speak to, because I think people here at the top that, you know, you're the director of national faculty for PBL works.
00:12:24
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And, you know, you've said how these experiences teaching contentious topics made up 1% of your teaching experience.
00:12:31
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Maybe they'd think that you taught at an inquiry-based school or a PBL model or something like that.
00:12:36
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But that is absolutely not the case, right?
00:12:38
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You were inserting these wonderful inquiry models in between the periods of the school day in a really interesting way.
00:12:45
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I was wondering,
00:12:46
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If you could speak to that for learners or for listeners.
00:12:50
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Yeah, for sure.
00:12:51
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That's such an important thing to lift up.
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I did teach, like I did a lot of these projects at a wonderful school.
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And I want to name that.
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It was the International School of the Americas Public School of Choice in a large Texas district.
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But this school was one of the flagship schools for the International Study School Network.
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And so we were...
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built on this foundation of global competence.
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And we had this graduate portfolio and profile that were built around ideas that included investigating the world and recognizing and weighing perspectives
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Each grade level took a trip outside of state, like the juniors would go along the civil rights trail.
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We had the largest student run model United Nations in the country.
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So there were a lot of like really, really innovative things happening at the school.
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But at the same time, you know, we were a public school in Texas.
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We were a school within a school.
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We had a 50-minute bell schedule.
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Everybody took certain classes.
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At our school, every student took AP World History, which was the course that I taught at ISA.
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We had report cards.
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We had grades.
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At that time, we had class ranking.
00:14:11
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We all took the state standardized test.
00:14:13
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And so...
00:14:16
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It was a little bit of a blend, right?
00:14:17
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Like to do this, but in these, these like deep dives and contentious topics, we had to hold them outside of the regular school day, right?
00:14:28
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Like I had principals that were like, Hey, we can find a place to, to, to weave this into the schedule of super supportive.
00:14:35
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But the kids didn't, they weren't willing, even though they wanted to study it more than anything, they weren't willing to give up an opportunity to take another AP course because the AP course was what was gonna give them the grade point average that would be a little higher.
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There was like a multiplier effect on the grade point average.
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And so although they would much rather take my Bordelary course than my AP World History course or whatever, they had to take
00:15:02
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It was so much pressure to be in this larger machinery, in this competitive standardized machinery that disallowed for this opportunity
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for what they really wanted.
Inquiries Inspired by Current Events
00:15:17
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What I really wanted was this deeper inquiry and something that was highly relevant.
00:15:21
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And so we ended up having these courses before school, during lunch.
00:15:26
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So people would rush to the classroom to talk about like the Monroe Doctrine with the red cafeteria tray in hand, right, to do this.
00:15:36
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And we only met, you know, for these courses, we only met once every two weeks
00:15:42
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And we would maybe have like one field trip or two trips throughout the year.
00:15:47
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So we spent a lot more time in my AP World History class with the students than we did in these specialized classes.
00:15:54
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But I would argue, and I think the students would say the same, and they would probably be more adamant about it than I am, that these peripheral experiences to the school day were far more important, far more valuable than they were having in my mainstream classroom.
00:16:13
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And we'll talk more, I think, about the student reflections and the testimonials of those experiences.
00:16:18
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I think for listeners approaching contentious topics, thinking in the context of Texas and the structure of how you structure that inquiry that you just spoke to here,
00:16:30
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You were really only able to pick four topics, I think, over the four years that you ran for these year long inquiries.
00:16:37
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And it's not like you started off with the the least contentious topic in the book.
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Right.
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Capital punishment in Texas, followed by the land trilogy.
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Right.
00:16:49
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With Borderland.
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oil land and school land, I think in that order.
00:16:54
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Some of the most, you call them third rails, hot buttons or whatever that imaginable in these contexts.
00:17:01
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So I'm super curious to hear from you then just about that model.
00:17:07
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Whereas the Borderland Project is a cornerstone of that narrative, it's an iteration of that inquiry model that you explored first with capital punishment in Texas and then improved upon and iterated upon for oil land and school land as variations on that theme.
00:17:24
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Can you speak to how that idea and that model and those themes that you connected to it originated and how those developed over time?
00:17:33
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On capital punishment in Texas and all of these ideas, right?
The Capital Punishment Project
00:17:38
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I want to be clear that we didn't enter with some clear framework or foundation about how we wanted to approach it.
00:17:44
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It was very much trial and error.
00:17:46
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And the biggest influencers in creating this
00:17:51
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model that I wrote about in the book were students, like just listening to students and what was working for them, observing how they were engaging in these conversations.
00:18:01
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So I want to start with that.
00:18:03
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I want to talk too about like
00:18:06
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none of these things were done by me as a alone.
00:18:09
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They were all, everything that, anything that I've ever done with value as a teacher has been highly collaborative.
00:18:15
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And so I drew upon my friends in the art community.
00:18:20
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Really all of these topics have stemmed from what was something that was really important in our, like the news cycle, what were students caring about?
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And also,
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Who do these art?
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I worked with a lot of artists and was fortunate to be connected to an art community.
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What were they also interested in doing work as professional artists?
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And all these artists who I worked with in each of these projects, like Mark Minjabar, who I worked with in Capital Punishment in Texas, he said something along the lines that,
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You know, whenever I have a question, I find it best to pursue it in collaboration with others.
00:18:58
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And he was particularly interested in working with students to see their perspectives and also just because of the nimbleness of teenagers' thinkings on these issues and their deep curiosity.
00:19:10
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And so...
00:19:12
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It stemmed from a blend of hot topics, student interest, and who are these outside professionals that we could bring in to partner.
00:19:21
Speaker
You mentioned in the book that one of the things that drew you to the question of capital punishment was the fact that somebody had been executed in Texas by lethal injection, I think, for the first time since...
00:19:33
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Correct me if I'm wrong, Texas maybe had like changed death penalty laws and somebody had just recently been executed via that.
00:19:41
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So it was fresh in the headlines, a fresh topic or I guess a wound, you know, that needed to be explored in the politic there.
00:19:51
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Yeah, it was actually like most of this work was focused on Charlie Brooks Jr., who was the first man to be killed by lethal injection after the death penalty was reinstated.
00:20:06
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And then he was the first African-American to be executed anywhere in the United States in the post-Greg era, which was like after this reinstatement of
00:20:15
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of capital punishment.
00:20:17
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And so my, this, he was, he was executed in 1982.
00:20:21
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So it was a long, it was, it was a while ago, but Mark had been in close conversation with his sons and Mark had also had like these really interested conversations with like sister, Mary Prejean, who was a lead advocate for abolishing the death penalty.
00:20:38
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And Mark had a kind of a traumatic and fascinating experience of interrupting a, a,
00:20:45
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a mob lynching in a, in a place in South America that still was practicing some vigilante justice.
00:20:51
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And so he was, was just intensely interested in a lot of the questions about capital punishment and living in a state, right.
00:20:59
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Where his taxpayer,
00:21:00
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dollars will in part fund capital punishment.
00:21:04
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And so, but he came to the class with like such a stance of, of wonder, but also a stance or like a rich archive of information.
00:21:19
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And so he had letters from the family that Charlie Brooks had sent back to his sons.
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We listened to court cases.
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We visited archives at the University of Texas around capital punishment.
Transformative Impact on Students
00:21:36
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I think that, you know, Mark was a big part of showing me early on, like, how as a teacher, like the tenor of these classes was much different than sometimes happened in my AP World History class.
00:21:52
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And so...
00:21:53
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Although I'd worked with many artists before, it was one of the first times in the class where I saw how Mark centered art practices in our inquiry into this incredibly emotionally complex issue.
00:22:11
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And
00:22:12
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It was just vastly different than what I saw in class when I tried to sometimes present a contentious topic and students were like ready to jump to a conclusion, ready to debate.
00:22:21
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They were ready to take a stand, right?
00:22:24
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To write an essay, to make a presentation, right?
00:22:27
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But Mark, instead, we were just drawing, right?
00:22:30
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Or we were just like, I mean, we did this thing called jamming where we were writing on the drawing and writing on the court transcripts.
00:22:40
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There was no...
00:22:43
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no push to come to a quick conclusion about anything.
00:22:46
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It was using art as a way to, to allow us to stay in that space of curiosity without coming with a concrete answer.
00:22:54
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And so I think like that was a huge moment for me to, to see how he was weaving that in and, and,
00:23:01
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I don't consider myself an artist, but I could engage in those practices, right?
00:23:06
Speaker
Like he and a lot of the art that he does and that a lot of the folks I've worked with who are in this like called the social practice art world or contemporary art world is about like sparking, sparking dialogue and conversation and using art.
00:23:22
Speaker
to just deepen our inquiry and ask more questions.
00:23:25
Speaker
There's such an interesting through line from what we were talking about earlier about efficiency and then to bring it back to art and situate that within the context of a student performance in school, which so often demands some sort of convergent thinking on some idea, right?
00:23:42
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Where regardless of thinking about things, you have to defend with evidence some sort of proposition.
00:23:48
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Yeah.
00:23:49
Speaker
And maybe it's contentious or maybe it's related to the content of a course, but the artistic processes that you're describing really lead to divergent thinking, right?
00:23:59
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An expansion rather than a contraction of possibility and performance and really lead students to perhaps ask more questions at the end of the learning and
00:24:10
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Then have answers in the part of that.
00:24:13
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And yeah, I love the activity that you describe of the jamming on the actual court transcripts, how you all had read that there, the artistic expression and drawing at some point, maybe it was your artist friend or someone made this wonderful dialogue table.
00:24:27
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where people could sit at this and it had questions related to capital punishment and things that you could engage with dialogue and not necessarily have answers about.
00:24:37
Speaker
And then I think using the capital punishment in Texas, both as
00:24:43
Speaker
a model for teaching contentious topics, but then as your own personal model for how you iterated upon that in the subsequent years.
00:24:51
Speaker
Let's talk about the land trilogy here then.
00:24:54
Speaker
And what question was the focus of exploring borderlands and the meaningful context?
00:25:01
Speaker
How did that get into oil land?
00:25:03
Speaker
And then finally to look inward at the model of school?
00:25:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:08
Speaker
So one thing I'll say kind of as a bridge towards from Capital Punishment into the land trilogy, it was this really important idea of centering art, but moving away from an idea of art that we sometimes see as a genre in art education, right?
Exploring Borders: The Borderland Project
00:25:24
Speaker
Like art education is sometimes its own genre, which is about like producing a product that is building on an example and who can ever do that best product wins, right?
00:25:35
Speaker
Has the rubric chakra.
00:25:37
Speaker
with all the skills you need to show as you're going through this.
00:25:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:41
Speaker
And so I think that one of the ways that Mark and Jason and a lot of people I've worked with pushed my thinking was this idea that we're not interested necessarily as a product, as itself, like people creating some sort of product.
00:25:54
Speaker
It's really about processing information and using art
00:25:57
Speaker
as a way to spark more questions for learners themselves, but also for the broader community.
00:26:02
Speaker
And so moving away from a prescribed kind of top-down approach to art instruction to something really far more in like the contemporary art space.
00:26:11
Speaker
And so there's that.
00:26:13
Speaker
But moving to the work that we did with Borderlands, Oillands, and Schoolland, and all of these courses were very much influenced with the
00:26:25
Speaker
by my friend and artist, Jason Reed, who I've known for years and we've worked together with this organization called Borderland Collective for many years.
00:26:33
Speaker
We used a lot of the centering of the same art practices that Mark and I had used, but we started making some adjustments.
00:26:41
Speaker
And one adjustment that we did was really wrap the project around a central question.
00:26:46
Speaker
So for Borderland, our question was, what is the purpose of the border and what has shaped your answer to that question?
00:26:53
Speaker
And
00:26:54
Speaker
In capital punishment, we...
00:26:56
Speaker
spoke with a lot of different perspectives of people who hold different perspectives.
00:27:00
Speaker
But in Borderland and Oilland, we went full throttle with that.
00:27:04
Speaker
In Borderland, we asked the question, what is the purpose of a border?
00:27:10
Speaker
And what has shaped your answer to that question to Border Patrol agents at the border?
00:27:16
Speaker
We went to the border and we saw the border at Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, which at the time was one of the few places without a border wall in this region of Texas.
00:27:26
Speaker
And we saw the border just as a tranquil river with butterflies floating around and migratory birds.
00:27:34
Speaker
Is that the cover of the book?
00:27:35
Speaker
That is the cover of the book.
00:27:37
Speaker
This situates it for the reader as well.
00:27:39
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:40
Speaker
That was a picture taken by a student, Li Huang, who was in the class.
00:27:45
Speaker
And so that was, yeah, that was that peaceful river and thinking about like,
00:27:49
Speaker
wow, the border can look like this.
00:27:51
Speaker
And then two miles or a few miles down the river, we took the bus.
00:27:55
Speaker
We always had amazing bus drivers when we took these trips.
00:27:58
Speaker
They were like,
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, whatever, we'll do it.
00:28:01
Speaker
We found out that there was a militarized outpost close to this.
00:28:05
Speaker
And we went there and we went from this tranquil river to seeing a heavily armed, guarded, like two-story fence and gate that was there with Humvees and all kinds of machine guns and everything.
00:28:17
Speaker
And so it's like, what is the purpose of the border there?
00:28:20
Speaker
And you're thinking about it.
00:28:21
Speaker
We've
00:28:22
Speaker
Worked at the Sacred Heart Respite Center, which was run by Sister Norma, who provides aid for many years, has provided aid to asylum seekers in the area.
00:28:33
Speaker
So we met some asylum seekers and made some soup.
00:28:36
Speaker
We sorted clothes and help people get ready for the next part of their journey.
00:28:41
Speaker
We spoke with Eddie Canales from the South Texas Human Rights Center.
00:28:47
Speaker
And Eddie, for many years, he passed away this past year, but an incredibly dedicated person who for years put out water barrels in this part of Texas.
00:28:59
Speaker
That was one of the most dangerous crossings in the United States where people from Mexico were traveling in from Mexico were trying to avoid a border patrol
00:29:09
Speaker
checkpoint and would die from dehydration in this large area of the brush country of South Texas.
00:29:15
Speaker
So, I mean, we talked with global ambassadors who were visiting San Antonio on a totally different thing, but they were experiencing immigration in a different way due to the Syrian refugee crisis around the same time.
00:29:28
Speaker
I mean, just person after person after person and just trying to get like, we were trying to understand the complexity of a simple, seemingly simple question, right?
00:29:40
Speaker
And we asked this question over and over and over to people, to ourselves from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
00:29:47
Speaker
And the goal of the class, really, if it was anything, was to see how our answers were shifting and changing over time and becoming more complex and
Long-Lasting Influence of Inquiry Projects
00:29:55
Speaker
nuanced.
00:29:55
Speaker
It wasn't about like you have a right or wrong question or yours is different than this person.
00:30:00
Speaker
It wasn't about a stance, right?
00:30:01
Speaker
It was about just deepening understanding about this very complex topic.
00:30:07
Speaker
Shifting to that concept then of deepening and problematizing, complicating student understandings and reflections, one of the coolest parts of the book that I found is not just the inclusion of
00:30:23
Speaker
student reflections from journals and things that they had kept at the time, but also you had reached out to students who, you know, since graduated were out in the world, some of them working in a lot of these capacities in and around Texas too, but ask them about the impact of these experiences, especially as it relates to Borderlands.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I'll maybe just read one or two of these so people can get a sense of the impact here.
00:30:47
Speaker
And this to me
00:30:49
Speaker
As I was reading this, too, thinking about the context of efficiency in school measurement, and I kept saying, where is this valued in our measurements of school success and achievement and everything else?
00:31:02
Speaker
Right.
00:31:02
Speaker
Like it's one thing to take a dipstick of a test score or something at a certain time, entirely other one to reach out years later and hear from students about the things that impacted them.
00:31:12
Speaker
One of the students says,
00:31:33
Speaker
activism and drive to create space for intersectional education through creative expression.
00:31:39
Speaker
There's no doubt in Ellie's response here that she's channeling a little bit of Ryan and that experience.
00:31:46
Speaker
I'll read another one.
00:31:48
Speaker
I'm not cherry picking.
00:31:49
Speaker
I'm just picking a random page in the book and trying to
00:31:52
Speaker
trying to find one.
00:31:53
Speaker
This is great too.
00:31:54
Speaker
When we traveled as a class to McAllen, Texas, the border as a concept suddenly became quite real and personal.
00:32:00
Speaker
The border had names, faces, and a story to tell.
00:32:03
Speaker
The headlines flashed on my TV at home became tangible and human.
00:32:07
Speaker
The time we spent at the Catholic Respite Center in McAllen and the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge breathed life into the CNN updates that pop up on my phone.
00:32:16
Speaker
I could no longer sit idly by.
00:32:18
Speaker
I wanted a better, happy, and fair future for no...
00:32:21
Speaker
The boy I worked with at the Catholic Respite Center and the thousands of other migrant children like him.
00:32:26
Speaker
I now work as a legal assistant for the races children's program in Austin.
00:32:31
Speaker
A lot has changed since the Borderland course, but I'm happy to say that the core values Borderland taught me remain very much relevant.
00:32:38
Speaker
I continue to greet my community and current events with a curious mind and a driven heart.
00:32:43
Speaker
I continue to seek out and uplift humanity in the face of rigid immigration policies and callous indifferent towards human rights issues.
00:32:51
Speaker
I continue to ask better of myself and those around me.
00:32:53
Speaker
I'm committed.
00:32:54
Speaker
I'm passionate.
00:32:54
Speaker
I have borderland to thank.
00:32:57
Speaker
What a testament to the power of this.
00:32:59
Speaker
Is this what you had expected when you reached out to students?
Impact of a Grade-Free Environment
00:33:05
Speaker
No.
00:33:05
Speaker
What surprised you when Paige and Ellie and Noah and Daniela reached back out all these years later?
00:33:13
Speaker
you know, I was just supremely moved by, by what they shared about the influence.
00:33:20
Speaker
And, and I'll make a note.
00:33:22
Speaker
Nobody's saying that about my other classes.
00:33:25
Speaker
So, I mean, like, so it's like, it's, it really is like,
00:33:29
Speaker
the i mean that's what i wanted this book to be about is like the pedagogical imperatives um really can just redefine a relationship with with students between students and teachers with students in the world and so pedagogy the pedagogical foundations of an experience are just so important so i think like like i was always moved by these students right like and that they move me honestly like the
00:33:55
Speaker
if you want me to be fully transparent, like they moved me to do these classes, right?
00:33:59
Speaker
Like, because it was their curiosity there and their, um,
00:34:04
Speaker
their goodness, right?
00:34:05
Speaker
That like, I wanted to just provide spaces for them to more fully become the people who they already were.
00:34:12
Speaker
And so I think like, that was a big part of it.
00:34:16
Speaker
But I do think that you asked what surprised me.
00:34:19
Speaker
I think what surprised me was not that it was a meaningful experience.
00:34:24
Speaker
I had a sense right at the end that it was a meaningful experience.
00:34:28
Speaker
But
00:34:29
Speaker
that how many of them are doing things that are directly connected to this one topic that we probably spent, like, I don't know, not that long.
00:34:40
Speaker
I don't even know how many hours, but not that many hours on it.
00:34:43
Speaker
I think some people entered the course because they were already interested in these topics, but it certainly, like, it's evident if you look at these quotes and where people are now that it did have an impact on some career trajectory for sure.
00:34:58
Speaker
And I think it's such a testament to that approach to contentious topics, not that students left feeling like they knew the right answer or they felt like they could better engage in a political debate or whatever.
00:35:11
Speaker
But the fact then that their experiences with Borderland in particular activated them to get involved in the issue.
00:35:21
Speaker
Regardless of what angle or what lane that they pick to get involved with that, it really activated something in themselves at the level of purpose and meaning to say, well, this is not something, you heard it in that last testimonial, this is not something I can ignore.
00:35:37
Speaker
I know the people that are impacted by the headlines that pop up on my phone notifications.
00:35:42
Speaker
I know
00:35:44
Speaker
Now that I know I can't help but act in the world.
00:35:46
Speaker
And that to me, I think, is just such a testament to this kind of education that, again, you're saying was one to five percent of the total time teaching and not necessarily a component of the other coursework that they were taking.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:36:04
Speaker
This was a course, I don't know if you'd call it a course, this was an inquiry that occurred sort of as an extracurricular club to explore these issues.
00:36:13
Speaker
And given the quality and depth of student experiences and reflections that we're referring to then, how did you put a grade on this?
00:36:21
Speaker
Or how did kids know that they were learning and what they were learning if you weren't grading the things that they were doing?
00:36:27
Speaker
How did you approach that?
00:36:28
Speaker
Everybody got 100.
00:36:32
Speaker
So that means that you gave them 100 and then they just didn't show up and try and they didn't care anymore?
00:36:38
Speaker
Right.
00:36:39
Speaker
Yeah, they didn't.
00:36:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:40
Speaker
No, I actually... That's what I've heard this happened.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's what happened, right?
00:36:43
Speaker
I mean, I will say, and I can talk about this a little bit more.
00:36:47
Speaker
Like, I think that if there's one learning that I would go back and do differently, I would have a clearer...
00:36:54
Speaker
imperative to have stronger assessment.
00:36:58
Speaker
At that point in my career, I hadn't fully decoupled the idea of assessment from grades or assessment from like a coercive measure.
00:37:07
Speaker
I do believe that assessment is super, it's essential, right?
00:37:11
Speaker
And it's like super powerful to help people move along the path towards learning.
00:37:17
Speaker
But
00:37:18
Speaker
assessment should be something that's collaborative and side by side and focused on important goals and less worried about like, I had always, you know, as a student myself, the only reason I did many things was because there was a grade for it, right?
00:37:32
Speaker
It was a coercive measure.
00:37:34
Speaker
I was recently just a couple of weeks ago, I've been reconnecting with some of the folks in this class and I was having a conversation with several of the students.
00:37:41
Speaker
And one of the students said,
00:37:43
Speaker
you know, not having a grade, that was the first time in my life I'd ever done academic work that wasn't graded.
Community and Collaboration in Inquiry Projects
00:37:51
Speaker
And you know what?
00:37:52
Speaker
It was the first time in my life where I ever felt free to really ask critical questions because I'd always worried about, I need to ask a question that's going to lead me to what the teacher wants, right?
00:38:09
Speaker
Like, or to what the test wants or whatever, but it was really about the teacher.
00:38:13
Speaker
Like,
00:38:14
Speaker
she had been so concerned about like, well, this is what this school thing is all about is getting the grade.
00:38:21
Speaker
And she said that it opened up the possibility to ask questions that
00:38:27
Speaker
without even thinking about what was the appropriate question to ask or the right question to ask or what was going to lead to something.
00:38:33
Speaker
And so I thought that was a super powerful comment.
00:38:38
Speaker
The other thing about like when we're talking about teaching contentious topics and we're moving away from an efficiency model,
00:38:46
Speaker
If people are worried about what a teacher wants, this isn't going to be effective.
00:38:51
Speaker
It's not about trying to read the teacher's mind.
00:38:54
Speaker
And I'll say like the worst way to do any of these courses is trying to move students towards your own political viewpoint on a genuinely complex topic.
00:39:05
Speaker
And so grades muddle all of that.
00:39:08
Speaker
I think that you don't have to move away from grades all the time, but in situations like this and contentious topics, we're really trying to get people to be okay with not knowing.
00:39:17
Speaker
and be uncertain for a little bit, grades are kind of counter, run counter to that.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, because what would it mean to say, oh, I've participated in this process.
00:39:27
Speaker
I've opened my mind to this dialogue.
00:39:29
Speaker
What do you mean I got a C?
00:39:32
Speaker
What'd you take off points for?
00:39:33
Speaker
Then they're going to be doubting, you know, that this process is beneficial and effective, right?
00:39:37
Speaker
The
00:39:38
Speaker
Again, recognizing how vital feedback loops and assessment and reflection play a role in that, but also the actual harm that grades can cause to a safe learning environment where you're supposed to be exploring and asking questions.
00:39:54
Speaker
the quote unquote wrong question, or you're supposed to be proposing answers that are going to be disagreeable, you know, to some people to probe and prod, right?
00:40:02
Speaker
How does that fit into the topic here?
00:40:04
Speaker
Right.
00:40:05
Speaker
It stifles that emotional and intellectual safety if they're going to be judged and evaluated and receive a low grade for, for that experience.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:14
Speaker
Thanks for bringing that up because it is,
00:40:18
Speaker
That's another thing about these courses is they were really communal experiences and that it was all about relationships and building something together.
00:40:27
Speaker
Although it was like we all had different perspectives, we were all moving towards a final presentation of our learning and learning.
00:40:35
Speaker
And Mark, again, and Jason, they had many ways that they were able to combine different perspectives into beautiful art.
00:40:44
Speaker
Like Mark had this manifesto, which he gave the students prompts at the end of the year, where it was like, I am for a border that dot, dot, dot.
00:40:53
Speaker
And the students would fill out that STEM.
00:40:55
Speaker
And in their, their answering of that, that STEM, they
00:41:01
Speaker
you could begin to see that everybody had different perspectives, but we also had like this common learning experience.
00:41:09
Speaker
I can read a couple of those.
00:41:11
Speaker
For listeners, it was all compiled into this one book for basically public display.
00:41:18
Speaker
And I think what a cool recognition of the collaborative nature of this, that this is the culminating exercise, not our answers to test questions, but
00:41:28
Speaker
here is the culmination, I suppose, of all of our questions and our process we asked, we contributed to this topic together.
00:41:37
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:41:38
Speaker
And like on this manifesto, some students' answers were, and they all stood up, right, in class at the end.
00:41:46
Speaker
And
00:41:47
Speaker
said, I am for a border that like, and so one student said, I am for a border that treats people on both sides as human.
00:41:53
Speaker
Another student rose up and says, I am for a border that rips a closed door off its hinges.
00:41:58
Speaker
And another claimed, I am for a border, which is what, who, that remembers my grand, my grandmother.
00:42:06
Speaker
And so he
00:42:07
Speaker
It was a collaborative thing and it felt so different.
00:42:10
Speaker
It almost felt to me like akin to being on a sports team or being in band where it's like we're in this thing together.
00:42:19
Speaker
You don't grade your basketball team, right?
00:42:21
Speaker
You don't grade the band.
00:42:24
Speaker
I mean, maybe you do, but that's not what drives those experiences, right?
00:42:28
Speaker
It's being part of a community.
00:42:31
Speaker
It's about doing something that's important.
00:42:33
Speaker
I also say like not every student was, it wasn't just like magic.
00:42:37
Speaker
There were students who I had to encourage to attend at first and had to like track some people down until things got rolling.
00:42:46
Speaker
And so it's, but like as the experience has unfolded and people kind of felt like, oh, this is different than your other class, Mr. Sprott.
00:42:56
Speaker
Like I can do this thing, right?
00:42:59
Speaker
Like it became, it did feel like a team.
00:43:04
Speaker
And I think, too, there's a level of like unlearning or deprogramming that has to happen for students, too.
00:43:09
Speaker
Right.
00:43:10
Speaker
They can't think about experiences in school except through oftentimes the lens of grades and grading and testing.
00:43:16
Speaker
And so when you say, well, this space isn't going to have those things, there's a lot of risk involved for kids in that.
00:43:22
Speaker
It's a big it's a big shift to move from.
00:43:25
Speaker
a largely extrinsic driven system to one that's filled with meaning and purpose.
00:43:30
Speaker
And you have to bring to the issue into this class your whole person.
00:43:34
Speaker
You don't just get to dip a toe in and take the test and disconnect.
00:43:38
Speaker
And thankfully, I was in a place where this wasn't the only experience that they were having like that.
00:43:43
Speaker
it was like a place that valued learning over coercion as a whole.
00:43:47
Speaker
And so most students had experiences like that.
00:43:50
Speaker
So it wasn't like a totally unfamiliar feeling, but it was for me, it was, it was pretty new.
00:43:56
Speaker
The question that we so often get as educators and classroom teachers get, right.
00:44:00
Speaker
Is how do you know that kids are learning, right.
00:44:01
Speaker
If you're not measuring and assessing perhaps in a particular way or applying grades or whatever.
00:44:07
Speaker
And I think
00:44:08
Speaker
The antidote to that is exactly what you've provided here through these student journals, the reflections, the ones coming from, I don't know, you know, almost 10 years on here in preparation for
00:44:19
Speaker
as you wrote the book, and the products, you know, the collaborative products that they created at the end here too.
00:44:25
Speaker
I mean, you could hand that to anybody, send them through the art gallery, right?
00:44:29
Speaker
You read the manifesto, right?
00:44:30
Speaker
You look at the art that the kids created and will you tell me, did they learn something, right?
00:44:35
Speaker
You read in their own words.
00:44:37
Speaker
And that to me is so much more powerful.
00:44:39
Speaker
It's self-evident.
00:44:39
Speaker
It makes the learning self-evident on the page compared to having to have an interpreter guide you between, okay, what differentiates an 87 between an 88?
Experiential Learning vs Traditional Classes
00:44:49
Speaker
Did that kid learn 1% more of the content than the other kid?
00:44:53
Speaker
We got to weigh them on the same scale.
00:44:54
Speaker
Like that's not, we know that's not how learning works, but we try to pretend that's the objective way of doing it in school.
00:45:00
Speaker
And it really does.
00:45:01
Speaker
I mean, especially like at the high school level, it can pit students against one another, right?
00:45:05
Speaker
Like, and this class was different in that way, I think.
00:45:11
Speaker
In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance.
00:45:19
Speaker
But there are no superheroes here and no simple answers to be found.
00:45:23
Speaker
Only the quest for connection.
00:45:26
Speaker
In 2025, we are responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue, bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together.
00:45:48
Speaker
What if, instead of viewing the fringes as an educational afterthought, we treated them as a blueprint for what schools could become?
00:45:56
Speaker
In our opening flipped keynote, Dr. Sarah Fine will explore what can be learned from spaces that are often seen as peripheral to the core purposes of school.
00:46:04
Speaker
Elective courses, career and technical education pathways, alternative education programs, and extracurricular activities.
00:46:12
Speaker
These spaces carry powerful lessons about how to design for authentic relationships and deeper learning.
00:46:19
Speaker
And we are taking our flipped keynote model one step further by adding fireside chats, moderated panel discussions, followed by audience Q&A.
00:46:27
Speaker
Shanae Bond, Maria Monroe-Schuster, Luckett Keish, and Will Richardson will lead us in dialogue about the challenges facing education today and how we can collectively address them in 2025 and beyond.
00:46:41
Speaker
Audrey Waters, Shayna V. White, V. Dow, and Charles Logan will help us answer what, if anything, should be the relationship of AI and edtech to education.
00:46:51
Speaker
We'll also be hosting a student panel of young people from Great Plains Action Society, an Indigenous-led grassroots organization advocating for Indigenous rights, to speak to their experiences and perspectives as Indigenous youth today.
00:47:05
Speaker
And instead of week-long learning tracks as we've had in the past, we are including two-hour daily workshops with expert practitioners.
00:47:13
Speaker
Nawal Karuni will help participants understand and connect family practices to curriculum to create deeper, more authentic caregiver collaborations.
00:47:22
Speaker
Dr. Emma McMain reimagines SEL as open dialogue, not a checklist, connecting social and emotional learning to culture and society.
00:47:32
Speaker
Angela Stockman invites participants to explore how pedagogical documentation can serve as an act of stewardship, honoring, preserving, and nurturing rich narratives about learners and learning.
00:47:44
Speaker
And we'll continue to use our Discord as a hub for camaraderie, community, and to keep the conversation going beyond the live events.
00:47:51
Speaker
Our virtual conference to restore humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd.
00:47:57
Speaker
To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we've cut the ticket price to just 50 bucks.
00:48:03
Speaker
You can learn more about conference to restore humanity and register on our website at human restoration project.org slash conference.
00:48:11
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining us on our quest for connection.
00:48:14
Speaker
As we continue the journey to restore humanity to education together.
00:48:21
Speaker
For listeners, this might sound real wishy-washy, and that's maybe intimidating.
00:48:29
Speaker
I think the book provides a little bit more of like, this is a process, right?
00:48:35
Speaker
It's not like a pedagogical practice that you can say, oh, this is like a do now, right?
00:48:40
Speaker
Or you could do this immediately.
00:48:42
Speaker
You
00:48:42
Speaker
have in the book, these little kind of recipe, almost guides in here that say, this is a thing that can connect to this value or this idea.
00:48:50
Speaker
But all of those practices are rooted in these five tenets that guided every single project.
00:48:58
Speaker
And I'm curious about two things.
00:49:00
Speaker
First, if you could just read those so listeners know.
00:49:04
Speaker
And then
00:49:05
Speaker
describe, were those intentional at the beginning, a foundation that you built on, or were those values that emerged as a result of the inquiry that you planned and participated in with students?
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:22
Speaker
Thank you for that question.
00:49:23
Speaker
I think that like,
00:49:24
Speaker
we did include some of these, I'll say this before we even begin, like we, we, we included some of these intentionally, but a lot of it had to do upon reflection about like, what was it that really made this experience effective?
00:49:38
Speaker
And so it was a little bit like a, a qualitative analysis of, of these years of experience in there and drawing out what,
00:49:45
Speaker
what was really the difference between these.
00:49:47
Speaker
So the first tenet is a question, it's
Five Tenets for Teaching Contentious Topics
00:49:50
Speaker
called a question to open hearts and minds.
00:49:52
Speaker
And so the idea is that you're asking a question that anybody with a little bit of knowledge on this topic has an entry point into.
00:50:01
Speaker
So what is the purpose of a border, right?
00:50:03
Speaker
That's, you can enter there.
00:50:05
Speaker
There's another part of this that's intentionally not
00:50:09
Speaker
trying to bring in binary based answers, right?
00:50:12
Speaker
Like it's either this or that.
00:50:14
Speaker
Another is it's probing underlying assumptions.
00:50:18
Speaker
These questions should probe some underlying assumptions.
00:50:20
Speaker
So it's like, if you said, how can we improve immigration policy, right?
00:50:26
Speaker
That's a great question for a particular project.
00:50:29
Speaker
But I think if you're talking about something that's super, super contentious and will elicit deep emotions of students,
00:50:38
Speaker
I want people to kind of like free themselves from having to go to like some sort of action oriented project at first.
00:50:45
Speaker
Right.
00:50:45
Speaker
Let students dive deeply in this.
00:50:48
Speaker
And so what is the purpose of the border is different than how can we improve immigration policy?
00:50:52
Speaker
Because what is the purpose of the border even questions the notion of borders?
00:50:56
Speaker
Right.
00:50:56
Speaker
The other question doesn't.
00:50:58
Speaker
It assumes that they are natural.
00:50:59
Speaker
It assumes they are real.
00:51:01
Speaker
And so this kind of goes under that a little bit.
00:51:06
Speaker
And then the last part of all of these questions was, and what has shaped your answer to this question?
00:51:10
Speaker
And this is to make it explicit that everybody comes to these questions in different ways.
00:51:16
Speaker
It comes to their answer in a different way.
00:51:18
Speaker
They all have different ones, and that's normal.
00:51:20
Speaker
And guess what?
00:51:21
Speaker
Yours can change as you encounter more information.
00:51:25
Speaker
And it should change throughout the year as you're gathering new perspectives.
00:51:29
Speaker
So that's the first tenet.
00:51:30
Speaker
The second one is art as inquiry.
00:51:32
Speaker
I think we've talked about that a lot.
00:51:33
Speaker
This idea just to center art as a way to not focus so much on the product, but as a way to process these complex issues and maintain that sense of curiosity.
00:51:44
Speaker
The next one is dialogue as action.
00:51:48
Speaker
I believe that by refiguring who speaks and how we speak, it really changes the world, changes how we see the world.
00:51:57
Speaker
It changes how we see one another.
00:52:00
Speaker
And so when we think about dialogue as action, we always would use these protocols for dialogue, which were like almost recipes, as you said, like recipes for conversation that would allow certain amount of time to listen, certain amount of time to talk, just to, um,
00:52:18
Speaker
to have a more equitable platform and a focused platform for conversations instead of debate, right?
00:52:25
Speaker
We want to be clear that let's move away from debate.
00:52:28
Speaker
Debate's a fine activity.
00:52:29
Speaker
But again, if it's something that's really contentious, debate often just pushes people further into their own perceived notion.
00:52:36
Speaker
And even if you're getting people to debate the other side of a topic, it still pushes people to think about the topic in a binary way.
00:52:42
Speaker
It's either this or that instead of like a polychromatic view of these topics, which are not two-sided.
00:52:48
Speaker
Right.
00:52:49
Speaker
They're far more complex than two sides.
00:52:51
Speaker
And so that's that assessment for liberation.
00:52:54
Speaker
We've talked about assessment a little bit earlier, but this idea that it is important to think about what are some.
00:53:02
Speaker
key competencies that students might be building.
00:53:04
Speaker
And as a teacher, how might you walk alongside those students in a collaborative effort to help them build those competencies?
00:53:10
Speaker
And then the last one is mindfulness for mitigation and collective creation.
00:53:17
Speaker
And this is this idea that like these conversations are tough, but students are really resilient too, especially if there is a trauma sensitive foundation for the course.
00:53:29
Speaker
And so I think that
00:53:31
Speaker
a lot of this last tenet about mindful practice is about how do we build a trauma-sensitive foundation so that students can activate their prefrontal cortex to feel support enough, to know how to gain support, know how to breathe, know how to practice this in order to persist in challenging conversations, to persist, to encounter things that might be very challenging to them,
00:54:01
Speaker
and to know that they will be okay and to build the skills to be okay to continue to ask those questions and to move forward and to
00:54:08
Speaker
move towards like what I've heard described as anti-fragility, right?
00:54:12
Speaker
Like to build some, some resistance in that way so that they can yeah, continue with that inquiry.
00:54:21
Speaker
So there's that.
00:54:22
Speaker
And then also like with mindfulness, it's about like slowing down.
00:54:26
Speaker
It's about understanding that knowledge is always shifting instead of thinking and knowledge is always fixed and something that should come down, come from above.
The Vital Role of Inquiry Models
00:54:35
Speaker
And so a lot of the mindfulness work I've, I,
00:54:38
Speaker
It was inspired by Ellen Langer, who is known as the mother of mindfulness, has been a Harvard professor for many years.
00:54:46
Speaker
And this idea that mindfulness is an awareness that perspectives are different, that everybody comes to a situation from their own way of thinking.
00:54:56
Speaker
And mindfulness is an understanding that those things are always shifting and changing and evolving and that things aren't just fixed in the world.
00:55:06
Speaker
when listeners hear the explanation of what's happening, right?
00:55:10
Speaker
It seems like it's sort, it might be without guidance and structure.
00:55:14
Speaker
And I think with the benefit of hindsight, putting in these tenants might help demystify that a little bit, right?
00:55:20
Speaker
Like think of the emergent power of these five tenants kind of working in tandem together, right?
00:55:26
Speaker
Like what does, you know, the value of approaching questions to open hearts and minds in your own context, like,
00:55:35
Speaker
Right.
00:55:51
Speaker
Looking ahead then, I'm super curious, only because I went through a lot of issues teaching so-called divisive topics, as they were called in the state of Iowa, but contentious topics around nationalism, white nationalism, teaching about current events in a real open way, in my opinion.
00:56:12
Speaker
But considering the context of when you taught these four units in the mid-2010s, I know
00:56:19
Speaker
The last several were in the first round of the Trump administration.
00:56:23
Speaker
Do you ever think or speculate about what it would be like in Texas now trying to do that work in 2025?
00:56:28
Speaker
Yeah, I do all the time.
00:56:31
Speaker
And I really appreciate that question.
00:56:34
Speaker
I think that this may be biased, but I believe that this kind of approach was built for this time, right?
00:56:42
Speaker
Like it is made for this time.
00:56:45
Speaker
And not all your listeners were probably in Central and South Texas in 2015 and 2016 when we did the Borderland Project.
00:56:53
Speaker
But this framework was built in a pressure cooker.
00:56:56
Speaker
if that makes sense.
00:56:59
Speaker
In 2015, 2016, I would argue that immigration was a hotter topic in our region than it is today.
00:57:05
Speaker
The year before, 68,000 unaccompanied minors had crossed the border every day in the news.
00:57:11
Speaker
There were stories about asylum seekers.
00:57:13
Speaker
There were stories about overflow of prisons in the region, youth seeking support.
00:57:19
Speaker
And this was
00:57:21
Speaker
during Donald Trump's run up from a fringe candidate to the Republican nominee.
00:57:27
Speaker
And so there was a ton of rhetoric around that.
00:57:30
Speaker
And the national rhetoric that we're hearing around immigration was nothing new from Texas.
00:57:35
Speaker
Even policy approaches where what we're seeing nationally have been bandied about in Texas for a while.
00:57:44
Speaker
And again, this process is not about like getting students to take a stance on an issue.
00:57:49
Speaker
But what I have found is that when students have an opportunity to grapple with complexity in a trauma sensitive foundation, to hear, to be with a diverse group of students, to have frameworks that support an equitable and focused conversation,
00:58:06
Speaker
and that previously marginalized voices are foregrounded into the conversation, right alongside dominant voices in the conversation, students leave with a more compassionate understanding, with a deeper interest in the topic, a more humanized understanding of the topic.
00:58:25
Speaker
And so I do feel like this is actually an approach that I'm not trying to sell the book.
00:58:33
Speaker
I make like a nickel off of the book, right?
00:58:34
Speaker
Like it's a, but...
00:58:36
Speaker
It was made for this moment, made for this time, and could be helpful for people who are trying to think through this.
00:58:43
Speaker
And again, I'll say like the most insidious thing, right?
00:58:46
Speaker
I still don't believe it's the political rhetoric.
00:58:48
Speaker
It's bad, right?
00:58:49
Speaker
It's harsh and it's tough, but it is these broader systems that we have lived with that push us towards quick conclusions and standardized understanding of
00:59:02
Speaker
And that we don't question nearly as much as maybe some of the really painful and harsh rhetoric that we're hearing around us.
Student Engagement and Critical Thinking
00:59:10
Speaker
And I want to tell just like one quick example.
00:59:13
Speaker
Like I've talked with...
00:59:15
Speaker
social justice educators with like a really strong social justice bent.
00:59:20
Speaker
And I've told them that like, yeah, we talked to the border patrol.
00:59:23
Speaker
We've talked with, you know, conservative politicians and their response in some cases has been, why, like, why would you do that?
00:59:30
Speaker
And, and my answer to that is like, how could you not talk with somebody who's arresting people on the border and
00:59:38
Speaker
Later, you know, after the class engaging in the child separation policy and pulling mothers from children, how could you not hear what is motivating those individuals to take those steps?
00:59:51
Speaker
They're an important voice in the conversation.
00:59:55
Speaker
And like, I think that it's essential that we trust students if we've given them the conditions and the skills to think critically, to engage with perspectives that are vastly different than their own.
01:00:07
Speaker
And I'll give an example because when we went to the border and the students spoke with the border patrol, it was a very uncomfortable conversation for me as a teacher.
01:00:19
Speaker
We had met with several Border Patrol agents earlier in the summer as we took some faculty down there.
01:00:23
Speaker
And it was a different conversation.
01:00:24
Speaker
That was like a fascinating conversation where they were talking about the complexities of the work.
01:00:30
Speaker
And what was it like to be raised in the border and to be doing this work and have parents and grandparents from both sides.
01:00:37
Speaker
And it was really interesting.
01:00:39
Speaker
But this conversation that we had with the Border Patrol with the students was much different.
01:00:43
Speaker
It was...
01:00:44
Speaker
like a scared straight presentation about why students shouldn't join the cartel basically.
01:00:52
Speaker
And it was, I would say the tone was belittling to students, you know, and it wasn't what we had requested.
01:00:58
Speaker
We had requested a dialogue, not a presentation.
01:01:00
Speaker
And it was a lot of propaganda.
01:01:02
Speaker
There were pictures of people being, you know, arrested and militarized helicopters and a lot of things where I was just like sitting there.
01:01:09
Speaker
And at many points I wanted to interrupt the conversation.
01:01:14
Speaker
and jump in because I wanted to like protect students.
01:01:17
Speaker
But I didn't know what to do, honestly.
01:01:19
Speaker
So I just sat there and I was at the front of the room.
01:01:22
Speaker
I couldn't see how the students were receiving it.
01:01:24
Speaker
And at the end of this presentation, he said, you probably don't have any questions, do you?
01:01:30
Speaker
And I felt it.
01:01:31
Speaker
I felt a whoosh of hands come up.
01:01:35
Speaker
And the questions that the students asked
01:01:38
Speaker
were beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, kind, inquisitive, strong, courageous questions
01:01:48
Speaker
where they were gaining information.
01:01:50
Speaker
They weren't trying to prove anybody wrong.
01:01:53
Speaker
They weren't trying to prove themselves right, but they were asking questions like, you know, you, you mentioned that a lot of the students join the cartels because they see no other option, but, but then it was like, we're interested in what kind of work does your agency do besides programs like this, like that are more preventative, provide more preventative measures or,
01:02:15
Speaker
You said that you're from New England.
01:02:17
Speaker
How do you think that shapes your interaction with this role?
01:02:22
Speaker
And, you know, then the students took those questions, whether they agreed with him or not.
01:02:27
Speaker
And then we came back and we had a structured dialogue and they deconstructed what he had said.
01:02:34
Speaker
And...
01:02:35
Speaker
That deconstruction of a perspective was essential in helping them look more at the systemic factors that were supporting agencies like the Border Patrol were just like...
01:02:54
Speaker
integrated into the way that we think about the broader population maybe thinks about this issue.
01:02:59
Speaker
And, and we, the strength of their arguments or the strengths of their understanding was incredibly bolstered by this person who a lot of the students disagreed with.
01:03:13
Speaker
And so I think that that goes for, for both ways in oil land.
01:03:16
Speaker
We often heard from, from people from oil field workers who have like very different perspectives than, uh,
01:03:24
Speaker
than the students.
01:03:25
Speaker
And it stretched our understanding.
01:03:27
Speaker
And what it did, like, it was a humanizing thing.
01:03:30
Speaker
I think the way that the students asked the questions, for one, it changed the way he thought about youth and the types of questions that they would ask.
01:03:39
Speaker
And it also brought him closer to the students.
01:03:42
Speaker
And
01:03:43
Speaker
He would be more interested in the students because they were asking questions that I do believe like pushed his thinking on some things and some things, some questions maybe he'd never ask himself, but we're kind, strong questions.
01:03:55
Speaker
And so I'm an advocate like we have to be better as a as a nation about.
01:04:03
Speaker
listening to understand, not listening to agree, but like listening to understand where people are coming from, because it helps build our critical lens, right?
01:04:11
Speaker
It helps support the own actions that we take.
01:04:14
Speaker
And it helps humanize these situations in a way that if we don't ever have that opportunity, we can just like blank slate, paint people as this way or this way.
Trust in Students and Inquiry Process
01:04:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think the story you just described is just such a testament to trusting the process and also trusting kids.
01:04:33
Speaker
Because if you've set them up with a mindset of inquiry and we're asking these questions, this is the purpose of all of this.
01:04:42
Speaker
They're out there gathering their agents in their own learning process in that way.
01:04:47
Speaker
And then you put them in an issue where they're confronting kids.
01:04:50
Speaker
you know, somebody that they might have thought of as being an enemy or someone on the wrong side.
01:04:56
Speaker
And if you trust the preparation and the process and you trust kids to ask, you know, to perform in that context, then they're going to do it, right?
01:05:07
Speaker
And I think...
01:05:08
Speaker
Some of what you're talking about, that resistance to put students in those contentious positions, maybe betrays a lack of trust either in that process.
01:05:17
Speaker
Like, you know, I have not supported kids enough of being able to ask good questions in this sense and doesn't trust kids.
01:05:25
Speaker
And I think leaning into both of those as an integral part of the process really sets students, sets the process up for success too.
01:05:35
Speaker
I think just trust begets more trust at every step of the way.
01:05:38
Speaker
Yeah, we can overprotect students to the point where we're not building their skills to...
01:05:45
Speaker
to navigate the world in which we're seeing continually develop into this more like divisive and closed ways of thinking.
01:05:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:53
Speaker
And I think even if you had not seen that conversation be so successful from student, if it wasn't such a powerful testimony to the preparation of the process, if it fell flat, well, that's a feedback that you can use to say, okay, we're like, you know, bring that back here to step one.
01:06:10
Speaker
If we were to have this conversation again,
01:06:12
Speaker
Guys, did you feel prepared in this moment?
01:06:14
Speaker
Like, how can we help the process?
01:06:16
Speaker
And then, you know, we'll try it again.
01:06:18
Speaker
So I think, again, just being open, you know, as an educator yourself to that and to getting honest feedback from kids, too, in that environment can be so important.
01:06:28
Speaker
We're hearing all of this about the experience that you're able to create for kids in the classroom in this inquiry-based model as a classroom
Project-Based Learning and Human-Centered Education
01:06:37
Speaker
teacher.
01:06:37
Speaker
You've since stepped out of the classroom.
01:06:40
Speaker
How does all of this influence and inform the work you're doing now with PBL Works?
01:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think that one of the things I love most about PBL and PBL Works is that I believe project-based learning is important.
01:06:54
Speaker
a wonderful conduit for human-centered learning where we are, and it's, you know, PBL Works influenced these projects.
01:07:03
Speaker
What I learned from them and thinking about driving questions and thinking about scaffolding and authentic learning was a huge influence in designing these projects.
01:07:13
Speaker
So I certainly took a lot from the org as I developed these projects and I'm an advocate for the org and I work for the org.
01:07:21
Speaker
because I believe that building teachers' capacity to create and facilitate high-quality project-based learning is an avenue for more humanized learning and to give students opportunity to grapple with important questions, to give them the support so they can be building important skills along the way.
01:07:42
Speaker
And so all of those things are very important in the work that I do today.
Encouragement for Educators
01:07:46
Speaker
We've been talking about all of the ideas, right?
01:07:49
Speaker
Sort of this swirling, I'm trying to think of braiding, threading, bringing a lot of different complicated ideas together to provide an experience for students.
01:08:02
Speaker
So taken as a whole, I think the narrative, the ideas, the tenants, the beliefs that are contained within teaching contentious topics marks a huge structural transformation of
01:08:13
Speaker
in the approach to teaching and learning.
01:08:15
Speaker
You've commented on the shift between your, you know, the day-to-day and your AP world class compared to the once every two weeks in this inquiry model.
01:08:25
Speaker
So I imagine for teachers in most contexts, getting to where you ended up is a real big undertaking.
01:08:31
Speaker
How can teachers who listen to this episode and want to learn more about you and those ideas that influence all those things that are braided throughout here, if they wanted to start down a similar path, where would you recommend they start?
01:08:44
Speaker
I mean, first thing I'd say, partner, partner, partner, right?
01:08:48
Speaker
Like find people who are going to be interested in pursuing something like this.
01:08:54
Speaker
Find people who have slightly different views on a topic that you do so that you can model those conversations, you know, and engage in those conversations.
01:09:03
Speaker
I was fortunate to work at a school that had a student internship program.
01:09:06
Speaker
So a senior student interned with different professionals.
01:09:10
Speaker
And so every one of these projects, I had a student intern who was co-leading this.
01:09:14
Speaker
I was sitting there talking about each of them in the book as being incredibly instrumental in leading work with students, reaching out to partners, handling a lot of the logistics.
01:09:26
Speaker
And so I think that's the number one thing.
01:09:29
Speaker
And then if you don't see
01:09:31
Speaker
the time and the space to do a full-on project throughout the year, think about how you might weave
01:09:37
Speaker
a tenant or two into, uh, into your classroom.
01:09:40
Speaker
And so if you have a, an essential question or a driving question you're using for a unit of study, think about how you might make that more about a question to open hearts and minds instead of more of like an action oriented question.
01:09:51
Speaker
I know that today's time doesn't seem like a time to, to take risk.
01:09:58
Speaker
And I think we always have to take like calculated risk as professionals, but, um,
01:10:04
Speaker
you know, everything that I did and I've done as an educator that I find meaningful was, was in some way a risk, right?
01:10:13
Speaker
Like, and putting myself out there.
01:10:16
Speaker
So I, I,
01:10:18
Speaker
find the right level of risk for you and for your context.
01:10:22
Speaker
And I think students appreciate the willingness to put a foot out there.
01:10:29
Speaker
And then also a huge thing is a willingness to be uncertain and to not be the holder of the answer and say like, I'm interested in exploring this.
01:10:39
Speaker
I know that you all have different experiences.
01:10:41
Speaker
In some cases, you may have a lot more experiences in this topic that I do.
01:10:45
Speaker
And I want to learn alongside you.
01:10:47
Speaker
And I generally, I genuinely wanted to do that in every project and students were instrumental in pushing my thinking forward.
01:10:59
Speaker
And so it's another thing is just like,
01:11:02
Speaker
let go of having to be the holder of knowledge and the holder of authority.
01:11:08
Speaker
And there's nothing, nothing, nothing more freeing than that.
01:11:11
Speaker
And that's, I guess, another reason I like contentious topics, because I don't know the answer to them.
01:11:16
Speaker
And it makes it authentic, right?
01:11:18
Speaker
It is an authentic exploration.
01:11:20
Speaker
And students love to see the teacher not, quote unquote, knowing everything.
01:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's authentic and it's collaborative, right?
01:11:27
Speaker
You're modeling the same ways of thinking and understanding as kids are and grappling with new perspectives at just the same time.
01:11:36
Speaker
You might not have ever heard this voice before, so you're having to compare your own ideas and thoughts in there in the moment.
01:11:42
Speaker
And what a more powerful introduction is.
01:11:45
Speaker
to kind of breaking that student-teacher dichotomy or that binary or that power struggle with a question to open hearts and minds because it's going to require you open yours too and not just demand the same for kids.
Ryan's Book: Teaching Contentious Topics
01:11:59
Speaker
We've been talking, Ryan, about this book, Teaching Contentious Topics in a Divided Nation, a memoir and primer for pedagogical transformation.
01:12:08
Speaker
If people have been listening to this and they want a copy, how in the world can they get one?
01:12:14
Speaker
They can, it's on, it was a self-published book because I had a very specific approach to this and I didn't know who would publish it.
01:12:23
Speaker
And also I worked, I got to give a shout out to Molly Sherman who designed the book.
01:12:28
Speaker
It is like, it's a unique education book.
01:12:31
Speaker
And we wanted to make something that teachers after a long day
01:12:35
Speaker
of teaching who want to keep learning, don't have to just look at small pages of black and white texts over and over and over.
01:12:42
Speaker
So we wanted something that felt good and looked good.
01:12:46
Speaker
And so, yeah, shout out, huge shout out to The Beautiful Design by Molly Sherman.
01:12:51
Speaker
And you can find it on Amazon.
01:12:54
Speaker
Just Google, go to Amazon and search Teaching Contentious Topics, Sprott.
01:13:00
Speaker
It's a weird name.
01:13:01
Speaker
Nobody has Sprott.
01:13:01
Speaker
So it shows up pretty quickly.
01:13:04
Speaker
I will just second the fact that it is a gorgeous book.
01:13:08
Speaker
It really doesn't look or feel like an education book.
01:13:13
Speaker
You know, it's like an anthropological ethnography, right?
01:13:17
Speaker
It looks, it reads more like those books on my shelf than it does.
01:13:21
Speaker
Here's, you know, a pedagogical approach to teaching contentious topics.
01:13:25
Speaker
So I will definitely second that.
01:13:27
Speaker
It's beautiful.
01:13:28
Speaker
Thank you so much, Ryan, for taking the time to talk with me today.
01:13:31
Speaker
Thank you, Nick.
01:13:31
Speaker
I appreciate all the work that you're doing.
01:13:33
Speaker
It's been a real pleasure.
01:13:36
Speaker
Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
01:13:39
Speaker
I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
01:13:43
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
01:13:47
Speaker
Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
01:13:54
Speaker
Thank you.