Point of Learning

On today’s show, the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project. For over 30 years, this unique teacher-led professional development program has cultivated multicultural teaching and learning across the globe and around the U.S.

Forty-four seasons in, Shakespeare in Delaware Park is one of Buffalo, New York’s great public art traditions. As a little kid, some of my first memories of my hometown were family outings seeing old plays in this beautiful green space. As fortune had it, I returned this summer as a performer, joining an outstanding cadre of designers, actors, musicians, directors, managers, and interns to work on a fresh, fun production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. This episode showcases contributions from some people who make magic happen.

Emily Jane Style is a “relational scholar.” She appreciates the intellectual dimension of ideas, but also knows that ideas matter relationally, because there are real flesh-and-blood people in any given room, people with real and complex life stories involved in any given discourse. My favorite tribute to Emily’s work comes from Christina Patterson Brown, an educator and activist who studied with her in 1991, and recently thanked Emily for modeling “what woke and intersectional work looked like before there was an internet.”

The U.S. cultivates a belief in meritocracy: People get what they deserve. Whatever we have, we earned. The problem, of course, is that it’s not true. In this episode, I talk with with Dr. Peggy McIntosh, the scholar who has done more than anyone else in the past 30 years to advance the concept of privilege as crucial for understanding and dismantling our pervasive myth of meritocracy.

According to the April 8, 2019 edition of The Nation, U.S. college students who graduated in 2017 averaged $28,700 in student loan debt. According to this podcast, Cuban college students averaged 0. But that’s just the beginning of what we can learn from Cuba! Episode features highlights of my conversation with Yanna Cruzata Quintero, a sidebar on the jaw-dropping Cuban Literacy Campaign of 1961, and lots of good music.

Epic Theatre Ensemble a collaborative of teaching artists and students in New York City who believe that participation in theatre is essential to a healthy democracy, and that this kind of engaging theatre experience should be a hallmark of U.S. education for all students. This episode features highlights of my conversation with Melissa Friedman, Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of Epic Theatre Ensemble, as well as some examples of the amazing work Epic does to engage students as citizens.

Listening matters for every relationship, from loved ones at home to civil discourse in community and country. This new year’s episode honors a very cool experiment in listening undertaken at the Library for the Performing Arts in New York City for six weeks at the end of 2018. Dr. Jonathan Hiam, Curator of Recorded Sound, guides us through the room in an experimental episode lit by compositions of the visionary composer and performer Arthur Russell. I think you’ll dig it.

For 25 years, Anne Phinney was a teacher who believed firmly in the power of connecting with animals to influence kids' empathy, compassion, and ideas about teamwork. For all her life, she's been crazy about horses! She now spends full days living her dream life on Moose River Farm in the Adirondack Woods with her husband Rod, caring for a menagerie of horses, goats, llamas, chickens, geese, tortoises, dogs, and a pot-bellied pig. Today she offers llama treks, as well as sessions in equi-reflection, providing opportunities for people to learn from and with horses in deep ways. We discuss all of that and more during the 2018 Thanksgiving Special.

Jill Harrison Berg is an educator with nearly 30 years of experience working in all kinds of schools. Her new book Leading in Sync: Teacher Leaders and Principals Working Together for Student Learning (2018, ASCD) is the richest resource I’ve encountered in the last decade for people in schools who are ready to build the trust necessary for real collaboration and marshal the vast resources latent in every faculty for the best possible learning outcomes for kids. This episode will be of special interest to educators now working in schools, but anyone who works on a team in any kind of organization will benefit from what Jill has to say.  [Art by Zuzy Gujda.]

This episode probes the value of mathematics and debate for students—and everyone else. Brent Farrand is an award-winning math teacher and kingmaker debate coach who established the debate team at Science High in Newark, NJ in 1979. [Thumbnail portrait of infinity by Brent Andrew Farrand.]