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79: Reimagine the System w/ REENVISIONED (Dr. Erin Raab)
30 Plays5 years ago
Today we're joined by Dr. Erin Lynn Raab. Erin is the Co-founder of REENVISIONED, a movement to redefine the purpose of school. REENVISIONED aims to change the conversation of school away from standards, norms, and improving the status quo, toward human flourishing, community, democracy, and collective liberation. Erin and her co-founder, Nicole Hensel, both graduates of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, aim to collect 10,000 stories of students, teachers, and community members to develop a shared vision of what school could, and should be.
The organization works with schools and individuals to catalyze new conversations and create new visions. They provide a tried and true process for opening space for truly eye-opening conversations between young people, educators, and other adults in their community about what we all really want out of our education system and for our live. You can read some of these interviews at REENVISIONED.org.
In our conversation together, Erin talks about systems-based thinking and transforming the system, rather than upholding the status quo. It's a deep, complex discussion centering on history, psychology, and more. I hope you enjoy!
GUESTS
Dr. Erin Lynn Raab, who earned her Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University, where her scholarship pertained to the question of how we can transform education systems so they foster individual flourishing and thriving democracy, and is the co-founder of REENVISIONED.
RESOURCES
- REENVISIONED: Hundreds of interviews on the purpose of school, with free resources and activities to help facilitate these conversations by yourself or with classes.
- “Why School?": A Systems Perspective on Creating Schooling for Individual Flourishing and a Thriving Democratic Society” - Dr. Raab’s Ph.D. Dissertation
- The End of Policing by Alex Vitale (referenced)
Shorter, broad audience pieces by Erin:
- If We Want a More Just, Equitable Society We Have to Re-envision School. Here’s how to start.
- Designing School for Human Flourishing & Thriving Democracy
- The Four Purposes of Schooling
FURTHER LISTENING
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 79 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
00:00:08
Speaker
My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio.
00:00:13
Speaker
Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Matt Walker, Tracy Nicole Smith, and Shannon Schenkel.
00:00:21
Speaker
Thank you for your ongoing support.
00:00:23
Speaker
You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Purpose of Re-Envision Ed and Education Shift
00:00:45
Speaker
Today, we're joined by Dr. Aaron Robb.
00:00:47
Speaker
Aaron is the co-founder and principal consultant of Re-Envision Ed, a movement to redefine the purpose of school.
00:00:53
Speaker
Re-Envision Ed aims to change the conversation of school away from standards, norms, and improving the status quo.
00:00:59
Speaker
Aaron and her co-founder, Nicole Hensel, both graduates of the Stanford Graduate School of Education, aim to collect 10,000 stories of students, teachers, and community members to develop a shared vision of what school could and should be.
00:01:12
Speaker
The organization supports schools and individuals by providing a framework to conduct these interviews, contributing to a larger conversation, as well as opening space for truly eye-opening conversations about what we all really want out of our education system.
Aaron's Background and Realizations
00:01:25
Speaker
You can read all of these interviews at reenvisioned.org.
00:01:28
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In our conversation together, Aaron and I talk about systems-based thinking and transforming the system rather than upholding what we always do.
00:01:35
Speaker
It's a deep, complex discussion centering on history, psychology, and a lot more.
00:01:39
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I hope you enjoy.
00:01:45
Speaker
Our mission is to change the conversation around schooling, which is not something you often hear as a mission in the field of education.
00:01:53
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But it came out of, I've been working in education for almost 20 years, and I started in international development and worked both on Latin American programs.
00:02:02
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I spent a number of years in a township in South Africa starting up.
00:02:06
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a library and education center where I ran after school programs and leadership programs for young people, and then worked with the National Department of Education in South Africa and spent nearly a decade working all the way from on the ground to huge kind of multilateral international organizations.
00:02:23
Speaker
This question about why it wasn't working, my kids weren't leaving school empowered, oftentimes even having the basic literacy skills, but that they needed to get jobs.
00:02:32
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But even more than that,
00:02:33
Speaker
didn't leave with the confidence, the understanding of the world to navigate their lives as adults.
Exploring Theories in Education
00:02:40
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So at that time, I think I was still a little naive.
00:02:42
Speaker
And I thought that there must be a group of experts somewhere who knew the answer.
00:02:46
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And all I needed to do was go find those experts and they could learn the answer, the right way to do it.
00:02:51
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And then I would go back out into the world and do it right.
00:02:55
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And so I applied to do my PhD at Stanford, got out to Stanford, realized in many ways that's not what PhDs are for, that PhDs are largely for training academics.
00:03:06
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And so I ended up doing a very atypical PhD because I was there with this question of why isn't this working?
00:03:12
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Why isn't this working?
00:03:13
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Not just for a couple kids, but
00:03:15
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for many kids, maybe most of the kids across the world.
00:03:19
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And I had just started a library, so I thought, well, I'll start in literacy.
00:03:22
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You know, that's necessary, if not sufficient, to living an empowered life.
00:03:26
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And spent almost two years really delving into the literacy literature, only to find out that really smart people had thought about literacy for a very long time, and that we had empowering theories
00:03:38
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We had empowering approaches and we just didn't use them.
00:03:42
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So then I thought, well, maybe it's in second language acquisition.
00:03:45
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I really thought there was something we didn't know.
00:03:46
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So I thought, OK, well, maybe it's in second language acquisition.
00:03:48
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My kids learn in Zulu.
00:03:49
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They transition into English.
00:03:51
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In the United States, obviously, we have a huge number of English language learners.
00:03:56
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Maybe it's in this language of power, second language acquisition issue.
00:03:59
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I spent another maybe year and a half in the second language acquisition literature only to find out that really smart people have thought about second language acquisition for a really long time.
00:04:09
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We had empowering theories.
00:04:10
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We had empowering approaches.
00:04:12
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We just didn't use them.
00:04:13
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So I thought, well, maybe it's one of these newfangled areas like character development or socio-emotional learning that have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years.
Systems Theory and Transforming Education
00:04:22
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We spent the next year and a half delving into those literatures.
00:04:26
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only to find out that not only were they not newfangled, we have literally been thinking about character development in Aristotle, but also we had great ways of thinking about doing them.
00:04:37
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We had great ways of actually doing them, and we just didn't use them.
00:04:42
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Honestly, at this point, I thought, well, maybe education isn't the place that I should be working.
00:04:47
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I think school, we know all these things.
00:04:51
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I think school might be actually harming kids and the adults themselves.
00:04:55
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In schools, right, we have high rates of depression, lots of dropping out, lots of demotivation, lots of kids who we tell aren't valuable because they're not doing well on exams.
00:05:05
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And so I really did a lot of soul searching.
00:05:07
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And luckily at that point also got introduced to systems theory.
00:05:11
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And I started thinking, well, if it's not going to be a new literacy approach or if it's not going to be a new way of thinking about second language acquisition, what would it take to shift or transform our system
00:05:23
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so that we can use what we already know.
00:05:25
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We actually know a lot about how to foster learning and community in our schools.
00:05:33
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And we largely don't do that.
00:05:36
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And so I took the last three years of my PhD thinking about what that means.
00:05:41
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What does it mean to transform a system?
00:05:43
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That's a very abstract thing.
00:05:44
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And then how to go about doing that.
00:05:47
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And one of the first things I found is that
00:05:49
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if you want to shift a system, you have to know what its purpose is and you have to transform how people think about what that purpose is.
00:05:57
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And so re-envisioned comes out of that first step of systems change, which is about changing what it is that we see to be the problem to be solved, right?
00:06:07
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Like what are the questions we're asking about
00:06:10
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what school is for and what we're trying to do through it, because I truly believe we have really capable, creative, well-intentioned, hardworking people at every single level of the schooling system.
00:06:24
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You hear a lot of critiques at all levels.
00:06:26
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Oh, the superintendents, oh, the educators, oh, no, we have really wonderful...
00:06:34
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smart people working all over, but I think largely within systems that inhibit their ability to actually do things.
Challenges and Critiques in Education Reform
00:06:42
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And I mean, a lot of the human restoration project that are dehumanizing, that ultimately are dehumanizing both for the adults and for the young people that are in our system.
00:06:50
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So Re-Envision Ed came out of that journey.
00:06:52
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It's not what I thought was going to come out.
00:06:54
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I kind of thought going into my PhD, I'd be starting a new literacy program.
00:06:57
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Honestly, I thought I'd start a new
00:06:59
Speaker
kind of literacy nonprofit or something along the lines of what I had done before.
00:07:02
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And what I realized is that that would fundamentally leave a system that I felt was chewing up children.
00:07:08
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Re-Envision Ed is trying to change the conversation about schooling from one about competition, social mobility, right?
00:07:14
Speaker
Race to the top, no child left behind, to one that is about human flourishing, that is about democracy and collective liberation, that is about who we are as a community and how we practice that in schools.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, you brought up that idea of systems thinking and I'm with you that it's very frustrating when there are education reformers who see teachers as if like they're dumb or ignorant or like they're doing something wrong.
00:07:43
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Where, I mean, I've seen and I'm sure you've seen that when you do change the conversation and you allow teachers to work within a different system, they do have a tendency to do that instead and it works out a lot better.
00:07:56
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A lot of us feel stuck for financial reasons, safety reasons, whatever it might be, upholding something that maybe we don't agree with, or we just don't realize it could be done differently.
00:08:07
Speaker
There are so many people working to uphold the status quo through better teaching strategies or through marketing.
00:08:15
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At many points, a
00:08:16
Speaker
amazing professional development tool, quote unquote, that costs a ton of money that might increase test scores by 5% or something without ever asking that fundamental question of, well, why do the test scores matter to begin with?
00:08:28
Speaker
And why are we not focusing on things like motivation and agency, et cetera, especially when we have all of that research from
00:08:35
Speaker
literally hundreds of years of support that the things that we're currently doing don't work and there are other things that do work.
00:08:42
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Do you want to talk a little bit about what exactly it is that you're doing to make this happen?
00:08:48
Speaker
And before that, I would love to just say one thing on what you just said, which is one of the things you learn when you start really delving into systems thinking is that whenever you have patterned responses, so
00:09:03
Speaker
You think about schooling, whether it's, you know, in our high-income schools, we have really high rates of anxiety, depression, suicide.
00:09:11
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In our low-income schools or schools that serve low-income communities, we have high rates of disengagement, demotivation, dropping out.
00:09:19
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Educators oftentimes leave within a few years.
00:09:22
Speaker
Certain school leaders tend to be most affected in their fifth year, but I think 50% of them leave by their third year.
00:09:29
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But
00:09:29
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And we tend to blame individuals.
00:09:31
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And we think about individual interventions.
00:09:33
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So I lived in Palo Alto for a long time.
00:09:36
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We think about, oh, we've got this
Systemic Issues in Education and Society
00:09:38
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really big anxiety and depression problem.
00:09:40
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Why don't we hire more therapists?
00:09:42
Speaker
And that's really important, but it's triage.
00:09:45
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It's really important to those students.
00:09:47
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But unless you change the system, you're going to end up continuing to need that triage every year.
00:09:53
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And I think the same thing when we look at adults, we continue to blame adults.
00:09:58
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We blame educators for their behaviors.
00:09:59
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And yet when it's seen in every school, pretty much when the anomaly is behavior that looks different,
00:10:07
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then we know that those behaviors are driven by the way we've created the context in which they're working, not by those individuals.
00:10:14
Speaker
That it takes kind of human strength or motivation to overcome or be outside of that kind of patterned response.
00:10:22
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And so one of the biggest things is thinking about how we can design those environments differently so that people naturally act different ways.
00:10:27
Speaker
Exactly.
00:10:28
Speaker
That actually reminds me of a conversation I was just having with Nick the other day where we were talking about how right now the main zeitgeist topic is police reform and what goes about doing that.
00:10:41
Speaker
And I was reading...
00:10:43
Speaker
It's a verse of books by Alex something that talks about why traditional police reform measures don't work like anti-bias training, teaching people to, I guess, shoot someone at a different spot instead of a shot that kills them.
00:10:58
Speaker
And instead talking about why reallocating or I guess defunding the police budget tends to work better because the system itself has changed significantly.
00:11:05
Speaker
And that kind of all leads me when you're talking about this idea systems based thinking to also think about education, because there is a carceral component to education.
00:11:15
Speaker
And also there I mean, there are, quote unquote, bad teachers, but that's not really the overall problem right now.
00:11:22
Speaker
The problem is, is that teachers are upholding a system that doesn't work.
00:11:26
Speaker
So it's the exact same way as there are bad cops that do bad things.
00:11:30
Speaker
But still, in general, there are a lot of things that police do that they shouldn't be doing to begin with.
00:11:35
Speaker
It's not their job, etc., which is the exact same way with teaching.
00:11:38
Speaker
If you're upholding a system where my goal is to check off a few Hirsch boxes and increase test scores by 10%,
00:11:47
Speaker
the point A to B to C of getting there is going to be way different than if I set up the system to be, I want students to recognize or at least get on a path to purpose.
00:11:56
Speaker
And what does that look like for me?
00:11:58
Speaker
And the conversation entirely changes.
00:12:00
Speaker
And there will still be quote unquote bad teachers, but it's going to be way easier to identify that going on in that system as opposed to what's going on currently.
00:12:10
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:11
Speaker
And what being a bad teacher changes, right?
00:12:13
Speaker
It changes from
00:12:15
Speaker
someone who didn't get the test score growth to someone who maybe isn't treating their students as humans or creating the right kind of community.
00:12:23
Speaker
I think that's a really apt analogy, Chris.
00:12:27
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And one of the things that really worries me about the conversation right now about policing is that same systems, is the demonizing of cops.
00:12:35
Speaker
I think that the more in this world where we are so divisive, the more that we can look at the ways that we are shaped.
00:12:41
Speaker
It doesn't mean that people don't make bad choices or that there aren't some,
00:12:45
Speaker
Bad educators or bad cops.
00:12:47
Speaker
But when you have patterned behaviors, it's not about those individuals.
00:12:53
Speaker
And I think the more that we shame people, the less likely things are able to transform.
00:12:59
Speaker
I think we've seen this in education as well.
00:13:00
Speaker
As soon as you're starting to publish educator names and shame them for not getting the test score growth right in newspapers.
00:13:08
Speaker
the less able educators are able to take the risks or orient towards learning in the ways that they need to because their identities are so under threat already.
00:13:17
Speaker
And I think that I worry a little bit that we're doing the same thing with the police at the moment.
00:13:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, this is going to go on a tangent here for a little bit, but I really like this mode of discussion.
00:13:27
Speaker
So I think that something that re-envisioned Ed aims to do is stop this, what I would see as like a neoliberal co-option of what's going on in education for the last, I guess it's like the 70s or 80s, but really long before that.
00:13:42
Speaker
We see all these things that don't work in education.
00:13:45
Speaker
And instead of changing that conversation, we tend to use the right words to talk about reform.
00:13:52
Speaker
So I'll talk about like, I want all students to achieve, quote unquote, but we never define what that word achieve means.
00:14:00
Speaker
And when certain individuals do very well in that system, as in their students, let's say, get a scholarship to Stanford or something like that, we uphold those teachers as proof that the education system works, which this could be seen in any system in the United States.
00:14:16
Speaker
If we only highlight those individuals doing well or those individuals doing poor, no one's ever questioning the
00:14:23
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okay, well, what does it mean to do well?
00:14:27
Speaker
And if we change that system, does that mean that those students are still not doing well?
00:14:31
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Like, are we taking something away from someone?
00:14:33
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And the conversation just derives down to this question about individual people's actions as opposed to a collective action.
Historical Context of Schooling
00:14:40
Speaker
Oh, Chris, I love that.
00:14:40
Speaker
And there's so many, so many, I don't think that this is going off in a random direction at all.
00:14:46
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I think this is actually central to the point.
00:14:48
Speaker
And I would agree with you.
00:14:49
Speaker
I think, one, I think it's interesting that, you know, we've thought about, just as we've thought about what capitalism is over time.
00:14:58
Speaker
So my master's was in development studies.
00:15:00
Speaker
And so I studied how we thought about
00:15:02
Speaker
what it means to develop as a country.
00:15:04
Speaker
And that has changed over time.
00:15:06
Speaker
What capitalism is isn't stagnant.
00:15:09
Speaker
In that same way, we thought about schooling and what it's for in different ways.
00:15:14
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When schooling started in the 1800s, we were heading into civil war as a country.
00:15:20
Speaker
It wasn't sure that this democratic project was going to work.
00:15:24
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We were incredibly divided.
00:15:26
Speaker
And there was a decline of religious institutions and other socializing institutions.
00:15:34
Speaker
And so schooling arose as a way to socialize us into being citizens.
00:15:40
Speaker
Basically, we think about it.
00:15:42
Speaker
I can't remember what it is.
00:15:42
Speaker
I might get the statistic a little bit wrong, but in the East Coast, we already had a 90% literacy rate around there.
00:15:47
Speaker
It's something astonishingly high.
00:15:49
Speaker
We think it was to make sure that
00:15:51
Speaker
all kids learn to read from an early age and prepare them for work, but that was not the original narrative with Horace Mann.
00:15:58
Speaker
Horace Mann used a couple different narratives, but his primary motivation was we need a way to create a sense of who we are both within local communities to make sure that local communities are working together and thinking about the growth of their young people, but then also as a nation, what does it mean to be American
00:16:17
Speaker
in a time when we have such huge divisions, which I think is interesting when you think about it today.
00:16:22
Speaker
Then, you know, we came, we got through the Civil War.
00:16:25
Speaker
I'm going to do a very high level brief history, industrialization.
00:16:31
Speaker
And then we needed a way of thinking about how to prepare workers, but it was still very much in a collective social efficiency way.
00:16:39
Speaker
Right.
00:16:40
Speaker
I think about think about when the Russians launched Sputnik.
00:16:43
Speaker
Right.
00:16:44
Speaker
We didn't say you should study science because that's where all the money is, which is what we say today.
00:16:49
Speaker
You know, oh, be a scientist or be an engineer because then you can then you can make good money.
00:16:54
Speaker
No, we said study science.
00:16:55
Speaker
You can help your country.
00:16:57
Speaker
And the narrative around education from the late 1800s through, I would say, 1970 was really about this idea of serving the larger national good.
00:17:12
Speaker
That's why you study.
00:17:13
Speaker
That's why you went through this.
00:17:14
Speaker
Then in the...
00:17:19
Speaker
1980s, late 1970s into the 1980s, it started shifting.
00:17:22
Speaker
And it's still, even with a nation at risk, if you read a nation at risk, it's still very much in that frame, right?
00:17:26
Speaker
Like we should invest in education because look at all these other countries.
00:17:31
Speaker
We're going to fall behind all of these other countries in our economic growth.
00:17:35
Speaker
It wasn't these kids over here aren't going to have the same kind of access to social mobility that these other kids have, right?
00:17:42
Speaker
But as with the fall of the Soviet Union, we kind of emerged as victorious and we started very much like taking on the neoliberal framing of the individual and that each individual should be able to navigate the system.
00:17:56
Speaker
And equity moved from everyone having being part of this national organization
00:18:01
Speaker
project to does everyone have a chance to compete?
00:18:05
Speaker
I think about it as, you know, does everyone have an equal chance to end up in the top
Equity and Educational Environment Design
00:18:11
Speaker
1%?
00:18:11
Speaker
And we start discussing whether or not we should even be having
00:18:16
Speaker
such a disparity between our top 1% and the rest of us.
00:18:19
Speaker
What we've said is that's what equality is, is do we have a really diverse representation in that highest class?
00:18:25
Speaker
And I think that's really undermined our ability within education.
00:18:29
Speaker
I mean, it's muddled it, one.
00:18:31
Speaker
Because schools don't make socioeconomic policy.
00:18:36
Speaker
Governments make socioeconomic.
00:18:38
Speaker
We can't solve inequality.
00:18:40
Speaker
And I have a favorite philosopher who talks about we end up when we frame it this way, when we frame equity as ability to compete within an unjust system.
00:18:49
Speaker
what we end up with is people making very individually rational decisions that are collectively irrational.
00:18:56
Speaker
In one school over here, right, you can maximize your test scores, you can get all of your kids into the top universities, etc.
00:19:04
Speaker
But if you're looking at building a system, all that means is some kids down the road don't have that.
00:19:09
Speaker
So you've always got some people and what you're doing is you're blaming people
00:19:13
Speaker
The kids who don't have that, right, you're blaming the bottom 50% for being in the bottom 50%.
00:19:19
Speaker
And yet what we've done is we've created a situation in which somebody has to be in the bottom.
00:19:25
Speaker
I mean, mathematically, obviously, somebody's in the bottom 50%, but kind of what that means changes dramatically.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then once you can really see that, it's lunacy.
00:19:36
Speaker
It's lunacy what we're doing.
00:19:37
Speaker
We're constantly studying the people at the bottom, studying the people at the top.
00:19:41
Speaker
How do we make sure the bottom people can get to the top to do these things?
00:19:44
Speaker
And it's like, well, that's just always going to be shifting around.
00:19:47
Speaker
It's like a whack-a-mole game at the systems level.
00:19:50
Speaker
Unless we change how it is we think about what we're doing.
00:19:53
Speaker
And if equity can become rather than competition, if equity can become, does every child when they go to school have an environment that is rich for learning in which they are seen and
00:20:05
Speaker
valued, have the resources they need and the humans they need to grow and learn in community.
00:20:11
Speaker
You can do that for every single student in the United States.
00:20:15
Speaker
Every single one.
00:20:16
Speaker
You cannot make sure every single student gets into Stanford.
00:20:21
Speaker
Right.
00:20:21
Speaker
You can't make sure every student has a well-paying job someday in schools.
00:20:26
Speaker
That's not something schools can do.
00:20:27
Speaker
If we have an economic system in which 40 percent of people don't earn a living wage, then 40 percent of students are going to graduate and not earn a living wage, whether or not they've learned differential calculus or gotten a Ph.D. That's not a problem that schools can solve.
00:20:42
Speaker
I think what you're saying makes perfect sense.
00:20:45
Speaker
And what I think about, too, is the idea that we can then rationalize inequity or rationalize our practices.
00:20:52
Speaker
I find myself doing this all the time where I'm looking at the grade book, which is just like a bunch of zeros and ones.
00:20:58
Speaker
And I'm just mindlessly going through like, that's a zero, that's a zero, that's a zero.
00:21:02
Speaker
And subconsciously what I'm doing is I'm saying these kids are worth something and these kids aren't.
00:21:08
Speaker
And it allows us as a society, both the students in the room, sadly, as well as the teacher to start to frame it as, well, those students deserve to not have as good of a life as the students who are doing these things.
00:21:22
Speaker
And those that are
00:21:24
Speaker
following the will of what it is I'm telling them to do are worth more.
00:21:29
Speaker
And that could lead to a whole separate discussion of, are we basically training an entire generation of people that you shouldn't question authority, that you should just do what you're told, and those that are the rule-adviders, those that
00:21:43
Speaker
have done this very particular area of study are more worthwhile than those who haven't, which by itself is a giant equity.
00:21:52
Speaker
It's a crazy thing.
00:21:54
Speaker
And I know that that builds into two of your discussion of what it means to have a good life.
00:22:00
Speaker
And the first thing I think of when I think of that question is the Alfie Cohn, how he introduces most of his talks is asking groups of teachers, parents, what have you about what it means to have a good life.
00:22:13
Speaker
And when he asked the question, like, what do you want your child to be like when they're 30?
00:22:18
Speaker
They always say like, happy, loved, content, just very like happy-go-lucky, happy terms.
00:22:24
Speaker
They don't say like, I want them to be rich.
00:22:26
Speaker
or quote unquote successful in economic terms.
00:22:30
Speaker
But yet that's the entire framing of how schools typically works.
00:22:33
Speaker
Like I want you to get an A so you get into a good college, so you get a good career, et cetera.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yes.
00:22:37
Speaker
So I promise we will get to what Re-Invisioned actually does.
Educational Goals and Visions
00:22:41
Speaker
And part of that is catalyzing actual conversations and having this exact conversation that you're talking about.
00:22:50
Speaker
So both in my dissertation research and then with Re-Invisioned, part of what we do
00:22:56
Speaker
is create space and catalyze conversation between young people, adults, between people working within any particular system or community
00:23:08
Speaker
about what it is ultimately we hope and not just what do we hope for kids, right?
00:23:14
Speaker
Some kind of big, broad, you know, other people's children.
00:23:17
Speaker
But think about a kid that you care about.
00:23:20
Speaker
What is it you want for them when they're in their 30s?
00:23:23
Speaker
And what is a good life?
00:23:25
Speaker
And you're right.
00:23:26
Speaker
It's not that people don't want kids to earn money.
00:23:30
Speaker
In fact, one of the things that surprised me in my research was that
00:23:34
Speaker
Wealthy parents were just as likely as less wealthy parents to say that they didn't want their kid.
00:23:40
Speaker
They were living on their couch.
00:23:45
Speaker
care partly because we've created a system in which there are real material consequences and real physiological consequences for ending up at the bottom right so people see that and they feel fearful about it but we found that there were five main parts of a good life when people talked about kids that they care about it they wanted them to have productive work so work that didn't kill their soul but paid the bills preferably and
00:24:09
Speaker
They wanted them to have rewarding relationships.
00:24:11
Speaker
So they wanted them to have interpersonal, you know, one-on-one, but also belong to a larger community, kind of be part of a group.
00:24:18
Speaker
They wanted them to be able to creatively express themselves, have a sense of who they were and be developing that sense of that self over time.
00:24:26
Speaker
They wanted them to be civically and politically engaged.
00:24:30
Speaker
And that didn't necessarily mean voting.
00:24:32
Speaker
Right now we're in a very, this means a particular thing, particularly right now in this moment as we're heading into this election, but actually
00:24:38
Speaker
It was more kind of what Hannah Arendt called world making.
00:24:42
Speaker
How do you work with others to create the world that you live in?
00:24:45
Speaker
That might be through Rotary.
00:24:46
Speaker
That might be volunteering with a local garden.
00:24:48
Speaker
But how is it that you kind of come together with others in your community to make the world?
00:24:53
Speaker
And they wanted them to be healthy physiologically and mentally.
00:24:58
Speaker
So part of what came out of this was thinking about, okay, what is then the relationship between what happens in school and that future life, right?
00:25:07
Speaker
And one of the things to note is that those categories are really broad.
00:25:11
Speaker
What productive work looks like for one person that they enjoy is really different than for another person.
00:25:20
Speaker
I had one little girl who really wanted to be an Olympic horseback rider.
00:25:24
Speaker
And I had one little boy who really wanted to be a robotics engineer.
00:25:28
Speaker
I have not thought about either of those careers, never realistically.
00:25:33
Speaker
And so what matters is how well you can see the options available to you, which options are available to you, and how well you can make choices about those things.
00:25:45
Speaker
that are meaningful for you.
00:25:46
Speaker
So some people like to have three good friends.
00:25:48
Speaker
They are good friends with them their whole life.
00:25:50
Speaker
And they'd rather just not really interact with that many other people, right?
00:25:53
Speaker
They get all their needs met through those three friends.
00:25:55
Speaker
Other people, I love to know everybody.
00:25:57
Speaker
I love people, right?
00:25:59
Speaker
So people are going to, within those categories, it's going to look really different.
00:26:03
Speaker
So a big part of that is how we make decisions about these different key aspects of our lives.
00:26:13
Speaker
When I think about flourishing, I draw on Aristotle who thought about flourishing is when we can make informed decisions about our lives.
00:26:22
Speaker
He called some deliberative decisions, but how we can make informed decisions about our lives according to our own values, skills, strengths, and interests.
00:26:31
Speaker
And I think one of the things that struck me about his writing so many years ago is that he already identified that to be able to do that, you both need their prerequisites and that you need to live in a society in which you have the freedom to make those choices and your core basic needs have to be met.
00:26:49
Speaker
Because if your basic needs aren't met, then all of your choices are oriented towards meeting those basic needs.
00:26:55
Speaker
And that's not real flourishing.
00:26:56
Speaker
That's not real freedom.
00:26:58
Speaker
And then I think that what gets added on to that is there's been a lot of research in the last 30 to 40 years by Martin Seligman and others around what it means to flourish from a social psychological lens.
00:27:09
Speaker
And I think you can then say a person really flourishes when their core needs are met, when they have the freedom to make choices about their lives, and when they find their choices to be meaningful and fulfilling.
00:27:22
Speaker
And that's what social psychology really adds to that, is that we have these areas of our life we make choices about.
00:27:28
Speaker
Do we have the freedom?
00:27:30
Speaker
And do we ultimately make the choices that we find meaningful and fulfilling?
00:27:36
Speaker
School helps us know ourselves, helps us practice making choices, allows us to see the choices that are available in the world, right?
00:27:46
Speaker
So it develops our sense of ourself.
00:27:48
Speaker
It develops our sense of our place in the world, what options are available to us.
00:27:52
Speaker
And most importantly, allows us to be in a place that practices having the freedom to make choices about our lives and test out whether we find them meaningful and fulfilling, right?
00:28:03
Speaker
And I'm not sure this is getting a little bit
00:28:05
Speaker
I don't know, abstract again, but a big part of what we know from brain science now, from neuroscience, and what we know from Aristotle, from ancient philosophy, is that who we practice being, we become.
00:28:18
Speaker
Literally in our brains, when we do something or we think something, many times it strengthens the synapses and it makes it more likely that we do it.
00:28:26
Speaker
And we make physical structures in our brains as we practice things that literally who we practice being, how we practice being,
00:28:35
Speaker
is what we become, is who we become.
00:28:36
Speaker
And Aristotle said the same thing.
00:28:38
Speaker
And so I think about school, how are we practicing that flourishing now?
00:28:42
Speaker
The way we are most likely to make sure our kids flourish in the future is if they practice now.
Flourishing and Practice in Schools
00:28:47
Speaker
The way we're going to make sure that they are able to be collaborative and creative and work with others and build healthy communities and healthy relationships is whether they're practicing that today and learning how to do that and making those brain structures work.
00:29:01
Speaker
And I think we shouldn't be surprised when
00:29:04
Speaker
If we haven't practiced that, if what we practice is competition and scarcity and inequity, then I don't think we should be surprised when that is what's showing up in our political institutions and our companies once kids are out in the world, right?
00:29:20
Speaker
It really highlights, I think, the appeal, not necessarily the end goal, but the appeal of books like Tony Wagner's work or Ted Dintersmith, where there's a big focus on educational reform of 21st century skills.
00:29:36
Speaker
And I think most people agree with the concept of like, there should be more creativity, we should have more choice, these skills are very important.
00:29:44
Speaker
but where the alignment may be off between educators and outside interests like those is the alignment there is we want really well-equipped workers, as opposed to the question of, we want people who, as you're describing, it's like flourishing.
00:30:02
Speaker
They are the ones making the goals.
00:30:03
Speaker
And maybe that is their goal is they want to have a really good job, but it doesn't have to be.
00:30:07
Speaker
There are many different ways that you could go with those skills.
00:30:10
Speaker
And,
00:30:11
Speaker
As you're saying, when you have a system that is listen, obey, and answer, it shouldn't be surprising that you have political institutions that basically don't listen to you, no matter what side you're on.
00:30:25
Speaker
People feel like they do not have a voice.
00:30:27
Speaker
Well,
00:30:28
Speaker
they're used to, they were basically trained or brought up in an environment where there was very little choice that wasn't practiced.
00:30:33
Speaker
And to build a democratic classroom means that you surrender some of that power so that students have the opportunity to make those choices and to act in that environment, not that they have the ability to choose the next thing that they're going to work on for their employer, but to deconstruct the power narrative altogether.
00:30:49
Speaker
So it's my choice who I work for and how I work for them or who I vote for or who I rally for.
00:30:56
Speaker
I think that that pedagogical difference is really important to identify early on so that we're not just shifting from basically a system where we focus on content to skills to obey someone else, but to transfer from content to skills to make choices for ourselves and as individuals.
00:31:12
Speaker
One of the courses I taught at Stanford was the history of school reform with David Lavery, which is
00:31:18
Speaker
Excellent.
00:31:19
Speaker
I highly recommend his book, Someone Has to Fail, if anyone wants a good overview of the last 180 years of school reform, much of which has been so much reform, so little change.
00:31:33
Speaker
But in the way that you're talking about, I think there are two places, kind of strategic places that reformers go wrong right off the bat.
00:31:42
Speaker
The first one is they think about, they misdiagnose the problem.
00:31:47
Speaker
They misdiagnose the purpose of school and they frame it either.
00:31:51
Speaker
What I found is that there are four main ways we talk about what the purpose of school is.
00:31:56
Speaker
And this is all the way back from Plato's Republic to now, right?
00:31:59
Speaker
Like if we talk about schooling,
00:32:01
Speaker
We have four different ways we talk about that.
00:32:03
Speaker
We talk about it as being for individual human development, so learning.
00:32:08
Speaker
So how do we develop these math skills?
00:32:12
Speaker
How do we develop socio-emotional skills?
00:32:14
Speaker
Whatever it is, individual learning.
00:32:16
Speaker
We have ways of talking about how do we develop who we are?
00:32:21
Speaker
So this is what I call social possibility.
00:32:23
Speaker
So the citizenship, not just skills, but orientation, the practice of the sense of identity of being part of a collective.
00:32:31
Speaker
A third way we talk about it is the social efficiency way of how do we prepare enough STEM workers?
00:32:37
Speaker
How do we make sure our economy can compete with China's?
00:32:40
Speaker
These kinds of questions, lots of political scientists and lots of economists and lots of policymakers frame their thinking and their research and their policy there.
00:32:49
Speaker
And we have the kind of individual efficiency.
00:32:51
Speaker
So how do I make sure my kid gets into Stanford?
00:32:53
Speaker
How do we make sure every kid graduates from high school?
00:32:56
Speaker
And these kinds of things.
00:32:58
Speaker
Now, these four purposes are just, I think that they're just true.
00:33:01
Speaker
They're just, we have those purposes for schooling.
Designing for Individual and Collective Growth
00:33:04
Speaker
But when we think about the design of actually what happens within schools every day,
00:33:09
Speaker
What I found is that you have to focus on, you have to design for the individual and the collective kind of development, not for the efficiency purposes.
00:33:18
Speaker
When you design for the development, you get the efficiency.
00:33:21
Speaker
When you design for creativity and learning and community, it turns out people are prepared to take different kinds of jobs.
00:33:28
Speaker
But if you try and design for getting people into the jobs, I mean, it's like planned economies.
00:33:34
Speaker
Like you can't, you just, it's,
00:33:37
Speaker
complex.
00:33:37
Speaker
That's not the way humans work.
00:33:39
Speaker
This is not an engineering exercise, right?
00:33:41
Speaker
This is a cultivation exercise, both at the micro level and at the thing.
00:33:46
Speaker
So the first thing is that they frame it incorrectly.
00:33:48
Speaker
They think about the problem we're solving wrong.
00:33:50
Speaker
And the second way is that they think about the connection between what happens in school and those future outcomes they want incorrectly.
00:33:57
Speaker
And I think the best way I've come to think about this is through a metaphor.
00:34:01
Speaker
So lots of people think about
00:34:03
Speaker
this as an engineering or as a manufacturing problem.
00:34:06
Speaker
Oh, what we need are these kinds of people in the world.
00:34:08
Speaker
And whether that's even democratic citizens or STEM workers or, or flourishing kids, any, any of it, you can actually take the right problem and still think about the connection between school and those future outcomes incorrectly.
00:34:21
Speaker
Lots of people, um,
00:34:23
Speaker
have changed their thinking to be talking about flourishing, to be talking about thriving, to be talking about these bigger things.
00:34:29
Speaker
But how they think about it is they want to then backwards plan all the way to pre-K kind of exactly what curricular structures and knowledge they're going to tick off along the way so that, you know, they have this nice easy continuum.
00:34:45
Speaker
And I think it forgets a couple of things.
00:34:48
Speaker
One is
00:34:49
Speaker
Growth, human growth, I mean, any of us that pay attention to our own growth is long-term and it's not linear.
00:34:55
Speaker
You can't go back and say it's going to happen this very consistent way over 18 years.
00:35:02
Speaker
26 or 84 years, right?
00:35:04
Speaker
Like it just, that's not the way it happens.
00:35:06
Speaker
I think the next thing is that we think about fixing kids.
00:35:09
Speaker
It's like, oh, we've got to make them creative.
00:35:11
Speaker
We've got to intervene to make sure that they know.
00:35:15
Speaker
But just like an acorn already has an oak tree inside of it, you just have to create the right environment for it.
00:35:20
Speaker
Kids already have all of those things.
00:35:23
Speaker
They just need to be able to practice them.
00:35:25
Speaker
We don't need to fix kids.
00:35:28
Speaker
We need to create environments in which
00:35:31
Speaker
They have the opportunity to be who they are, to practice these kinds of skills and ways of being.
00:35:35
Speaker
And I think the third thing is that teachers can't control the outcomes directly.
00:35:43
Speaker
And this should be so obvious.
00:35:45
Speaker
It's one of those simple, obvious truths that somehow gets lost in our conversations.
00:35:50
Speaker
But whether you're talking about test scores or whether you're talking about a really healthy human being who's flourishing, none of us have direct control over someone else's growth.
00:36:01
Speaker
Right.
00:36:01
Speaker
Like we because it is always an interaction between an individual and their environment, because people have will, because each person is different and interprets the environment and experiences differently.
00:36:14
Speaker
What educators have control over is the environment that they design and the set of experiences that they design for young people.
00:36:23
Speaker
And just in the same way that a gardener might think about the soil and the sun and the water and how that might be different for each plant.
00:36:30
Speaker
but they can't control whether or not that particular tomato comes out exactly how they predicted, right?
00:36:37
Speaker
But they can overall create a very thriving garden if they're paying attention to the environmental factors, the things that are within their control.
00:36:48
Speaker
So the second way that reformers often go wrong is that they think they can directly control the outcomes if they just put in exactly the right...
00:36:58
Speaker
I think about it like the manufacturing line.
00:37:00
Speaker
Well, if we just intervene here and we add that little piece that will end up not actually good.
00:37:06
Speaker
I just think of like, just, oh, we'll put in a coding class and all of a sudden we're going to have all these STEM kids, which doesn't happen.
00:37:13
Speaker
Also, it makes kids hate coding, which is very ironic.
00:37:16
Speaker
So yeah, yeah.
00:37:18
Speaker
Let's dive into the practical.
Involvement with Re-Envisioned Ed and Resources
00:37:21
Speaker
We got the theoretical, which I'm really into.
00:37:23
Speaker
Like seriously, everything you're talking about is directly in line with what HRP does.
00:37:27
Speaker
Like the whole shtick for us too.
00:37:29
Speaker
Like I totally get it.
00:37:30
Speaker
Let's talk about how people can get involved with re-envision ed.
00:37:36
Speaker
and how this could be incorporated maybe in a pandemic context.
00:37:40
Speaker
Like how can we use these resources to make something happen?
00:37:43
Speaker
Also, one thing on that is what I always find interesting about that we need to create more STEM workers or we're going to get equity through kind of creating more coders is let's be honest that once women and people of color are the primary coders, that job is just not going to be paid as much.
00:38:01
Speaker
I mean, we've seen this again and again and again, that that is not the way to create equity.
00:38:06
Speaker
OK, so Re-Evision Ed does three things.
00:38:08
Speaker
One, we very literally catalyze new conversations in communities.
00:38:14
Speaker
And this, we have a set of materials.
00:38:16
Speaker
We have a whole project that we've developed that is youth-centered.
00:38:20
Speaker
Young people interview each other, interview adults in their lives.
00:38:24
Speaker
They're the ones, they learn how to qualitatively code.
00:38:27
Speaker
So they make sense of that data.
00:38:28
Speaker
They pull out the themes and they come up with the vision for their classroom, for their school, for their district.
00:38:34
Speaker
We've used this in a couple different ways.
00:38:36
Speaker
We've piloted this across five states.
00:38:38
Speaker
We have
00:38:39
Speaker
I don't know, four to 500 interviews that are on the website.
00:38:42
Speaker
We've used this with adults at a huge national network where actually the adults are the ones still asking the questions and making sense.
00:38:49
Speaker
And we've used this on a micro level in an alternative school in one classroom where they went out to their whole school.
00:38:54
Speaker
And it's been done at every single level.
00:38:57
Speaker
And it can be done if you have a one day long workshop where you're bringing together all the people virtually or not in your community or
00:39:05
Speaker
or it can be done over an entire school year.
00:39:07
Speaker
So it's just really, really flexible, but it's a process basically for asking these different kinds of questions together.
00:39:14
Speaker
And I think it's really important that it's both young people and adults.
00:39:17
Speaker
I think a lot about adults have wisdom.
00:39:19
Speaker
We've lived through things, we've seen things and young people bring renewal.
00:39:23
Speaker
They bring creativity, they bring new perspectives, right?
00:39:26
Speaker
And so bringing those together is really, really important.
00:39:29
Speaker
So we have a set of resources.
00:39:30
Speaker
They are free, they are online, they are not beautifully designed yet.
00:39:35
Speaker
They're still in kind of PDF and Word, but all you need to go is go to the website, put in your email.
00:39:42
Speaker
You can download all of them.
00:39:43
Speaker
If it seems like something you want to do and you want a thought partner about how to make that work in your classroom or in your district or in your school, then just reach out and we'd love to work with you.
00:39:55
Speaker
And so that is one way is that if you're an educator or a school leader and you want to think about how do we have these conversations as a community, we have a bunch of resources for you.
00:40:05
Speaker
Number two thing we do at Re-Evisioned is we're building a network of like-minded people.
00:40:09
Speaker
This is how we met Chris.
00:40:10
Speaker
You know, this is how I meet leaders across the country.
00:40:15
Speaker
Part of that is that we do consulting work with like-minded organizations, nonprofits, and schools who are thinking about part of our work has come up with a set of design principles that actually do lead to.
00:40:25
Speaker
So when we think about how do I create that garden, we have a set of design principles and a way of thinking about what that is.
00:40:31
Speaker
And we work with different organizations around thinking about how to bring that into their work and
00:40:35
Speaker
or to think about their theories of change.
00:40:37
Speaker
How do we connect what it is we're doing with that ultimate, you know, how do we change the metaphor for us with these ultimate outcomes?
00:40:43
Speaker
We also have a book club, a monthly book club where we're reading next month, we're reading abolitionist teaching.
00:40:50
Speaker
This has been going for a number of years.
00:40:52
Speaker
So if you're interested in being part of a really wonderful community of educators who are thinking deeply about these topics and committed to their own learning monthly,
00:41:02
Speaker
reach out.
00:41:02
Speaker
We'd love to have you.
00:41:04
Speaker
We have constant conversations like we've had with leaders across the country.
00:41:07
Speaker
So also, if you just want to talk, reach out.
00:41:10
Speaker
I talk to probably five to seven people a week and try to learn what's going on.
00:41:14
Speaker
And then we obviously, we have some, maybe not obvious, but we have like a Facebook community and Instagram community.
00:41:18
Speaker
And we're on Twitter, these different social media things, which honestly I'm not that great at, but I think are really important for getting the word out.
00:41:25
Speaker
And then number three is thought leadership.
00:41:27
Speaker
You know, a lot of what we're talking about
00:41:30
Speaker
is really, it's a weird shift in frame from how we take it.
00:41:36
Speaker
It actually is from the ground up a different way of thinking about what it is that we're doing through school, what it's for and how we can go about doing that well.
00:41:46
Speaker
And so we've been focusing on writing thought pieces.
00:41:51
Speaker
My dissertation is out there.
00:41:52
Speaker
We do blog posts, trying to illuminate different facets of it and the shift that has to be made and kind of mindset or frame to be able to see the problems and how we can solve them.
00:42:04
Speaker
aligned with this vision of really creating a strong, a strong, thriving democracy and a place where all young people and all educators can be flourishing both today and in the future.
00:42:16
Speaker
So we catalyze conversations, we build a network and we're engaged in thought leadership trying to get these ideas out there.
00:42:29
Speaker
hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education.
00:42:33
Speaker
You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.