Human Restoration Project

When I sat down with James Mannion to talk about the educational polycrisis back in July, his long-time colleague, friend, and collaborator Kate McAllister was right there by his side. After the recording, Kate & I spent a long time catching up about her work and its intersection with our own, and we immediately vowed to remember to hit record the next time we chatted.Kate McAllister is both a co-founder of The Human Hive and the founder of The Hive in Cabrera, a school for ChangeMakers in the Dominican Republic, where she joined me from for this conversation. Kate has over 20 years' teaching experience and has spent much of that time training and developing teachers and educators all over the world. She is a passionate educator, published author, fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers and The RSA. The Hive, founded back in 2020, is Kate's answer to the question "what if?" What if learning could be different? What if we did education with not for others? What if we can become more self-determined in our learning? What if education can help regenerate the planet?And as you’ll hear in this episode, Kate’s personal and educational journey is a remarkable reflection of her dedication to the fully human messiness of growing and learning in community with others.The Human Hive

Today’s episode is Dr. Sarah Fine’s keynote, the Quest for Authenticity: Lessons in Powerful Learning from the Fringes, from our Conference to Restore Humanity back in July of this year.As Dr. Fine argues, the limits of our grammar of schooling and the metaphors we use to think about teaching and learning are constraining, but there is nothing inevitable or inherent about them. This is the throughline in her observation of co-constructed and collaborative humanized learning spaces, where inevitability gives way to possibility predominates.Not only is it possible to change the grammar of schooling, but that humanizing grammar already exists within even the most traditionally structured school, Sarah argues, in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars, in the periphery. These spaces, she points out, offer “the hallmarks of a learner-centered system: trust, safety, & authentic care, where learners and educators codesign coursework.” As Sarah and her co-author Jal Mehta urge in their 2019 book, In Search of Deeper Learning, “We need to change student learning, so we need to change schools, so we need to change systems.”Video version on the Human Restoration Project YouTube channelQ&A w/ Dr. Sarah Fine

The reach and impact of our food systems – that is, the complex, interconnected, and globalized web of institutions, resources, and processes that bring food from the farm, to the table, and into the waste stream – is universal: every single one of us has either worked in ourselves, or known people who work growing, raising, producing, processing, packing, transporting, preparing, or serving the food we all eat.In the food we consume, we become connected to the conditions, the labor, and the people of the food system that produces it. Fully 1 in 10 American workers, over 17 million people, work in paid frontline food system jobs. And millions more work at home to plan, shop, prepare, and in many households, grow the food their children and families eat.There are massive implications for schools as well, as they participate in the food system directly to bring literally billions of meals to children each year, and as labor in the food system impacts the families, children, and communities our schools serve.My guests today are Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern and Teresa M. Mares, associate professors and co-authors of Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain, available from University of California Press in September. Their book captures the grim realities faced by food workers alongside the opportunities for solidarity at every point in the system while amplifying the successes and challenges faced by movements to make food work, good work.“As long as people are suffering to get food to our plates,” they write, “we need to center food workers in any vision for a just food system.”Will Work for Food book from UC Press

Please note that Human Restoration Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and that this interview is not an endorsement of Morales as a candidate for office.Before Howie Morales became Lieutenant Governor of New Mexico, before he was ever a state senator, he was a teacher and a state-championship winning baseball coach in rural New Mexico. He also holds a Master’s in bilingual education and a doctorate in curriculum and instruction. So it’d be difficult, it seems, to understand what he’s accomplished in those elected positions except through the lens of his experience in the classroom. And he joins me to talk about that experience, how it informs his work and achievements in office, and the challenges New Mexico public school students, families, and teachers still face.

In the opening pages of my guest’s book, she recounts a colleague's bumpy plane ride that provided the insight for the title of the book, Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: “We are facing turmoil in education, and the job of good leaders is to 'tame the turbulence'...educators have been caught in this turbulence; it permeates our profession and we haven't been able to get above it. As a result, it is the role of leaders to help teachers see how even small, simple shifts can change a child’s experience of school.”Rooted in real-world stories, Taming the Turbulence offers solidarity and actionable strategies to education leaders committed to centering the needs of all learners in increasingly polarized societies.And the author, Jennifer D. Klein, is an experienced educator and advocate for student-centered, experiential learning as a catalyst for positive social change. With two-decades of classroom teaching across a number of diverse international settings, as a teacher in Costa Rica and a school leader in Colombia, she now focuses on inspiring and training educators worldwide, working with groups like  What School Could Be, The Institution for International Education, and The Buck Institute. Her previous books include The Global Education Guidebook: Humanizing K–12 Classrooms Worldwide Through Equitable Partnerships and The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, coauthored with Kapono Ciotti, who we spoke with about that work back in episode 159.You can connect with Jennifer at principledlearning.orgTaming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership from Corwin

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