Human Restoration Project

Join Rob Sparrow, a philosophy professor at Monash University specializing in ethics of AI, and Gene Flenady, a lecturer exploring technology's impact on autonomy, as they dive into the ethical pitfalls of AI in education. They argue that AI outputs can often be meaningless, distorting the very essence of learning. The duo critiques the commercialization of universities, emphasizing the dangers of automated assessments and the potential erosion of genuine student-teacher relationships. Expect a thought-provoking discussion on balancing technology with authentic educational experiences.

Back in December 2024, I got an email from Tom Rademacher raving about an upcoming book from a teacher who is now a licensed counselor that read, “The thing that hooked me when I read it the first time was a whole part on teachers recognizing their own triggers to their anger and stress and learning to understand and adapt to them... but the whole thing is gorgeous.” The author was of course my guest today, Maria Munro-Schuster, and the book, which is now in print, is The Empathetic Classroom: How A Mental Health Mindset Supports Your Students – And You, which the HRP team was more than thrilled to contribute the forward:“The Empathetic Classroom provides therapeutic self-reflection activities and prompts for educators and colleagues, the psychological theories underpinning them, guidance for applying them with students, and scalable activities for classroom implementation. Maria Munro-Schuster’s call to consider the mundane over measurement is essential in improving the current state of education. This proactive approach acknowledges that we are all learners and that all of humanity has something to gain from this mission. We can create school climates that are no longer so arid that a single spark or gust of wind sets everything ablaze. If we can do this we may find that the fires are more manageable and less frequent.”Order: The Empathetic Classroom (Teacher Created Materials)

“The problems we face are not the fault of any single individual or organisation. They are often the by-product of good intentions. And yet, alongside children and young people and their parents and carers, it’s educators who are most exposed to these pressures – who confront them every day, and try to make it all work regardless,” writes today’s guest in a piece from May titled Confronting the educational polycrisis.Joining us from Brighton, UK Dr James Mannion is a keynote speaker, teacher trainer, researcher, consultant and author with a passion for educational and political reform. He is the co-founder and Director of Rethinking Education, a teacher training organisation specialising in implementation and improvement science, self-regulated learning and practitioner inquiry. A former teacher of 12 years, James has an MA in person-centred education from the University of Sussex and a PhD in self-regulated learning from the University of Cambridge. He is also the host of the popular Rethinking Education podcast, of which I have been a huge fan for a long time. In fact, HRP contributed the very first video essay we ever made to a virtual arm of James’s Rethinking Education Conference back in 2022. This conversation crossover has certainly been a long time coming!“We have multiple crises on our hands,” James writes, “They interact and have become entangled. This makes them difficult to resolve - but resolve them we must.” And my hope today is that even if we can’t untangle the polycrisis today, we can at least get a better grasp and perhaps loosen their hold on our education systems.https://drjamesmannion.substack.com/https://makingchangestick.substack.com/https://www.educationpa.org/https://wssnow.org/https://www.ucyottawa.com/invitation-to-the-rcen-book-club/

Ryan Boren and Norah Hobbs from Stimpunks dive into the vibrant world of neurodiversity and disability advocacy. They share personal stories, highlighting the need for inclusive educational spaces and how traditional systems often fail neurodivergent individuals. The conversation explores innovative concepts like 'penguin pebbling' for resource-sharing. They stress the importance of community support and mutual aid, aiming to reshape perceptions around neurodiversity and empower marginalized voices in society.

At the time of recording, New York Magazine had released an article titled “Everyone is Cheating Their Way Through College: How ChatGPT has Unraveled the Entire Academic Project” which launched a thousand takes. The piece outlines an arms race, characterized as “a siege on education” between college professors, sneaking white-text Trojan horse prompts like “mention Dua Lipa” to confound the chatbots, and students, one of which is quoted as saying, “the ceiling has been blown off” cheating. One ethics professor elaborates to add that, “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate. Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” Which captures, in my opinion, the overall tone of the piece: college is an expensive and fixed game that students endure on their way to credentials and that institutions are powerless in a losing battle to stop. Education and learning have…little to do with it. But it’s also a chicken-egg issue where institutions of higher education are themselves contributing to the same attitudes they’re complaining about: if students copy-paste a prompt from Blackboard into the chatbot, copy-paste the output, and submit it all to be read and graded…by an AI…whose problem is that?My favorite take on the topic of AI in education is a satire meant to be read in the bulldog diction of philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Zizek: “That AI will be the death of learning and so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, and we are free! While the ‘learning’ happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want.This is all to say that the conversation with my guest today, Texas educator Chanea Bond, was prompted by all of this, as she shared the New York Magazine piece with the challenge,  “Somebody invite me on your podcast to talk about this article!” and three weeks later…here we are. I’m hoping today to get Chanea’s insight on the impact of AI in education and so much more facing teachers, students, and schools in 2025.EduTopia - Why I'm Banning Student AI Use This Year by Chanea Bond

For as much as schools are a necessary collaboration of communities and families, we haven’t spent much time, if any at all, on this podcast focused on parenting itself. Well that changes today, as I’m joined by Steve Shapiro and Nancy Shapiro-Rapport, siblings, and co-founders of Our Family Culture.Our Family Culture is a platform dedicated to helping families build strong, intentional cultures rooted in shared values, traditions, and meaningful connections. Through stories, guides, and community support, it empowers families to create lasting legacies centered on purpose and togetherness.https://ourfamilyculture.org/Founder’s Discount: FOUNDER

Ryan Sprott, an educator and author, shares his insights on teaching contentious topics through inquiry-based learning. He discusses the transformative experiences of students at the Texas-Mexico border, where they interacted with Border Patrol agents and immigrant advocates. Sprott emphasizes the importance of fostering critical thinking and respectful dialogue about complex issues. He also advocates for collaborative assessments and community engagement to empower students, creating a deeper understanding of social challenges in a divided nation.

I’m joined today by Dr Chloe Keegan. Chloe Keegan is Lecturer of Early Childhood Education in the Froebel Department of Primary and Early Childhood Education in Maynooth University, Ireland.Dr Keegan is an early childhood expert with over a decade of experience as an educator, researcher, and policy advocate. Her work focuses on children's rights and power, play and participation, and influencing practice and policy in early education. She completed her doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, developing an innovative method using GoPro cameras to involve children as co-researchers in studying power dynamics. Her research also explores the impact of play bans on children’s well-being, moral development, the influence of stereotypical media on children’s views of sex, gender, and race, and participatory art-based methods in children’s research and video-based reflective practices.Connect w/ Dr Keegan on LinkedInFull thesis: It's Like a Baby Jail

https://www.humanrestorationproject.org/conference “True light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.” ― N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms (as read by Zoe Bee)In stressful, uncertain times, when cynical powers attempt to divide and isolate us, community and solidarity are acts of resistance. But there are no superheroes here, and no simple answers to be found, only the Quest for Connection. In 2025, we’re responding to the need for community and solidarity in uncertain times by turning Conference to Restore Humanity into a model for humanizing critical discourse and dialogue: bringing together students and teachers, researchers and doers, thinkers and visionaries to explore complex topics in education and illuminate a path forward together.Our virtual Conference to Restore Humanity 2025 runs July 21st through the 23rd. To make this year as accessible and sustainable as ever, we’ve cut the ticket price to just $50. You can learn more about Conference to Humanity and register on our website at humanrestorationproject.org/conferenceNebula Nostalgia by FSM Team feat. < e s c p > | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.htmlhttps://escp-music.bandcamp.comMusic promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky. Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally, her children’s books have been translated into several languages and, remarkably, as you’ll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Suess to post-Soviet Russia.Nika is the co-creator of Anthropology For Kids alongside her late husband: Anthropologist, best selling author, and activist, David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020. A4Kids.org is an open-source platform which experiments with new educational formats. After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.Most of Nika’s projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the “Museum of Care”, a nomadic ‘anti’ institute,  and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care. “Playgrounds are vital public spaces,” she writes, “—they bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides. They’re also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions. A network of community-built playgrounds, designed around Visual Assemblies, could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.”https://museum.care/playgrounds-notes-from-the-curator/ Anthropology For Kidshttps://museum.care/ Radical Playgrounds: From Competition to CollaborationCities Made Differently (MIT Press)David Graeber Institute