Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our podcast.
Speaker: My name is Chris McNutt and I'm part of the progressive education nonprofit Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Kevin Gannon, Anna Wetlandt, and Daniel Holman.
Speaker: Thank you for your ongoing support.
Speaker: You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on social media and YouTube.
Speaker: Today, we are joined by Naval Karuni.
Speaker: Naval is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor based in Jersey City who founded and operates NQC Literacy, a consultancy firm serving pre-K through eight school leaders and teachers in holistic literacy instruction, equity-driven practice, and family engagement.
Speaker: She also serves on several committees, including the National Council for Teachers of English Committee Against Racism and Bias, evaluates manuscripts for Reese Witherspoon's Lit Up program, and advises the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Advisory Board.
Speaker: Her recent book, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations, Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care,
Speaker: is a deep dive into how educators can celebrate and elevate students' families while encouraging shared reflections and connections to what's happening in schools.
Speaker: So thank you for joining us today, of all.
Speaker: I am so thankful to be here with you today.
Speaker: All right, so let's dive into this thing.
Speaker: I'm really excited to talk to you about the book because I think that family collaboration is something that many educators, including myself when I was teaching, really struggle with.
Speaker: It can be kind of a difficult process.
Speaker: It's something that a lot of folks aren't trained in.
Speaker: At first, at least for me, it's just very awkward to have to call home and talk to folks and invite people in and learn more about their backgrounds as well.
Speaker: So I really appreciated how this book
Speaker: is very reflective and interactive.
Speaker: There's a lot of activities for thinking critically about students, families and bring in that perspective.
Speaker: So I want to open up by talking about Killeen, which is the metaphor that you use throughout the book.
Speaker: It's at the beginning of every single chapter.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: How does that relate?
Speaker: How does this just kind of structure the work?
Speaker: Well, when I was thinking about myself and what holds me and what grounds me, I do often think about objects because my family didn't have much from their past because they're immigrants and they didn't bring much.
Speaker: They came before the 1979 Iranian revolution and then didn't know that they were going to stay because then the revolution happened and they never created back.
Speaker: We're not one of those families that has tons of family heirlooms, but what we do have, especially because my father's side of the family, most of their items were lost in the Iran-Iraq war that was subsequent to the revolution in the 80s.
Speaker: And so what we do have are few, but really important to me, kilims.
Speaker: And these kilims are super wonky and irregular and handmade and often vegetable dyed.
Speaker: And each of these kilims tell a story.
Speaker: And the person who created those games may have looked out of the windows and and seen a cow or might be, you know, telling a love story that they are thinking about while they are doing the weaving.
Speaker: And so you see these random objects or these kind of telltale signs of different storytelling in the rug that holds you and grounds you.
Speaker: And I thought to myself, you know, this is how education should go.
Speaker: It should be grounding.
Speaker: and natural and personal and also flexible and nimble and, you know, not packaged and from a factory, but tailored to the person who was creating it and for the people who are right.
Speaker: So, and that they're meaningful.
Speaker: And so that is how I kind of anchor my teaching pedagogy in a way.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense as the book is very much nuanced.
Speaker: There are a lot of different things in this world.
Speaker: I keep reaching for it.
Speaker: I was going to grab it.
Speaker: Because I just have to have something in my hands.
Speaker: So there's just so many different parts of this work that really dive into ways that we can think about classroom practice differently when it comes to literacy, but also family engagement.
Speaker: But I really appreciate how in the work, if you're listening on the podcast, I'm holding up, there's a table.
Speaker: There's a bunch of different tables and reflective activities.
Speaker: It's very visual.
Speaker: And something that I was kind of taking away is that the design of the book itself is reflecting that Kaleem kind of aesthetic, I guess, or vibe.
Speaker: I think was it your cousin that designed this?
Speaker: It's beautiful.
Speaker: I love how like colorful it is and easy to read.
Speaker: I hate like boring looking books.
Speaker: So this is this is exciting.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: That was also important to me.
Speaker: I think so much of how we learn is visual or for some people, you know, it is important to digest better.
Speaker: And she did an incredible job of just, you know, mirroring that experience.
Speaker: So with that said, let's talk a little bit about just some overall themes and topics that you discuss within the work.
Speaker: So one thing that I noticed is that the framework of each chapter is essentially divided into a bunch of different, I suppose, like keywords or verbs.
Speaker: So reflecting, honoring, connecting.
Speaker: And as I was reading through those different verbs, the one word that really stuck out to me was the word exalting.
Speaker: which is a word I don't typically associate with education, let alone families, at least in this context.
Speaker: So could you provide a little more detail on what it means to exalt a family?
Speaker: I really love that you identified that because it's one of my favorite words, especially to use with families.
Speaker: because I hold families on a pedestal.
Speaker: I put families higher than anything when it comes to what's the most important for us in terms of how we get to know our students as educators, when it comes to why things matter, because a family
Speaker: determines that and shapes and crafts that for their child based on their own experiences often with education formally and informally.
Speaker: And so if you have a family that has typically
Speaker: you know, excelled in formal education, they will operate differently than a family who has felt alienated from the traditional school system.
Speaker: And they will operate differently from a family who had a totally different system in a different country.
Speaker: And they will operate totally differently if they don't feel part of the fabric of the community that their child is in, right?
Speaker: All of this is determined based on the caregivers, but we don't recognize that, nor do we like typically think about that when we're approaching and getting to know just the child, right?
Speaker: though it like makes up so much of the child and exalting because, you know, all families have been teaching their children strong literacy skills and learning skills, regardless of the formal education.
Speaker: So much of this work is around, you know, debunking the myth that education is synonymous with classroom teaching.
Speaker: And what is authentic literacy practice versus schooled literacy practice?
Speaker: If I think on a continuum, schooled literacy practice being like worksheets and or isolated words on a class list,
Speaker: weekly versus authentic literacy, like knowing the word defenestrate because you are a Dungeons and Dragons or a Magic the Gathering fan, because that's like an authentic practice.
Speaker: And so that comes directly from my son, right?
Speaker: And so I think, you know, families naturally and authentically do this.
Speaker: And during the pandemic, I really recognized that because I was privy to so many family experiences on Zooms and watching families interact and
Speaker: I realized that children, you know, families were educating their kids the same way that teachers were trying to educate their kids and that we were doing the exact same things that caregiving and educating is actually synonymous.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And in terms of debunking those myths too, I think it helps demystify the idea that sadly, it's starting to take like a dark twist with this, but a lot of folks consider families to perhaps not be involved with education at all.
Speaker: And as a result,
Speaker: folks don't reach out to families about what's going on in the classroom.
Speaker: It just creates this almost cyclical doom loop where I perhaps was not that involved in the classroom because I feel like I shouldn't be involved because no one was reaching out to me.
Speaker: And then the educator says, well, I'm not going to reach out to them because they're not involved in the classroom.
Speaker: That's totally true.
Speaker: And we have so many preconceived notions and biases around families and their engagement levels when really the truth is that we should redefine what engagement is because it's not what we deem as educators to be involved.
Speaker: If a family is attending something, that doesn't make them an involved and engaged parent.
Speaker: If a family doesn't engage some, you know, doesn't attend a report card pickup, it might be because they have four kids and they travel for work or it might be because they're juggling multiple jobs and they have a sick parent at home as well.
Speaker: but we don't know and see every single one of those nuances.
Speaker: Instead, typically, accidentally, inadvertently, we write off families and we say, you know, that's a really, no, that family doesn't, that family, right?
Speaker: And so we kind of label them.
Speaker: And so a lot of the beginning of the book, you know, it goes through thinking about your biases and thinking about your own stereotypic, you know, stereotypical kind of like thinking frames around how
Speaker: family should look sound or act and whether or not you have that in your mind, what you imagine a family who's very engaged looks like.
Speaker: And just like break that down completely.
Speaker: Just drop it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's probably just good advice in general for everything.
Speaker: It reminds me a lot of like, like Frarian style thinking of like, what are the like, what's the cultural capital who's being policed in the classroom from like a student level, let alone at a family level.
Speaker: Speaking of, I think it's a pretty good segue to talking about that you describe them as wars that families engage with school.
Speaker: You talk about it in a variety of different lenses.
Speaker: I really liked the labeling of these.
Speaker: Fearful, tentative, compliant, transactional, and toxic engagement.
Speaker: I don't even know where to really frame this question at, but I just wonder if you could talk more about what that looks like and what does that mean?
Speaker: Well, in all of my interactions with schools and families across the country, I realized that, like you said, this work is so nuanced because no two populations are the same, nor is the teacher body and the population the same, right?
Speaker: And so this all was determined and based on how that shook out.
Speaker: If the teaching body was super different than the, you know, different than the families, like how their relationships melded together was very based on, you know, whether or not there was similarities, differences and understanding and empathy around the family situation.
Speaker: And so a toxic, you know, sort of engagement is one where families might demand things.
Speaker: and or families feel that they have, they can overstep in agency, right?
Speaker: They can overstep in a variety of ways because they know best.
Speaker: This might be because they are paying customers in a private school.
Speaker: This might mean because they know the systems differently than other families.
Speaker: And so they're able to make demands.
Speaker: This could be in the climate of book banning.
Speaker: This can be in a variety of places, but
Speaker: There's a really kind of toxic back and forth between, you know, some school bodies and the families.
Speaker: But then think about the families who just don't know.
Speaker: Like think on the other end of the spectrum.
Speaker: They don't know what kinds of questions to ask.
Speaker: They don't know where they have the agency.
Speaker: They don't even potentially, families might not even realize that they can ask like, what services are my child entitled to?
Speaker: which is why I give a whole bunch of questions to give to families around agency, around process, around individuality, so that they know what kinds of questions to ask other than like, how's my kid doing?
Speaker: And we just don't want the transactional kinds of engagement because we know that relationship building is like the core of all good teaching and that
Speaker: that extends to families.
Speaker: And so those labels are meant to have teachers and districts, admin, think about all the ways that families might engage and where, where you want to fall on the spectrum.
Speaker: You know, where do you want your families to fall?
Speaker: And I think,
Speaker: The heart of it all is constantly remembering that we want the same things for children.
Speaker: Like we want the same things for like our goals are the same, but somehow these barriers are up and the barriers might be up for a variety of reasons, whether that's because they feel the families feel at a deficit or the families feel very entitled.
Speaker: And so how can we bring down the barriers?
Speaker: When I was interviewing in Chicago for the like the original podcast,
Speaker: point of this project was that I was, you know, piloting this program in Chicago Public Schools with funding and during the pandemic, there were adults like families who told me, I don't want to sit in chairs that are too small for me and have the teacher stand above me and talk to me and give me the expectations for my first grader.
Speaker: Because I'm a big talking man, I'm not interested in sitting in a very teeny tiny chair.
Speaker: And even that dynamic
Speaker: was like it created an environment that changed the way that those families wanted to engage in the schools, you know?
Speaker: And so it's just meant for us to think.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's fascinating that you bring that up because it's very similar to the work that we're seeing on the ground.
Speaker: So HRP, the way that we conduct a lot of our work is through empathy interviews.
Speaker: And part of that process is going into schools and having community focus groups or community empathy interviews.
Speaker: We'll bring in caregivers, family members, community members, et cetera.
Speaker: and talk to them about the future of education, how they feel about schools, et cetera.
Speaker: And what we find is exactly what you're saying, that first off, everyone wants what's best for their kid.
Speaker: Like no one's coming in and saying that they want everything to be the way that it is.
Speaker: They want to see more engaging classrooms.
Speaker: They want to see more hands-on learning.
Speaker: They want to see a lot of things that I think a lot of folks consider to be common sense.
Speaker: But what's most shocking to me is that we work in a lot of
Speaker: I suppose, very conservative areas.
Speaker: We work in a lot of very small rural schools.
Speaker: And I'm always nervous as all get out.
Speaker: both looking the way that I do, very nerdy, kind of liberal coded guy, but also bringing up things like social justice work, DEI work, because it's part of what we do.
Speaker: And I'm always nervous as all get out that I'm going to mention this and I'm just going to be run out of town and that we're going to start talking about critical race theory or something random.
Speaker: That's never been the case, fingers crossed.
Speaker: Every single time, families will tell us, no, that's what I want for my kid.
Speaker: And then they'll get into like the nuances of maybe why they harbor some problematic beliefs.
Speaker: But it's nothing that we can't work with in order to help their kids really have a worldwide lens, diverse lens, folks that engage with empathy and kindness and more.
Speaker: I love that empathy interviews is definitely part of all of this.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: I think we don't do maybe enough as as educators to just ask to ask to ask to ask it or and
Speaker: There's not the space like there's often not space across the daytime calendar year.
Speaker: And so it's important to think about when are the times where we can invite families in.
Speaker: I really encourage schools to not have the first parent teacher conference be parent teacher conference, but more it to be.
Speaker: like a caregiver collaboration session where we're co-creating something we're learning about the families we're like, because those grades in quotes from the beginning of that session, like is very snapshot and
Speaker: not useful, not as useful as knowing the families, knowing what their dreams are for their children, knowing what their cultural background is and what they can contribute and what they do as a family and what literacy practices they already are engaging in as a community.
Speaker: That will teach you and tell you so much more about the child that will then be able to, you know.
Speaker: So yeah, I love that.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, as you said, it moves away from being transactional, which kind of leads you into writing a book that almost feels insurmountable, which is about how do we connect with human beings, which is one of the most complicated tasks potentially that exists.
Speaker: And that's a task that is partially trained.
Speaker: I mean, you can read about it, but also something that you learn by doing because it does involve a lot of
Speaker: failure, I suppose.
Speaker: I'm glad that you brought that up because I do, you know, family lab sites where I'm inviting families into schools and classrooms and then, you know, the teachers who I work with continue this.
Speaker: And every single time teachers will say like, but what if a family says something that like breaks my heart, makes me cry, or I feel uncomfortable addressing, you know, we'll do things like draw neighborhood maps with our families or draw like, you know, special place
Speaker: because, you know, draw a special place with your kid, you fill this page that then becomes part of the brainstorming.
Speaker: So the kids, so families know then what the writing brainstorming looks like.
Speaker: No kid has a paper that's, you know, empty because they're sitting there with their family members and, or they're like going down memory lane.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And there's always something that's like kind of emotional and there's, there's failure in that.
Speaker: And, or there's like discomfort in it.
Speaker: Um, and every time the answer is just like, okay, then you sit
Speaker: Like then you sit and you reflect.
Speaker: I mean, there's not, there's not much more to do beyond when you connect with humans, there's like discomfort in it and there's going to be, but there, you know, if there's like a safe place for it and there's a place for families to come and say and do their, the reward will be reaped much bigger than maybe potentially the like mini discomforts around, like we didn't have a bed.
Speaker: We don't, you know, there were, there were a lot of things around that, that the teachers felt discomfort around, but it, it wasn't uncomfortable for the families potentially to share.
Speaker: It was just like sharing the reality.
Speaker: And then, you know, so it's just, it's eyeopening, nuanced, important, emotional, of course, because when you're dealing with families, it's like always emotional, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would imagine that the co-creation of those activities as well and framing it around
Speaker: kind of learning by doing or experiential learning, whatever you want to call it, opens up the door for a more caring conversation.
Speaker: Because when it is transactional, and like, for example, you're calling home and saying, you know, so-and-so has an F in the class, whatever that might be, you're
Speaker: you're really much creating like a dichotomy where it's teacher assigning kid label, as opposed to it just being, oh, here, we're engaging in dialogue together.
Speaker: There's no purpose of this beyond just the connection.
Speaker: And I would imagine that would lessen the chances that you would have kind of an adverse or kind of toxic relationship that develops early on.
Speaker: It's kind of like an evolution of the idea of
Speaker: call home and say something nice about the kid at the first week of school toward let's have an event and actually like bring people in and really engage with them.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: And they're really low stakes and they're really kind of there.
Speaker: I say at the beginning, there's no right or wrong answers.
Speaker: This is just joyful.
Speaker: It's just to have fun.
Speaker: You see palpably like everybody's shoulders go down because the families think that they're like on test for what they're supposed to like learn or create or do.
Speaker: And it's like, not that it's actually just like a joyful creation of something.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I brainstorm all these ideas with teachers, we're like, what are the Family Lab site co-creation, like little opportunities across the calendar year that we can look at your curriculum, look at what you're going to be teaching and or craft these little experiences in addition to the other things that we do typically and traditionally.
Speaker: We're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker: It really is kind of a collectivist approach of all these different things because you'll catch different families in different ways.
Speaker: You'll meet different families in different ways, just like we meet the needs of all of our students in different ways.
Speaker: And the coolest thing to see is people on the internet running with these family lab sites after I work with those teams.
Speaker: I mean, it is so fun.
Speaker: It makes me want to cry.
Speaker: It really makes me want to cry.
Speaker: I mean, I feel like it really meets people in the moment.
Speaker: I mean, I would imagine just practically that a lot of especially younger families are not using their phone.
Speaker: Like they're not calling in.
Speaker: I can count like on one hand how many phone calls I make in any given like three to six month period.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We're connecting and like online, obviously, but also.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: like through text and apps and just a variety of other means and I would imagine that having those family lab sites helps just really make more transparent what's going on at school because like we know that the vast majority of families think that their public school is amazing but they think that other public schools maybe aren't so great
Speaker: That's just the general opinion.
Speaker: But it doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt to have folks come in and see what are the practices of the classroom because you are very much talking a lot about what I would describe as progressive education.
Speaker: Like you're talking about moving away from one and done grades.
Speaker: You're talking about moving by like through a process where kids iterate on assignments.
Speaker: A lot of those assignments are more hands-on.
Speaker: So it's the caregiver connection isn't just
Speaker: So parents are involved, which is important, but it's also that we can change some pedagogy and invite families along in that process.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's like a layered sneak, sneak, sneaky to say, these are also really important values in education.
Speaker: And those values, by the way, are often lived out in families and family experiences by walking down the street and looking at a mural and noticing lots of different things and asking questions.
Speaker: And if they're not, it's super easy to ramp that up and support our work as progressive and, you know, you know, kind of like thoughtful educators.
Speaker: Well, you know, someone who has no time, someone who only has like the commute to school with their children.
Speaker: What are the things like when I do these part of this has been really interesting because now I do a lot of family facing work that's not educator facing.
Speaker: But now I'm like meeting with families and libraries and different kind of refugee organizations and like
Speaker: I'm working with families in a bunch of different ways.
Speaker: And so families will say things like, but my kid is stuck to their phone.
Speaker: How can I communicate with them then?
Speaker: And how can I build communication during a time when my kid is constantly on TikTok?
Speaker: And so we think about
Speaker: What are the literacy practices that that kid is learning in those moments?
Speaker: And what are the ways that a family can engage with their kid in that way that is boosting learning still?
Speaker: And so I love to just engage in the practice of a really simple T-chart.
Speaker: Like what do families do all the time with their kids or what do interactions look like?
Speaker: And on the right hand side, what learning is happening?
Speaker: or what learning could be happening.
Speaker: And you can name it down to like the standard for schools and districts that need to go there.
Speaker: But you can also do just like, this is nonfiction learning.
Speaker: This is fiction learning.
Speaker: This is conflict resolution.
Speaker: This is empathy building.
Speaker: Like families who go to a sporting event with their kid, families who are going to a soccer or a play, right?
Speaker: Like what are the things that happen in those moments that then can translate into really awesome writing in the classroom?
Speaker: Really awesome thinking, right?
Speaker: Like there are,
Speaker: families need that confidence boost and that validation and teachers need to know that all families are doing that even if it's like dysregulation even if it's emotional dysregulation or your perceived um you know family dysfunction like if you because i don't want that to get in the way either and it seems like at least in my experience once you crack that code
Speaker: You have more family involvement in your classroom than you really know what to do with, which helps from a systemic level when it comes to things like projects.
Speaker: Like, for example, I would all the time have folks come in and talk about the work that they do.
Speaker: They would help work on projects with kids.
Speaker: They would volunteer many hours of their time, often more than really I needed to come in and work with us, which was really beneficial to me as a teacher because
Speaker: just pragmatically, you'll never have more well-behaved kids because kids don't mess around with other kids' parents usually.
Speaker: But also, they learn a whole lot because it makes it more real world.
Speaker: This is a person who's not an educator, typically.
Speaker: There's someone who just
Speaker: lives in the quote unquote real world.
Speaker: And they're explaining a very similar concept to hopefully what I was talking about the day before.
Speaker: And it just adds a lot of legitimacy and credibility in addition to having that family connection, which is so important.
Speaker: I think that so much of it is looking at your calendar across the year, looking at your units, looking at all the things, and then figuring out when you can have families and figuring out when you can invite
Speaker: And so like when you can invite families in a very kind of low level ask that feels like little, like here's a little invitation or a bigger one, like, are you going to have them involved in a project or an activity in the building?
Speaker: Are you going to like think across your year so that there are lots of different opportunities in different levels and like amounts to really like tap into the expertise of like the whole adult community?
Speaker: Because then every teacher says to me, it's wild.
Speaker: There are more like collaborative partners.
Speaker: It's like I have all these other teachers because then
Speaker: that call that you're making to the parent is not in isolation when you say like, by the way, this wasn't turned in and or it's been becoming a pattern because you know that parent pretty well.
Speaker: You know all the things that are happening with that parent, right?
Speaker: I always give the example of when we moved from Chicago to Jersey City, we had kids in different schools.
Speaker: So I experienced the transition to a new school in a bunch of different ways.
Speaker: And I had an experience where my daughter was like being, I had to drag her down the
Speaker: sidewalk to get her to school and she didn't have the right tights and she was super upset that she didn't have her uniform and the teacher did not even know that like we were living out of bags for several months as we were like transitioning between houses and for like a place to live with our family of six right um
Speaker: And there wasn't even like a conversation.
Speaker: It wasn't even like, what is your living arrangement?
Speaker: How are you living?
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: How does that affect this child?
Speaker: Is she like an only child?
Speaker: Is she one of four?
Speaker: Oh, she squeezed in the middle.
Speaker: Like these are all things that like you need to know about your kid.
Speaker: And or, right, like versus another school where it was like,
Speaker: There was an entire conversation.
Speaker: There were forums.
Speaker: There were like, you know, Google Forms.
Speaker: There were all these like, how can we create a sense of belonging?
Speaker: Like there was a lot of.
Speaker: And so this is completely up to you.
Speaker: This is like within the locus of control of your classroom, you know.
Speaker: So, yeah, it can look a lot of different ways and it makes for a very different experience for the child.
Speaker: Speaking to that, this is probably a very loaded and complicated question, but I would imagine that part of what makes this work easier is when it scales into the culture of the building as opposed to it feeling like all of that weight of involving families rests on one teacher's shoulders.
Speaker: How do you help schools slash how do you feel like this book?
Speaker: can assist educators in bringing more people into that conversation so it can be a shared task as opposed to it just being like, you're my thing that we're doing.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker: It's not super loaded because now I've been doing it for long enough to know where it takes off and where traction happens.
Speaker: It happens when there's an excited cohort of teachers with a supportive administration behind them because they need time to think alongside each other
Speaker: about different invitations that can exist, and then they have to try it out.
Speaker: They have to spend some time thinking about the systems that exist and if it's working or not, and maybe tweak it.
Speaker: They need to think about the language that they use in the classroom.
Speaker: So like caregiver conferences or guest reader, we're not saying anymore.
Speaker: Instead, we're saying guest storyteller, because how might you inadvertently be alienating someone who thinks that the word reading sends up red flags, right?
Speaker: which has like happened in my spaces.
Speaker: And so, and so they need time.
Speaker: And so you need administration to like be on board and to say like, this is a project that we are, is part of where weaving into the fabric of our school.
Speaker: But I have found that year after year, if you have a small cohort of teachers doing it together, potentially like reading the book or thinking about it together, at least, you know, doing some, then you,
Speaker: the showcases make it so that their colleagues are interested in joining.
Speaker: Because what we do is of course showcase this across the year in so many different ways.
Speaker: There's been like really, really cool collaborative projects with families that then lead to like little QR coded conversations that you can scan as you're walking by so you can hear the families
Speaker: interacting with their kiddos and you see the actual like, you know, labor come, come out visually in like totally interesting ways that people are excited about latching onto.
Speaker: And so after three years, there tends to be like full school shift if you start with a tiny cohort that's dedicated.
Speaker: Yeah, the coalition of the willing is a very strong group.
Speaker: And it also helps, too, with a sustainability of the impact, right?
Speaker: Because as you invite more people into the fold, if one of those folks retires or leaves to join another school or whatever that might be, all of those practices don't go with them, because that is always the fear of any kind of
Speaker: cultural shift, especially, I mean, obviously like these huge positive systemic shifts that because they all rest on one person that then disappears.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So with that said, I'm curious about like, what's the, what's the big picture?
Speaker: So you've written the book, you're working with all these different schools.
Speaker: Like what's your, what's your why of doing this?
Speaker: Where do you hope this goes in 10 years, 20 years?
Speaker: Like what's the big picture aspirational question that you're hoping to, um,
Speaker: remedy or solve.
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: That's such a good question.
Speaker: Was that on the list?
Speaker: Oh my goodness.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What I really hope is just for schools, it would be amazing to me if all pre-service teachers read this so that number one, it was part of the way that we learn to teach.
Speaker: My why is very much families should not be disconnected from knowing the children.
Speaker: And they are part of the collective care framework that we need to collectively grow strong, critical thinkers and amazing humans, right?
Speaker: And so families are part of that work.
Speaker: I think that it would be a win to me if family engagement was redefined completely so that no school in the country believed that family engagement was attendance
Speaker: And no school in the country believed that family engagement was picking up, you know, a report card or because when the definition is defined from the school.
Speaker: That is incorrect.
Speaker: I want I want the strength to always be an unapologetic reverence and an unapologetic positive regard for families, recognizing their cultural capital and the funds of knowledge that they're bringing.
Speaker: figuring out how to better teach the students as a result, the children as a result, because we know them so deeply, and then it being a cycle of care.
Speaker: Like that is my hope.
Speaker: I don't know in practical terms, I think at the very minimum, we all need to shift language and we all need to shift, you know, our invitations.
Speaker: We all need to check our biases around families.
Speaker: Like we need to look at our texts to make sure they're representing all kinds of families and family structures.
Speaker: Like these are all things that feed into the work.
Speaker: But I want it to start from from from pre-service.
Speaker: I want all teachers to know this because it's it's harder when we're doing so much already.
Speaker: And then we're also saying and don't forget families that it's not an afterthought.
Speaker: It's not something to tack on at the end.
Speaker: It's not a checklist.
Speaker: And that was like part of the publication of this book.
Speaker: There were companies that wanted it to be publication companies that wanted it to be publishing houses.
Speaker: a checklist like a this is how you engage with families but it's just not it's just not the work the work is nuanced it's very journalistic it's very um it's it's like heart driven um and i'm like speaking as a mother of four young kids who have like experienced so many different school situations um and like what do you want for your own children all children are our children and speaking to pre-service teachers i think
Speaker: I don't know how far down we want to go down this path, but what's interesting about what you're saying is that, I mean, a really common critique of teacher preparation programs is that they are not, I guess, realistic enough or grounded in reality.
Speaker: Like they're all theory based, but at the exact same time,
Speaker: Part of my personal fear of that is that the way that you would shift back to a more pragmatic style of teaching and learning in pre-service is not typically towards what you're saying.
Speaker: It's toward the more transactional, like,
Speaker: if a kid, you know, starts speaking too loudly in class, how do you get them to stop as opposed to how do you learn more about them?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because that it is not a checklist, but yet so much of education is formulated in checklists.
Speaker: And that behaviorist mindset is so intertwined into how school systems operate, especially pre-service kind of like disciplinary policies.
Speaker: One of the most
Speaker: Horrifying things I've ever done is I I went back and got my career technical education certification So I was teaching for about 10 years.
Speaker: I went back and got a digital design certification and as part of that process I had to go back to school and I was in courses with folks who were all transitioning on a more traditional careers to become educators and
Speaker: The way that those classes were taught made me lose a lot of faith in how pre-service education was working because it was all rooted in how do I control this space?
Speaker: I mean, we were, there were, I have to share this one tangent example.
Speaker: We watched this YouTube video where this guy unironically was saying that you should squirt kids with water bottles when they sleep in your class because it will be funny and the kids will laugh at them.
Speaker: And yeah, my eyes were the same way.
Speaker: I was like, I'm sorry.
Speaker: Like, like, what are we doing here?
Speaker: Um, and it, that like kind of like adultist style, like, Oh, like we have all the power.
Speaker: They don't, it's funny.
Speaker: It's silly.
Speaker: Uh, let's like control kids and find interesting ways to control kids is very, very, very different than this idea of like love and care and humanity.
Speaker: Um, um,
Speaker: I don't know where I'm going with this, but it's just, I mean, I think where you're going with this is, you know, the center of all of the work that we do as educators should be caregiving.
Speaker: I mean, even in pre-service, like that's a shift that needs to happen.
Speaker: It should like caregiving and educating is the same because if you list the things that families do and you list the things that we hope to achieve in the literacy classrooms, they are the same.
Speaker: Like they are the same.
Speaker: And that is like something that I think we are like completely missing.
Speaker: If you get this book, if anybody gets this book, it does not need to be, does not need to be read all the way through it.
Speaker: You can try the ideas in one chapter.
Speaker: Other than that, I would just say that I have, um, a ton of conversations with kid lit authors whose books I recommend, um, that families have been using with fidelity, like just having, listening to these conversations.
Speaker: I have had families reach out to me and say it was so interesting for me and my kid to co-read a book and then listen to the author.
Speaker: Because I think really thinking about the round reach of all the different individuals who support growth of children's literacy skills is so critically important.
Speaker: And so I don't know, just I would just say like my last thing is
Speaker: don't disregard any adult in a child's literacy experience.
Speaker: When we think about collective care, it can be the bodega owner, it can be the spiritual community leader, it can be anyone who is there to debrief with the child, to talk through emotional literacy conversations, to all of those people contribute to the child and are valuable for then springboarding the same kind of learning that we're doing in the classroom.
Speaker: So I don't know, I really do believe in the collective.
Speaker: There is an entire chapter in the book on that.
Speaker: And so I thank you for interviewing me because you are part of my collective.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free at our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
