Ep. 44: Educated for Liberation

EQ: What does it mean to be educated for liberation and why does it matter?

Guest: Kelly Nicholls, local educator and organizer around the concept of liberated learning (we will hear more about it Radical Educator Academy! See flyer below).

School leader and change-maker Kelly Nicholls joins us to discuss her journey into education and leadership and the importance of changing the education system from within. Topics include:

• Education centered on white supremacy, including white modes of communication and hierarchical white spaces.

• Radical academy/education as liberation: resisting oppressive patriarchal systems within existing systems.

• Anti-blackness in schools - resisting treating Black people as a monolith and one size fits all approaches to discipline.

  • Louisiana School

• Individual teachers combating anti-blackness by lessening the prevalence of whiteness in curriculum and pedagogy.

Guilty Favesies

• Annie: saying yes to everything

• Hope: eyeliner

• Kelly: cigarettes (no longer a smoker, but they’re hard to quit!)

Do Your Fudging Homework

• Annie: Radical Teacher, a peer-reviewed academic journal on current social justice issues in education. Past issues available online.

• Hope: The Power Flower (Nicole Hurt)

• Kelly: Connect and follow #ClearTheAir on Twitter

Ep. 31: Not Data Without Stories, Not Stories Without Data

EQ: Why is the work of the ACLU in the Washington important and relevant in 2018?

Guest: Vanessa Torres Hernandez, Youth Policy Director at American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. Nerd Farmer Guest Ep 27

The formidable and fabulous Vanessa Torres Hernandez joins us to talk about the intersection of education and the law. Vanessa shares the story of her early life in Guam, the culture shock of American college life, and her years as a teacher.

Highlights include:

• We need to pay more attention to school safety  issues in Washington School Safety. Many instinctive responses to school shootings are wrong and not research based.  We need more preventative resources.

• There is an absurd amount of racial bias in school suspensions and other forms of discipline

• We need to question and re-imagine the role of law enforcement in schools

• The importance of stories with data and data with stories in improving school safety - it can’t just be about numbers or feelings, we have to examine both

• Equal Justice Works

• Learn more about the Every Student Counts Alliance (ESCA), a new collaboration between organizations and individuals in Spokane working to end the overuse of suspension and expulsion in Spokane Public Schools and to eliminate disparities in rates of suspension and expulsion of students of color and students with disabilities.

• Read more about WA state laws on suspension, including HB 1541 and Adopted Student Discipline Rules

Guilty Favesies

• Hope: candles, especially if they’re on sale at Target

• Annie: single-serving lunch snacks

• Vanessa: celebrity gossip magazines

Do Your Fudging Homework:

• Hope: What do you think about … Can the ACLU Become the NRA for the Left?

• Vanessa: Attend Adult Civics HH; Flights and Rights (ACLU) in Seattle; issue oriented civic engagement--most important

• Annie: clued in to what’s happening in legislature! Sign up for legislators emails

Ep. 7: Foster Care 101: A Primer for Teachers and Other Humans

Our EQ this week: How does being an interchangeable white lady impact your work in foster care?

Special Guests: Skylar Cole from Treehouse & Brianna Richardson a foster-to-adopt parent

Our guests help us understand many of the dynamics of the foster care system, including the fact that it is inherently reactive. We discuss how people of color have contact with CPS, DSHS, and foster care more often than white people. This disproportionality affects the youth we teach in a big way.

The assumptions made by those in the system are normed to white middle class values (middle class families are also much less likely to be investigated by CPS). Black families are two times and Native American families are three times as likely to be investigated as white families. Children of color are also less likely to be reunited with their families. We discuss a variety of related topics like dependency hearings, restrictions on foster parents, compensation and conditions for foster families, the serious lack of foster homes, and the subjectivity unintentionally built in to what is meant to be an objective system (which also mirrors systemic racism).

Do Your Fudging Homework:

• Skylar: Everyone needs to watch this video "What Mandated Reporters Need to Know about Racial Disproportionality in the Child Welfare System"
• Brianna: Read "Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Parents Knew" and check out the website Fostering Together for resources. 

• Annie/Hope: Go read up on Washington’s recent consolidation of Child Protective Services into the new Department of Children, Youth, and Families.  Reflect on the fact that this department now also houses the juvenile justice system and what that means for youth. Go to the community liaison or Treehouse representative at your neighborhood school and see what kind of support foster youth need right now.  Take action to help those kids! If you have the capacity, consider how you might contribute mentorship or a safe, loving home for foster youth.  

• Find on Facebook www.facebook.com/IWLpodcast

• Follow us on on Twitter @IWL_Podcast