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0:00:09.7 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas to the theories and practices behind entire systems. Think education is cool? So do we. So we pair two conversations, learn about our guests, then learn from our guests, share your takeaways and come back from more. You're listening to Think. Pair. Share with me Audrey Scott.

 

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0:00:43.0 AS: Today, we'll focus on learning through doing and on ways to create sustainable pathways out of adversity for children and youth. We'll consider the compelling intersection between inner-vulnerability and outward resilience, and for all your conspiracy theorist out there, we'll explore the conspiracy of goodness, as well. So, without further ado, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Neil Boothby, to Think. Pair. Share. Neil is a professor and Director of the Global Center for the development of the whole child at the University of Notre Dame. He's an internationally recognized expert and advocate for children affected by war, displacement and abject poverty. As a senior representative of UNICEF, UNHCR and Save The Children, he has worked for more than 25 years with children in adversity around the world. I'm eager to begin the conversation.

 

0:01:33.8 AS: Neil, thank you so much for being here, I really appreciate it.

 

0:01:37.1 Dr. Neil Boothby: My pleasure, Audrey, nice to be with you.

 

0:01:39.3 AS: Nice to see you as you're holding down the fort on the East Coast, so thanks for joining me via Zoom today and I look forward to the conversation.

 

0:01:47.7 Dr. Neil Boothby: Great.

 

0:01:48.9 AS: How have you been? 

 

0:01:50.0 NB: I've been good, under the circumstances... Gosh, I think it's... March 13th was the last time I was sort of out of my little cocoon, thank goodness at the country level, we're able to continue doing things. So, that part is good. How about you? 

 

0:02:05.5 AS: Yeah, same, absolutely. Our filming has been quite curtailed, but we've had chances to boost up the audio stories and... Sure, appreciate you joining us. Ready to go? 

 

0:02:17.4 NB: Okay.

 

0:02:17.5 AS: If you could pick up one new skill in an instant, what would it be? 

 

0:02:21.4 NB: One new skill in an instant, I think it would be Creole. I would like to be able to speak Creole because we spend an awful lot of time in Haiti, I get by a bit in French, but Creole allows you to talk to people within the communities in a way that I can't do at the moment.

 

0:02:41.8 AS: If you could live with any fictional character, who would you choose? 

 

0:02:46.9 NB: So, I'm a huge Walker Percy fan, and there's a novel called The movie goer, where Binx Bolling is the main character, he lives in New Orleans, and I found him to be a very fascinating sort of existential type thinker. I'm not sure I'd really wanna be him, but he's a character that fascinated me at a very sort of time in my life where I was still trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, so Walker Percy is my favorite author and one of the best characters is Binx Bolling.

 

0:03:17.1 AS: I'm not as familiar. Can you tell me something that you found fascinating about him? 

 

0:03:21.3 NB: So, Walker Percy described himself as a Catholic existentialist. He was an MD, he never really practiced. His father died at an early age, so it kind of got him preoccupied with questions about where did we come from, what should we do, why we're here, and where are we going after we die? So the novel, the movie goer, is set in New Orleans around Mardi Gras, and it takes place over the course of a week. And really nothing action-wise happens except the main character is going through a whole process of trying to figure out how he can wake up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and live a life of meaning.

 

0:04:02.4 NB: And in the end, he ends up getting together and marrying an individual who he's known for quite some time, Kate, who is somewhat fragile herself. But at the end, there is a closing passage where Kate who suffers from anxiety has to go downtown, she has to take the bus. And Binx says, "Listen, sit in the second seat on the right, and I will be thinking of you the entire ride." And again, it sort of puts together that I-thou relationship, I don't exist outside of the perception of somebody else. And so they sort of solidify, sort of came together around kind of holding each other in one's mind and in one's heart, and that makes the relationship real.

 

0:04:55.2 AS: It sounds actually really, really wonderful. I shall look this up. Thank you. If you were in charge of picking the eighth wonder of the world, what would you choose? 

 

0:05:05.1 NB: The eighth wonder of the world. I'm gonna fudge the answer a little bit and turn it into a modern-day miracle, alleviating poverty, actually creating a quality, at minimum, in this country, if not globally.

 

0:05:19.4 AS: I don't think there can be a better answer than that. What do you wish you had placed in a time capsule 15 years ago? 

 

0:05:26.5 NB: Probably what my personal goals were at that time, and I guess I would pull them out and sort of check to see the extent to which some of those had been achieved and perhaps how they might be refined and re-dressed moving forward in this next part of my life.

 

0:05:42.9 AS: Actually, that would be really cool. I always thought, I wish I had done more journaling as a...

 

0:05:48.6 NB: I threw most of my journals out, I did not... Unfortunately, bury them.

 

0:05:53.4 AS: Do you work better with music or without music? And if so, what are you listening to now? 

 

0:06:00.0 NB: So, normally, I would say I work without music, except when I am writing more reflective pieces. So, if I'm in my science side of the brain, I don't like music. If I'm in more creative, personal journaling, writing letters to loved ones and whatnot, night I will turn on music, and I think Ronnie Laws is this someone I spend a lot of time listening to. He's a jazz person who plays pretty mellow music, and I find it quite soothing and quite... It allows me to sort of think without having to deal with a lot of words, it's largely instrumental as opposed to vocal.

 

0:06:42.2 AS: That makes sense. Yeah, I knew a woman at work who could not work without music, so she'd wear headphones all the time, but you're right, I fall on that camp of you, if I'm trying to concentrate, I like something in the background that's not necessarily interfering, but that can help me focus. Okay, one more in the fun category, name a healthy food you enjoy and an unhealthy food you find hard to resist.

 

0:07:06.4 NB: Well, so my wife Susan, we do share cooking responsibilities, but she makes the best salads I've ever had. So, I would say a salad from Susan would be the healthiest... She does all the organic vegan stuff as well. And on the unhealthy side is, one of my remaining vices are Lay's potato chips. Even when I do 40% reduced salt, I still feel guilty when I eat them.

 

0:07:37.7 AS: Those are one of my husband's favorites as well, so I don't think you can eat just one. They were right about that.

 

0:07:45.5 NB: Yeah, exactly.

 

0:07:46.2 AS: Well, thank you for playing along and I appreciate we started getting a little fun glimpse into some of the stuff you enjoy. Tell me a little bit about the Global Center for the development of the whole child, explain a little bit about what that is and what the main crux of the work that you're doing is right now.

 

0:08:00.5 NB: Sure. So, the Global Center for the development of the whole child is a university-wide center that sits in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, and it was founded in November 2019. We work in nine different countries. On the one hand, we work in two countries around crisis, so refugees and internally displaced people. We work in India, for example, with the tribal societies which have set up residential schools to work with children from the delete, the outcasts and others that grew up in abject poverty and societally and historically have been told that they're not worth anything. And so the schools really work on self-esteem, and you can do it and imbuing 21st century skills, and have been quite successful in terms of progressing children out of that ditch that they've been in.

 

0:09:00.7 NB: And in Haiti, for example, where we're working at 340 school communities, and activating a Catholic parish system that includes the school, the church, and the family, and really working at how do we activate, create and activate a child development and learning system. 'Cause in a country like Haiti, for example, the government doesn't function terribly well, and about 85% of education is provided by non-governmental actors. So, you really kinda have to create the system. So we'll work in abject poverty, kids facing multiple kinds of adversity, and we look at it perhaps in terms of approaching it systemically, how can we activate the entities around children that are most important in their daily lives and support those entities as best as we can? 

 

0:09:50.1 AS: I feel like the scope of your work could seem overwhelming. First, how would you describe the work you do and how did you get involved in it? 

 

0:09:58.3 NB: Well, thanks for that question. I've sort of zigzagged in and out of academia on the one hand, and then operational organizations on the other. So, I've taught at Harvard, taught at Duke, taught at Columbia and came to Notre Dame, most recently. But in between, I ran Save the Children's programs, Children In Crisis programs. I was the head of UNHCR children's unit. I worked in Rwanda after the genocide with the UN and whatnot. And I think to me, the culmination of those experiences where you're sort of putting your hands in the Moon, so to speak, but then you're coming out and being able to think about it and write a bit about it has been useful, but I think it's also sort of forged a perspective, which I think is... The Global Center represents that perspective, which is that if you're talking about kids in adversity, one intervention such as Health or Education is not necessarily gonna change the life trajectories of kids.

 

0:11:00.1 NB: Because the structural issues are multi-dimensional. So, the center, in a sense, attempts to understand what are the key interventions at what you need to do that to not only get kids to learn how to read and write, but actually then support them in terms of evolving out of poverty. And perhaps our program in Haiti is the best example of that, in that Notre Dame has been there for 14 years, but we came to Notre Dame in 2019. I moved my operation from Columbia University to Notre Dame, largely out of my experience in Haiti with the Notre Dame team, which was an incredible commitment to making a difference in the lives of children and learning through doing. I was inspired by Notre Dame's conspiracy of goodness in Haiti, and I think we've moved from kind of a literacy program for first and second graders, so a school-based program that was in 340 schools, so it had quite a bit of scope and scale.

 

0:12:00.0 NB: But it was a singular intervention, teaching young kids how to read, and we moved from there much more towards a parish systems activation model. Whereby in a country like Haiti, the government does not invest that much in education, 85% of the schools are managed by non-governmental actors, so religious actors, civil society actors, etcetera. And so there isn't a robust national system, so the question then is, what is a system? What does a child development and learning system in Haiti... And actually, the Catholic parish provides the best opportunity to invest in systems because you have a church, so very religious people, they go to church, every parish has a school or most parishes have school, so you have a church and a school, and then you have families that send their kids to school and go to church. So, those are the three most important things in the daily lives of children.

 

0:13:00.8 NB: In fact, there's sort of a saying in Haiti that there's only three places that your kids should be, either in school, at home or in the church. And so that's sort of... Lakay, Lekol, Legliz . We call it L. So, it's our three-L system we're looking at, what can we do at the household level, especially given that the parents really are the first teachers in the house, what was it for school? And that 70% of the achievement gap is evident before kids even go to school. So, how they get off, whether they get off to a strong start or a slow start or whatever start, really determines then to a large extent, where they are when they start a formal school. And we saw with the literacy program, we did a pretty rigorous RCT, and they did learn how to read, comprehension, whatnot, word recognition, whatnot. But the bar was so low to begin with, that though they made progress, kids would come in to school, first grade, never have been read to, or they hadn't drawn or the teacher would say, "Turn to page six." Half the kids didn't know what a page number was.

 

0:14:05.2 NB: So, that's kind of the baseline in a certain sense. So, we went younger and we're working now on, what can parents do? So, we have parent teaching programs, kids get baptized, what can parents do at the household level? And then what can the church do? So the baptism, there's three to five pre-sessions before you're baptized, so the parents and the godparents and extended family come in. So, we've integrated sort of healthy brain science, it's simplified, we have videos that show parents how their love will support positive brain development, etcetera, etcetera. So, we're sort of using the church and the baptism is the mechanism that is most scalable. So, we get parents when they're young, they can get referred to the parent training programs, we have resource centers now where you could come in... We can't take the Internet to every household, but you can put it in every school community and parents and others could come in and download digital stuff, etcetera, etcetera.

 

0:15:05.1 NB: So, anyway, I'm getting into the weeds here, but the point is, is we're activating a system because in combination, those interventions stand a better chance of promoting lifelong learning and actual changes in the lives of kids. So, that's essentially what we do. And we have two types of partnerships, we have the dig and deep stuff, like Haiti and India is another example of where we're in it for the long term, but then we come alongside in other countries and provide technical assistance around program design, measurement and learning. So, it's kind of a blend of what we call our flagship program, dig deep, long-term operational versus kind of technical support.

 

0:15:47.6 AS: That sounds like extremely rewarding work. Are you comfortable sharing, why do you do it? 

 

0:15:52.6 NB: Yeah, no, I am, because it is a life-long endeavor. And I'm of an age where I don't necessarily have to continue working, but I can't find anything that's more meaningful.

 

0:16:06.8 AS: Was there something that made you look at the world versus focusing on the US? 

 

0:16:14.9 NB: No, that's a great, that's a great question. I'm not sure there was a thing that did... I was extremely fortunate to study with Robert Coles, who was a social psychiatrist at Harvard, that's basically why I went there. And Bob was someone who took his skills into the real world, and he, for example, was observing Black children who were integrating schools in the South for the first time during the Civil Rights Movement and whatnot. So, I was very captivated with that sort of approach, not lab work, but work in the real world. And on my way to Harvard, I think it was somewhere in Oklahoma, I was stuck on a freeway and I was listening to a radio program about people from Southeast Asia coming to the United States.

 

0:17:04.5 NB: And it dawned on me that that's kind of what I wanted to focus on, I wanted to focus on refugees, flight, etcetera. And so when I got to graduate school, I put those two interests together, and I'm still not quite sure why that... Especially in the middle of Oklahoma, why that captured me. But those two things came together in my mind. I was doing an internship and I was asked to assess the mental health of a young White boy who had lit a house on fire. And it turns out the house that he lit on fire was occupied by Vietnamese people who had come over on the boat people during that era. Fast forward, one of the persons in the house was a young 13-year-old girl who had lost her mother at sea. She had been that had been attacked by Thai pirates. She had been raped and thrown overboard and the girl survived, and I was...

 

0:17:58.8 NB: I guess, captivated, fascinated by this dialectic of inter-vulnerability. She's certainly... Her life had changed... Speaking of her mother would bring tears to her eyes. It was still a living pain, so to speak. And still, she functioned at such a high level within the two years he had lived in this country, she had learned to speak English, she was the best math student in her school. And in fact, the boy who lit the house on fire had been the school's math winner the year before, and this young woman had displaced him. And so there was a personal connection and also a racial connection between what happened. And so this whole thing about what is resilience... But that was inspired by a 13-year-old, but I was fascinated with her inward vulnerability, but outward resiliency. And that helped me sort of frame what my dissertation was gonna be about, and with a small research grant I worked... Went and worked on the Thai Cambodia border right after the Khmer Rouge genocide. And millions of people were fleeing Cambodia, but it was that young girl who kind of really solidified my interest in child development and crisis, so a little serendipity. But that's life.

 

0:19:19.6 AS: I'm fascinated by so many of the experiences that you've had, being there amongst these tragedies, can you talk to me about the human spirit in those elements? 

 

0:19:32.3 NB: Thank you, thank you for that question. I do think that that's extremely important, and I must confess that you go into the situation, so if you look at the genocide in Rwanda, you see the best and the worst of humanity. I mean, you see cruelty beyond belief, but you see compassion and sharing and solidarity in ways that you just... I don't experience it in the same way in my everyday life. And maybe just two examples of the worst moment in my professional life and perhaps one of the better ones, the worst moment, clearly the tragedy was in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there was a million refugees, Rwandese ended up flooding into Zaire, Which is lava rocks, big volcano lava rocks, and it's on a big, big lake called Lake Kivu, and they were emaciated sort of really thin wobbling into the camp, thirsty, hungry, they all rushed down to lake Kivu and they started drinking water and it turned out that it was... They all got... A lot of people got cholera, and they were dying like 10,000 a month, I think at the height.

 

0:20:46.3 NB: Well, this left a lot of children that were perceived to be alone, abandoned or orphaned, the babies were picked up and taken to a Caritas refugee camp, this is where the baby orphanage was, and it was basically the orphanage was just sheets of blue plastic to cover for the rain, which didn't happen that often, dirt floors, and then army cots just put in rows, and the babies were stacked, put on the cots like loaves of bread with IV stuck in their arm, so they were getting nutritional input, but nobody picked them up and held them. And I remember getting there one day, and this one baby was in the process of dying, not because of micronutrient deficiencies, but because of the lack of love and care. And I remember picking him up and looking in his eyes and he was already in a different world. And I remember at the time thinking about my first born son, when he was about three months, and I picked him up in a similar way, and I looked in his eyes and he laughed and he giggled and he recognized me. And in Zaire it was the opposite experience, it was this haunting look of no facial recognition, 'cause it was a boy, he had cried and cried and cried, and nobody responded to his needs, and it's called failure to thrive where you don't have any human contact, you cry and cry and cry, when nobody picks you up, you give up.

 

0:22:32.0 NB: And that moment has haunted me ever since. I hope now it haunts me in a good way, but it was very, very painful. So that's the ugly side of things, but it also is a window into what you need to do. Now, why in the heck did these nuns think they didn't have to pick up babies, and why in the heck... When I asked them that question, Well, we have to train people first. Well, you mean to tell me you have to train a Rwandese woman, or a Zaire woman, how to pick up a baby and wrap the baby around their bodies with their scarfs and go on with their everyday chores. Come on, this is not rocket science. So it provided a window of maybe a positive intervention, but it was... Well, it was awful. On the flip side of that, one of the better moments professionally is in Mozambique where war had divided hundreds of thousands of kids from their parents, they were separated from their parents, and in many cases, the kids and the parents didn't know if one of the other was alive. And we started a family reunification program and ended up re-unifying, tens of thousands of kids over the course of a year or so.

 

0:23:44.5 NB: But one of those moments, again, it was a teenage girl who had not seen her parents for over two years, and we put her on an airplane, we flew her back into the area that she lived, we got off the airplane, we're walking through kind of a quasi, it's not jungle but sort of savannah whatever in these pathways and there's little huts along the way, and you can start hearing people in their native language talking and kind of getting excited, and there was kind of a rumble that went through from house to house, and we walked up and finally the daughter and the mother see each other and wrap their arms around each other and embraced each other. And that's also a moment that's worth a lot...

 

0:24:36.5 AS: Oh my goodness, thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing, and that you care, see and that's... You can throw up your hands. You could be like, That's not my problem. Why do you do the work that you do? 

 

0:24:51.5 NB: Well, it's moments like that. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I love golf, I do play a lot of golf, but I gotta tell you, as much as I love it, it doesn't compare two moments of... Whether it's in a Haitian community or in a refugee camp in Tanzania, that's just... That's my community.

 

0:25:16.2 AS: Is there a calling there for you? 

 

0:25:19.5 NB: Yes. We spend a lot of time working. I can't imagine doing something I didn't love. As they say, if you find something that you love, you never have to work, and so there's that personal relationship of being in a place like... I've had my ups and downs, I've many, many failures, I've been in organizations which just grind you. But to make a long story short, absolutely. I do feel called to these issues, I'm not sure why. And the reason I came to Notre Dame in 2019 is because Notre Dame feels that calling too.

 

0:25:56.2 AS: We all need moments to believe in something bigger and hopeful, and it sounds like even though you've seen some of the very worst this world has to offer, you're still hopeful. Are you? 

 

0:26:08.4 NB: Absolutely, there is... Maybe it's cliche at this point in time, I think resilience may be overused, but people... Our souls and our hearts are quite resilient. If you wanna look at it scientifically, evolutionary, we've been going through bad advance forever and ever, and we do have tremendous ability to persevere and bounce back. I don't know what it would be like to live in a world where you're not hopeful. I think in this country, we're seeing that increasingly sort of this politics of grievance that's out there, which is kind of based on pain and neglect, anger and whatnot, I worry most about us as a nation spending too much time in that grievance. We have to, I think extend equality to everyone, but on a personal level and a society level, we've gotta find that hopeful place and then realistically build out from that. I just, for myself, I can't imagine... Even in the end if you lose it's better to work from a position of hope than it is from a position of grievance.

 

0:27:27.6 AS: I do have one more question I would like to ask you about that. It sort of fits into this category. You've seen some very violent things, but you also see the other side of it. People think violence begets violence, but you have observed where people in their next generation wants to make that difference, be that difference, give their families what they didn't have. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

 

0:27:52.5 NB: Whether it's sort of the Cambodian children that I first worked with back in the early '80s, many of whom we've resettled in the United States, and we continue a relationship, they're now in their 30s, 40s, or child soldiers in Mozambique that were abducted, trained and forced to kill other human beings, and now have gone back to their families and again, they have kids of their own and we stay in touch, more episodically. But using those two groups as an example, and the genocide that was Cambodia, and the brutality of RENAMO atrocities in Mozambique wide scale, the vast majority have grown up, have gotten married, have children, and it really is with their children that you see the difference. In many cases, it's not, again, sort of bringing forward harsh punishment, discipline, anger, alcoholism, whatever, the violence that we often get described as being perpetuated kids that are exposed to violence perpetuate violence. I haven't seen that. In the aggregate. What I've seen more is altruism that I didn't get this as a child, and I wanna make sure my son or daughter has it.

 

0:29:10.3 NB: So for example, in Mozambique, kids of former child soldiers actually as an aggregate, go to school longer than children who didn't experience those things. I'm not equating the two, but I'm just saying... And it's a little bit Audrey like the way that a pearl is formed, it starts off as sand and an irritant in a clam and there's a reaction around that and whatnot, but yet it eventually comes out as something of high value. And that's kind of what I've seen in some of these children that have gone through a crisis is... I don't know how to explain it very well, but it's altruism more often than it is violence.

 

0:29:53.8 AS: That's beautiful, thank you. What does resilience mean to you? And does education play a role in that, and if so, what? 

 

0:30:04.8 NB: Yeah. So I think there's a tendency in the United States to look at resilience solely as an individual characteristic, this child is resilient, she has the ability to bounce back from adversity or bounce back from trauma, she never gives up, etcetera. And I think to some extent, that is a rightful definition of resilience, but I think you also need to look at resilience from a social perspective. That girl would not have had the ability to bounce back had she not been with parents or other caretakers who gave her that love and that responsive care, that sort of solidified the social and emotional capacities within her cognitive development, which is kind of the brick and mortar for sort of academic success. So I think it's both an individual but a social construct, you do not become resilient on your own, you become resilient through interactions with others.

 

0:30:58.1 NB: And then the reciprocal relationship between education individuals and resilience, is resilient children do better in school and good schools produce resilience for that social interaction stuff. So there's a reciprocal relationship between the individual's resilience and then the school's resilience and each need is other. The challenge, I think, for education, is that we're preparing kids for jobs that don't even exist yet, so it's difficult to know exactly how to do that, but there are some sort of true and tried things, for example, we know that reading and writing and those kinds of skills are important, but the cement, or the glue around that is also social and emotional development. If you can't regulate behavior, if you can't concentrate, it may matter less how smart you are, for example. And so I think around the social and emotional issues perseverance, empathy, not giving up, being able to modulate your emotions, so you're not going into tirade on the one extreme or perhaps on the other side, becoming passive and not participating and whatnot. So those kinds of concerns are gonna be solid regardless of what the jobs are. So I think it's a combination of making sure that education is sort of holistic, that we're educating all parts of the child, perhaps even including her spirituality, for example, and not settling for just the academic stuff.

 

0:32:40.0 AS: Are there things that the average person might be able to do to try to contribute to something better in your work, in your world View? 

 

0:32:51.5 NB: I think if the focus is global, so beyond one's own community or beyond one's own nation, I think being aware of what's taking place in the world, in particular, perhaps the country's nearest to us, so there's lots of issues and problems in Latin America, and Mexico and the whole immigration issue, of course, Haiti is our neighbor, and it's the poorest community in the Western hemisphere, and probably many of us maybe don't pay as much attention to those things as possible. So I would just say stay aware and contribute in one form or another when possible. But perhaps the best learning takes place locally, so maybe global awareness, but there's a lot of things you can do in your own community, whether that's volunteering in a school, whether that's helping elderly people, reading to young children, we're learning more and more... If we go back to the early childhood development paradigm, the numbers of words that say children in middle class professional households versus who are perhaps well off households by the time they go to school, could be as many as millions of words. And again, that gap, what could a community do about the former kids that you can read to them, you can volunteer, there's lots of things you can do to really, really help children in your own community. So I would urge that sort of action, but then also maintaining an awareness of what's going on around the United States, for example.

 

0:34:21.3 AS: Wonderful. And reading a lot of the materials and things that you're working on, I'm reading this Conspiracy of Goodness. What does that mean? 

 

0:34:31.3 NB: Well, I think it... So Conspiracy of Goodness is something I've taken from a group of Huguenots in France during the Nazi occupation that ended up taking in many, many Jews when that was illegal and dangerous. And one of the children that was taken and came back as an adult and did a documentary called Weapons of the Spirit, and he's trying to explain... He goes back to these communities and ask people that are still there, why did you do that? And they said, Well, what else could we have done? This is what was required of us. And so we kind of cast around that whole phenomenon, this was a conspiracy of goodness, and that's always stuck with me because I think the Global Center and the work in Haiti and our colleagues in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and their ACE programs, these are conspiracies of goodness. We might stumble our toes, we might fail, we might not achieve everything we wanna achieve, but we're attempting, I think, to do good. And so, to me, it's a good conspiracy to be part of versus some of the other ones that we’re hearing about these days, which is kind of weird to say the least.

 

0:35:46.1 AS: I couldn't agree more and I'm happy to be in on this conspiracy of goodness with you and others. And thank you so much for your time today. Neil, it has been a pleasure.

 

0:35:54.4 NB: Nice talking with you.

 

0:35:57.8 AS: And thank you all for joining us for Think. Pair. Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate and leave a review, it's very much appreciated. Check out our website at iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening and for now, off we go.

 

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0:00:09.7 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas, to the theories and practices behind entire systems. You think education is cool? So do we. So we pair two conversations. Learn about our guests, then learn from our guests. Share your takeaways and come back for more. You're listening to Think-Pair-Share with me, Audrey Scott.

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0:00:43.0 AS: Today, we'll be talking about literacy. My guest believes it's essential to our being, that it's what ties us to history, to community, to culture, and allows us to engage. That's very high praise and a pretty tall order. So I'm excited to jump right in. But first, allow me to introduce, Ernest Morrell. He's the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education, a member of the faculty in the English and Africana Studies Department, and Director of the Centre for Literacy Education at the University of Notre Dame. Since 2015, Dr. Morrell, a well-respected leader in the field of English Education, the African Diaspora, and Media and Popular Culture, has been ranked among the top university-based education scholars. In an introduction to his biography, he says, "Words are power and freedom. Words are life and love. Words are seeds and the vista. Words, at least revolutionary ones, are the source of revolutions. I live for words. Writing is my service. My very words are love." We're so happy to have him with us today. Ernest, thanks for being here.

 

0:01:53.1 Ernest Morrell: Thanks, Audrey. It's a pleasure.

 

0:01:54.8 AS: Great to see you after all these months during the pandemic. How have you been keeping busy? I know you've got the kids there at the house. What kind of fun stuff have you been doing? 

 

0:02:03.2 EM: Well, we try to make it kind of a winter wonderland. We built an art studio over the summer, and so the kids have been painting on canvas. They've been learning music and recording music. They've been writing. My youngest son has been coding. And then also we just decided we were going to enjoy the winter and got snowboards, and we've been, you know, just trying to mix it up a little bit, and that's been fun.

 

0:02:28.9 AS: My gosh, it sounds like a winter wonderland.

 

0:02:31.2 EM: Yeah, it does. You gotta celebrate it, right? It's gonna be three months of the year. You gotta do something with it. So we got a lot of snow. Snowboarding works.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:02:37.9 AS: I think we're getting some more as we speak, actually too.

 

0:02:39.8 EM: Yeah.

 

0:02:41.1 AS: Thank you for joining me via Zoom, and we'll start with those sort of ice breakers. Some are quick answers, some are maybe not, some are I'm sure goofy, but I appreciate your participation. I think we'll start with a softball one. Are you a morning person or a night person? 

 

0:02:55.7 EM: We're night people. So when we went... We went into a very dark place when it was like no school. We were up to three in the morning, and then up at noon, I figured like 6:30-7 is mid-day in my normal biorhythm, so you get the same amount of sleep. But there's just something about it, I think, because we're creative types, and writing and reading and that kind of stuff. So 10 AM is morning enough.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:03:20.8 AS: I hear you. That sounds great to me. Hey, you gotta take the perks of this type of situation, so that's one of them. Okay, if you could only watch one genre of movies for the rest of your life, what would it be? 

 

0:03:32.8 EM: That's a hard one. I'm a... Like a... If there's a ball, I watch it. But in terms of movies, probably like histories, I really do like kinda well-made period dramas, particularly the Renaissance and the early modern... It just seems like such a, I don't know, sophisticated time, you know, compared to now. I really love the costumes of opera. It's just... There's just something about it.

 

0:04:00.0 AS: You're halfway there, I think, with the bowtie, so that was it.

 

0:04:01.9 EM: Yeah, see, that's what [0:04:03.1] ____.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:03.9 AS: I love it, I love it. Okay, great. This one might be a little silly, but what fictional family would you wanna be a part of? 

 

0:04:10.9 EM: Like TV or a novel? 

 

0:04:13.9 AS: Yeah, anything.

 

0:04:17.5 EM: Oh I think it'll be fun to be a Medici. They're not fictional so much, but yeah, you know.

 

0:04:23.6 AS: Hey, that's okay.

 

0:04:24.4 EM: Minus the head choppings and all that, yeah.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:27.1 AS: You get to pick or choose a little bit.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:04:27.9 EM: Run a bank, live in Milan, have Michaelangelo and Raphael painting for you in the garage.

 

0:04:34.6 AS: I love it. Can we come summer with you, please? 

 

[laughter]

 

0:04:36.1 EM: Exactly.

 

0:04:37.4 AS: Okay, great. What's the strangest compliment you've ever gotten? 

 

0:04:43.9 EM: Probably the version of, "I thought this was gonna suck, but then it was pretty good." Whether it's a student at the end of class or a keynote like, "I wasn't looking forward to this at all, but you made it. You didn't suck."

 

0:04:56.0 AS: You didn't suck. That's good. What's the best piece of advice you ever received? 

 

0:05:02.3 EM: I think, my father passed away a couple of years ago, so every day I play back something that he said. What doesn't take you out makes you stronger. Family is everything. Your faith roots are deep. Trust God. Love is the greatest strength that you have. Emotions are good to have but not to be ruled by. It's just some of the things that he says, if you let someone control your emotions then you become their puppet, but just a lot of maximums from my dad that just kind of pop into my head. Really, it's about family, faith, fidelity, kinda like God, country, and Notre Dame; those values are everlasting. I feel like my dad had eternal values. So it's just the constellation of those are kind of a... I don't know. It's my greatest hits. There's the gospel, there's my mom, dad, my grandma.

 

0:05:52.8 AS: Oh gosh, thank you for sharing that, actually. He sounds very wise.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:05:56.0 EM: Yeah.

 

[chuckle]

 

0:05:57.9 AS: I know that you've lived a bunch of other places and now you're living in South Bend. Can you tell me, for instance, something that you miss about New York and something that you like about here? 

 

0:06:07.1 EM: Everything is close. I feel like South Bend is enough city, enough town, that... Just see what Notre Dame, the river, and the downtown, and it's... Everything's really close. So you can experience the city, you can go to a football game, you can go to a show, and the campus is wonderful, and then I feel like we're undersold on how much of a... Kind of a playground that is in the spring and the summer, and it's just kind of outdoors, and there's Michigan right there. I guess with New York, there is kind of a frenzy to it.

 

0:06:38.0 EM: There's just a lot of stuff to do, but I also feel like with DPAC and with a lot of things we have, we get that, but you kinda get spoiled in New York, the kind of access that you have to kind of, I guess what we call high culture, there's a tremendous diversity, the urgency of it sometimes. One of my mentors, when I got there, he says, you don't have to be good in New York, but you have to be fast. Somebody's getting on the subway, getting that seat at the restaurant, that sort of thing, and just kind of people watching. We get off the subway at 72nd and walk up to 110th and Broadway. It's about a 40-minute walk, but if you have the time for work, it's just unbelievable, and it's just the spectacle of the city, the Skyline when you're coming across to George Washington or the Throgs Neck. Whether you're coming from the east or west, it's pretty spectacular.

 

0:07:30.9 AS: Yeah. I actually worked out in New York right after I graduated from Notre Dame, so I do really enjoy visiting and getting back out there sometimes. But you're right, but there's positives about both places, so that's great.

 

0:07:43.6 EM: I think college towns are actually the best combination, because you have a lot of big city stuff, but it's in a small town. I've really learned to love the college towns where I've lived. They're special places in America.

 

0:07:55.8 AS: I agree, 100%. Thank you. Do you have a favourite childhood book? And, why? 

 

0:08:00.5 EM: There's 'The Little Engine That Could,' and there's some Dr. Seuss, like 'Fox in Socks.' And I think what it is, is it's the memories you associate with the book, 'cause your mom read it to you over and over again, and all the talk about the fire engine books and that sort of thing, it's like, "Oh yeah, you just made me read them over and over again." My grandma and one aunt lived on the same block, there were three of us on the same block, so I think that it's more of the memories, the associations that you make with the books than the books themselves, and the research brings that out that, kids don't necessarily remember the books, but they remember the experiences that they have around them.

 

0:08:35.6 EM: And so they're fun. We used to do Dr. Seuss, and we tried to make raps out of Dr. Seuss and do beats off of them and that sort of thing, but I think it was just fun 'cause you can memorise the words and they were pretty easy and they were silly, it wasn't much to the stories. But I was with Kwame Alexander, we were on a panel and we both chose 'Fox in Socks.' I remember before, I was like, "No way." And I guess it's 'cause it's a little bit... A little bit hip hop, it's a little fun and so of course, I had to give my spiel and then listen to Kwame Alexander just rap the whole book to the audience and I was like oh okay and it's a new book.

 

0:09:11.4 AS: I think that you would agree that every person has a story worth telling. Can you tell me a little bit about yours? 

 

0:09:16.7 EM: So I grew up in the Bay area. My mom, and dad were school teachers, and we were just kind of making our way in the world as they were a first generation to really move from a pretty southern working class aesthetic into being professional, so that was kind of fun to watch them. And I spent most of my formative years in San Jose, growing up playing sports, watching them do what they did, and I was fortunate enough to be able to go to college on scholarship, and I was gonna major in business and law. And that's what you do. And the more I got into that world, the more I really began to understand the logic and beauty of what my parents did.

 

0:09:53.4 EM: So subsequent to graduation, I actually ended up teaching in the Bay Area and doing a bunch of wild things in my classroom, got us on the front page in New York Times, got us almost fired, but it was really just ways of getting kids super excited about school and learning and some of the things that I do now and I get paid for them, they wanted to fire me. But what it led me to understand was, like, the limitless potential of kids, but also the importance of really doing academic research and trying to document how some of the beliefs about kids and learning were wrong.

 

0:10:25.0 EM: So I ended up going back to graduate school at Berkeley while I continued to teach in Oakland, and when I finished my coursework, my wife and I moved down to Los Angeles and I started UCLA and created this program for kids, and that kind of took off and I got my PhD, and then I've just been on the academic track and working with kids in communities for the past 20 years, 28 years an educator, my 22nd year really full-time in higher education. So that's taken us to Michigan, to UCLA, to Columbia, and ultimately here to Notre Dame.

 

0:10:55.0 EM: So I was reading back this weekend over papers that I've written over the last 20, 25 years, and it's still the same story for me. It's still... It doesn't get old, what literacy can do, why it's important, the potential of kids, the power of them interacting with stories, the beauty of being able to hear their own voice to contribute to the conversation, like what Walt Whitman says, the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. And it's really just putting them on stage and letting them go. It's been a beautiful ride, I've been just really blessed.

 

0:11:25.6 AS: Well, we are blessed to have you, and I'm not letting you off quite that easy though. I'd like to go back to where you almost got fired etc for just a quick second, because I think it matters why you were passionate about it. When you were growing up, you said maybe you would be a businessman, maybe a lawyer, and somehow you shifted to education, and obviously your parents were in that role, but can you pinpoint when it started to become a passion of yours? 

 

0:11:47.6 EM: So as a college athlete, I was involved in a couple of programs where we got to work with young kids. It was like a thing you did in college and it was pretty much... I was interning for Bank of America, and I was thinking of JD MBA and 44 Office and APG in the new building in San Francisco, overlooking the bridges, and where my bosses were, it sounded pretty cool, but it was... I knew I wanted to write, and I became really passionate about that. I became an English major in my junior year, I kinda switched from economics to English and no one at the bank had a problem with that.

 

0:12:19.2 EM: They said it doesn't matter what you major in really, you kinda learn to be a banker here, but I went from a hobby to a real passion, and it wasn't... I had a good time with the bank, but it was just making that decision of what... Later on I heard someone say, "No one wants to spend their life doing their second favorite thing," and my favorite thing was writing and really trying to figure out how I might help people along this trajectory. As I said, in my life from the plantation to the palace, how do we get there? And that became more valuable for me than how do I get there? But how do we get there? 

 

0:12:56.0 AS: Yeah.

 

0:12:57.4 EM: And it wasn't... There were moments where... And I'd look over 'cause where I taught in Oakland, you could see the skyline of San Francisco. And facing what I was gonna face, I thought, "Is this the right decision? I could get back on that train and I could walk into the bank and they would hire me right away." So it was hard. But in retrospect, I have no regrets. It was really just... It was providence. Father Tumis, he talked about providence. It was providential. It wasn't so much a plan, but I just couldn't send the applications into the law school.

 

0:13:29.4 EM: And I didn't know what I was going to do and my mom said, "Well, you should come home and teach." And then I said, "Well, I'm gonna teach and then go to law school," and then, "Well, I'm gonna teach for another year," and then, "Well, I'll go to graduate school and get a degree in English," and then, "Well, maybe I'll do English and education." So it's just a series of steps that happened pretty quickly between, say, 21 and 25. By the time I was 25, I was pretty much on this track, but I can't go back and really pinpoint moments, it was just... I was called and I was just lucky enough to listen and to be surrounded by people in the bank and outside of the bank that really supported those decisions.

 

0:14:06.9 AS: As an educator, what did you see potential... Your mind went places that maybe other people's didn't. Were you driven by something else? Were you trying to teach them something? 

 

0:14:19.7 EM: I think, Audrey, we've come in the field to think about learning, where we first primarily thought about teaching. And I wasn't so interested in my teaching as I was in their learning. And I can remember a kid, the very first day that I taught in Oakland and I was going on about my syllabus, he raised his hand, he said, "Are we gonna do anything fun in here this year?" And he was joking. We got along fine, but it was... I guess what I wanted to do was to get them excited. And I was more addicted to their excitement than I was to anything I wanted to do. So I had British lit. And we started out with Beowulf. And Beowulf reminded me a lot of hip-hop. He's always bragging. They're in a meet hall and they're just like, "What songs are you listening to that remind you of Beowulf?"

 

0:15:06.9 EM: And they started bringing in really good songs and they got super excited about it. And we were talking about violence and the glorification of violence and a little bit of misogyny and just the... And some of the... Maybe the underbelly of the Saxon culture, but then the... The spectacle of it. And then I just had to kind of keep topping each unit. And they're like, "Listen to the Goodie Mob, and listen to this and that." And then we went into... Canterbury tales was the second unit. And I got this idea to have a court trial, and put Chaucer on trial for his portrayal of the pilgrims. And then I just kept rolling, Sir Gawain, and then like what are we gonna do for Hamlet? So that first year, we just had to throw away everything because they were... They had increasing demands, 'cause each unit was getting more and more fun.

 

0:15:49.2 EM: And so the part about the fire was really the combination of a poetry unit that included rap music, and that was just seen as a non-starter, teaching film and doing film study in the classroom. We did Godfather and The Odyssey, and then social action projects where kids had to come up with a project about changing the world. And some of that was things that they saw in their community, and some of it was things they saw on the school. It wasn't that, though. I mean, my administration was super supportive. It was making the newspaper.

 

0:16:16.2 EM: So it was fraught for being like 25, 26 and saying, "We're just trying to get kids excited," I don't really consider myself kind of a rabble-rouser. I always considered myself as a kid who takes out the trash for the neighbors. How did I get myself into this?" I asked myself that a lot, but it was really just the... How do you get them excited? I think I still ask that question a lot in the books and the articles and the talks. How do you get them to lean in? There's nothing like it, when they're all leaned in and they're totally invested and they're trying to talk over each other and their hands are up. And I'm willing to sacrifice almost any idea I have to get them to that point. You become addicted to it, you don't... You can't hear the crickets in the classroom anymore after that. So that's been just... Now, you have to add a bunch of theory and research on to that and why it's important and do that thing, but it was more instinctual at 22, 23.

 

0:17:16.4 AS: My hats off to every single teacher. And I think that's interesting that you said you used to be focused on teaching, and now it's focused on learning. Is that across the board, do you feel like? 'Cause I do feel like that's changed quite a bit.

 

0:17:29.0 EM: It's a more popular idea. I wouldn't say it's mainstream, it's average. But we're able to ask more questions now about how kids learn. We're able to talk about terms of disengagement, which I don't know that we would have worded it quite that way. My first year teaching was 1993. We have a lot more language to talk about, how kids are learning outside of school, and then they come to us as learners. What are the barriers to motivation? A lack of confidence and a lack of agency. Really, if there's something I can do and something that I like, I'm gonna be more motivated.

 

0:18:04.6 EM: So we're certainly injecting the language of learning in a lot more, even when we're talking about teaching. But how do you know kids are learning? It's not just what you get on a formative assessment or a summative assessment is what you see in them. So I feel like we've come a long way. I mean, the world of education has changed tremendously in the past 30 years. And regardless of the kind of contemporary rhetoric it's been, it's a pretty unilateral set of progress. And part of that, I think is really just unlocking this unlimited potential inside of them and just seeing what's possible for kids. The number of kids were able to go on and have two-year and four-year college experiences as opposed to what it would have been in the '80s, is just... It's really just remarkable.

 

0:18:48.0 AS: It's exciting to me, and I almost wanna be a student again, to a certain extent. Was there ever a time where you could talk to those students who had been so inspired by maybe the unorthodox way you were doing some things to see what the difference was for them? Were you ever able to sort of have any assessment of that? 

 

0:19:04.6 EM: Yeah. It's how I taught from the beginning. Obviously, I had my own educational experiences. And I kinda do what my colleagues were doing. I've actually been in continuous touch with almost all the students I've taught to this day. So I still follow them, and we... Social media facilitates that. I think the conversations were really about like how the world sees them more than the pedagogy itself, it's more of the outcomes of it, and how they really wanted to continue that, a lot of them are teachers now, a lot of them got involved in local community kinds of things, they do everything. Just one of my basketball players. She just got elected to public office in this last election.

 

0:19:48.4 AS: Wow, nice.

 

0:19:49.0 EM: So the conversation is really with their lives, but there were moments when I told them I was gonna go back to graduate school and they started to kinda freak out, you're gonna leave. I was like, "No, I'm gonna stay here but what I really want is for everyone in America to be able to have what we have in this class," and they were like, "Yes." And so there were those moments like, well, these are the things that we think are really important. And so I would say, if you could speak to America's teachers, what would you say? Just know we want to learn. Know our passion, you know the whole sociology of youth was around deviance. Our expectations have been historically low for this group of people in terms of what their values are and what their investment is in their own futures, and so it's really... Look at the kids, let's see them as strengths, let's see them as additives to society, and see them as genius, there's a... I think the most widely read book this summer that came out, the new one, Gholdy Muhammad's 'Cultivating Genius.'

 

0:20:41.9 AS: Yeah.

 

0:20:42.8 EM: The part of the cultivation is recognising the genius, that's there. So I do think that was a really important part of the relationship with them, I was close to them in age, I was in my early 20s, they were in their late teens, so we weren't so far apart, and they knew I'd grown up part of my childhood in the city, my mom taught in the city, so we shared that and we shared this bewilderment that people saw us so differently than we saw ourselves, and some of that has come to a head very recently that it's kind of shocking 'cause you just see yourself as normal like everyone else, and not everyone sees you that way, and so there's a real problem. And they'd... They were so aware of it because the community was insular, but the more they... Kind of we looked at larger media and there's a referendum on us out there, and it's just not accurate, and so I think part of the conversations that they wanted to have about education was about being loved, and being seen as lovable and being regarded as good people, like the people who taught them, saw themselves.

 

0:21:50.9 AS: I can see why they've responded to you. I would like to give our audience some kind of a common framework to talk about literacy, if you had to give the simplest definition of what literacy is, what would you say? 

 

0:22:02.9 EM: So, the short one would be the power to read the word in the world, so that you might become authors of the word and the future of the world, there's five really small components of how you put that together. Since we're talking about education, I think about children and young adults, but that they can understand the text that they read, and I think about that in three ways, if they can decode them... To be a reader of the word, you have to be able to decode to understand the words on the page, but just how to comprehend, and you have to be able to ask meaningful questions about those texts. And the second would be how you learn to read the world you live in, how do you make sense of the news, how do you make sense of why some people live one way and other people live another way, and it's the same thing, you wanna be able to decode that environment and the words that we read in text whether it's newspapers or children's books, help us to read the world.

 

0:22:58.4 EM: So that's the third part, you become a reader of the word and the world, but then I think we've moved more to not just reading, but what do you do with that, how do kids and young adults develop unique identities in relation to that world around them, and how do they find their own voices, whether it's a speaking voice or whether it's a voice, in the digital literacies or their writing voice, how can they share their own stories as actualised beings and world changers, so it really kind of moves from this understanding the text and understanding the world and understanding my place in that world and then being able to make things, to do things, to write things, and so you can see literacy is kind of essential to our being, and it's what ties us to histories, what ties us to community and culture, it's what allows us to engage, I think of people like Thomas Jefferson or Socrates or Jesus, who've talked about the word and how important that is to our own understanding of ourselves, because Harriet Jacobs talks about in the slave narratives, to contemplate freedom, to read yourself as someone who deserves freedom, while you are enslaved to create a cognitive dissonance, and that's partly bolstered by her journey to literacy during her time as a slave. I think that we really want these kind of three moves; the reading, the kind of self-awareness and the social action.

 

0:24:30.2 AS: One of the things that resonated to me in that bio you just sent was words as seeds. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that? 

 

0:24:37.8 EM: Words help to bring ideas into being. Again, with the slave narratives, Harry Louis Gates, who is a professor at Harvard, talked about, we speak and write ourselves in the being, and I think of Robert Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Jack, and he says he just saw things that didn't exist and he wondered why not... So the words can be seeds, so you talk to a five-year-old about becoming a poet one day, and then she becomes Amanda Gormant. The words are a seed, you just say, you're a poet, you're a genius, you're beautiful, you're gonna change the world. And then they become ideas, 11 John, the word became flesh. Right, and it's like the idea is like the seed can become flesh, it's just this little thing you plant in the ground, it comes up as a pumpkin, as a carrot, as something that you can dig into, but at first it's a seed, it's invisible. Nobody can see it. And so the words are seeds, but sometimes they're not pumpkins or carrots, they come up as more like poison roots. You are no good. You don't belong. You are second class. You are ugly. You are poor. Your beliefs are wrong, so...

 

0:25:44.4 EM: We... They're not innocuous and literacy is not just kind of a positive trajectory, if the stories that you're getting access to are poison or dangerous or harmful to you, so we want to plant seeds that are nutritious, that are sustaining, but words can do both. That's why literacy is so important. You have to be careful, you have to navigate a world that runs counter to a lot of the beliefs that we hold dear. And kids must do that as well. But when I say words are seeds in the bio, I'm talking about in the positive sense, how do you uplift, how can... I think I say in that same paragraph, my very words are love, they're me. I think that words can be love. And you wanna plant those seeds of love inside of our youth and let them know that they are loved, they are lovable and they are capable of love. And we can do that partly through the language that we use to communicate with them.

 

0:26:44.7 AS: How do you think is the best way to help these children and young people find their own voices? Where do you begin? 

 

0:26:51.8 EM: I think you begin with story. So, kids are natural storytellers, but they are first, story experiences. And we tell them stories, you say you tell stories through documentaries. We also tell stories around the dinner table, or on a road trip, and just exposing young kids to more indigenous stories of who we are and how we came to be who we are. Reading to children. And so they understand that the world is full of story, it's a big place. You come into the world able to listen and understand before you're able to speak, and that's for a reason because there's a lot to learn. But I do think as early on as possible, kids become storytellers, and there's this kind of multi-directionality of story, and the more you're able to tell a story, the more you become voracious with the stories of others. It never stops. There's not a point where, "Okay, I've heard enough story, I'm gonna go write some myself now." But it's a recursive, and we constantly want to continue to give kids access to more and more story and the skill set to be able to share their own story.

 

0:27:58.6 EM: And I think that's where education comes in, whether it's formal or informal, like setting up an art studio or the... Having a keyboard or piano, you can tell a story through the piano, but you have to learn the notes and so education is really important. How do you construct story, you think about the language of film in montage and long cuts, and just the realism of Italian cinema versus kind of like a Quentin Tarantino film, they can't be more different, but there's technique. It requires an education. How do we support that if we are educators.

 

0:28:31.8 EM: Sometimes what's absent is the space between hearing stories and really creating a learning context, how kids can do this powerfully. 'Cause you run the risk of moving from a didactic pedagogy to just a laissez-faire where you say, have at it, and that's not effective. I can remember, we brought in, when I was in LA filmmakers, 'cause kids we're doing documentary film, and there was this filmmaker, he was a cool avant-garde kind of guy, and he first taught me how to pack and unpack the film... He's like, hold on before you hold my camera, and he was like, he was in it, "You just, you can't come grab the camera," and he talked about how close you have to be in documentary and how to frame a picture, and then they were able to tell stories, some of them became really good documentarians, but he was hard on them, he's like, "Ah, you're so far away. That's like two dots back there, you gotta get up, you gotta know what they had for breakfast with the camera," and those sorts of things.

 

0:29:26.2 AS: Yeah.

 

0:29:26.6 EM: I think it's the same in other genres as well, it's just being awash in story though, and understanding that the story is really how we constitute ourselves as members of cultures and communities. It's like if you played a sport or you had a certain kind of art form that you followed. You can't see it enough, you need to see them, but you need your own blank canvases, and you need people who can help you be you. And I think that's the dilemma in education, because it's like either I'm hands off or I'm just like, I got a cookie cutter model. But how do I help you be you, is something that kinda keeps me up at night. How do I help them along this road, but kinda disturb them a little bit when they're too comfortable? But at the same time, how do I get out of the way? But how do I lead the way? 

 

0:30:11.1 EM: And I think that's part of the beauty of pedagogy because it's... 'Cause you're supposed to be active, but it's a gradual release model, because one day they're gonna become you, they're gonna become the people who are in control, and we want access, but we also want the skill set and the sensibilities, and we have that role as parents, grandparents, neighbours, parishioners, teachers, principals. The skill sets and the values are really important to transmit.

 

0:30:43.2 AS: How do you instill a joy of reading, a joy of learning, a joy of valuing oneself? 

 

0:30:52.0 EM: So, part of it is the relationships that you're building, and they have to be filled with story, so I think we've come past the moment where we took our most vulnerable kids and held story from them, and they just had worksheets, and it was not the story, it was complete this sentence or what word is missing, and that sort of thing, and so it's gotta be authentic. It would be being in playing scales and never getting to play a song until... I think that we've of solved that problem. We read aloud and all that stuff is back, but I think there are other elements to your question that are important, and you do want to go from the whole to the parts, and so part of decoding is not just reading the words on the page, but understanding genre, understanding form, understanding structure and technique. And you're getting it as you're reading these whole stories, and so the comprehension and the questions that you ask really do become about, how did the author put this together? 

 

0:31:46.0 EM: So Jody and I have this three-part model of reading, you're reading behind the text, you're trying to understand who the author is and where they came from, but how they're trying to communicate. You read within the text and what's their style? What's their prose? What's their diction? And so kids are asking those sorts of questions, and then they get out in front of the text and they think about what they might do, how they might improve, how they might write their own text, so you're dealing with these whole stories. I can think of my dad pacing behind the chair, coaching the TV during the football game, and we're watching the football game. He's like, "How could you run on third and eight? You gotta pass!" So, you're breaking it down and you're watching it, you kinda see the pattern of the game, but you understand you don't normally run the ball when it's third and eight. And so literacy is really about pulling the car apart.

 

0:32:32.0 EM: You know and like seeing what the carburetor does and what the battery does, and so there's these techniques and these skill sets, and then there's this beautiful language that Toni Morrison talks about. There's the vocabulary, but it doesn't make any sense unless you see the car run or you hear the song, or you watch the game or you see the story. Right. And, so we kind of deconstruct those and then they can reconstruct them in ways that makes sense for them, and that's that deconstruction and reconstruction. It's really a work of literacy education from elementary on up through graduate school. We're doing that at different versions for different age groups.

 

0:33:04.4 AS: Okay, I know we just came off of World Read Aloud Day, and I know how important it is to have stories read to you and to be part of that, but is there a joy of reading that got lost somewhere along the line, and is it a newer focus these days? 

 

0:33:19.2 EM: So that's a really... It's really important. There's a bunch of questions inside of that, I think a part of it is reading versus schooling. And how reading is taken up in school has been a challenge. There's a lot of research that says when students choose what to read, they enjoy it more, and so you take a... What a perfect reading life would be outside of school, like a summer where no one's asking what the lexile level is of that book and you're just at the beach with Judy Blume upstairs in your bedroom, reading, you know the crossover and imagining yourself making up your own lines, or playing basketball. That sort of thing. And so that's still a pretty, I think pristine experience. The joy of reading on your own at your pace, something that you choose and with access to the right books, again, where kids can see themselves, and it's not just kinda see yourself in terms of this person looks like me, but maybe you're a baseball player and there's a bunch of biographies on baseball and you love it, or you like Nancy Drew, the Mysteries or Harry Potter. And you kinda see yourself in Hogwarts whatever, the Defence Against the Dark Arts.

 

0:34:25.9 EM: There's something special about that, or watching the kids go through 'The Chronicles of Narnia' and it's just a genius of literature. So I've had an opportunity in my life to talk to authors about just the joy of it, but then they're also really good books to help kids develop academic skills. And so reading is something that has to be taught in school, so then it becomes more fraught, it's tested, it's regulated, and there's hierarchies, and you might not have seen yourself as a bad reader until you got into school and all of a sudden, you know Cindy's just kinda reading those sentences fluently and I get stuck on every third word. So you develop an identity, then interrupts your reading outside of school. David Pearson's colleague, he's been in this field for almost 50 years, and he talks about reading identity as being the thing, and so when the identity gets disrupted and you say, "I'm a bad reader." You don't wanna be at the beach with Judy Blume. You don't wanna see books, you don't wanna do homework. You just kind of push it away. So there's a real challenge because part of the reading instruction happens in schools has to be a little didactic, and has to be a little bit remediating and has to push you and challenge you, and so does the joy get lost? 

 

0:35:36.5 AS: Yeah.

 

0:35:37.8 EM: It's complex, because you really do need to push kids and challenge them, but you constantly have to be coming back to keeping these identities sacred as readers, and so a lot of work that I do and with colleagues, the work I do with Pam Allen and some of things that Jody and I have come out and see, you can do both, and it can be rigorous and it can be engaging. And I think if you look at game theory or if you just looked at social theories of learning, the challenge isn't necessarily a barrier, kids wanna be challenged, but they wanna know that they can face those challenges. They don't want it to be easy. They just want there to be a pathway through, and so if we continually come back to pressing here but then there are moments where you're just writing a story, like Donald Graves is a writing researcher and in one of his books he's like. "Just let them write." So it's gotta be moments of that where you can play and yes, I'm gonna teach you perspective in an art class but home, I just want you to play with canvas.

 

0:36:34.7 EM: And so we have to balance that, or else, we'll lose the joy. We have to keep it authentic, or else it won't make any sense, but we do need to push children and challenge them to reach their higher selves, and we just need to think about how best to caricature that challenge for them. This is why I think that people have done that the best in this health battle that I've been fighting my football coach, checks him with me every Friday, and we kinda reminisce on what it was like 30 years ago, and he was hard, but he says, "I'm hard because I believe that you are capable of so much more than what you know." And when we do that with kids and there's the pay off, we're going to have... You're gonna write a one-act play. You're gonna present your poems, you're gonna go talk to the mayor, and so they understand that, and then there's more joy in the challenge, but I think that when you lose your joy in the challenge is when your identity becomes disrupted.

 

0:37:30.0 EM: And so we can, as David Pearson would say, "We can keep the identity sacred and we can still challenge," and you need various kinds of reading lives, you need moments in class where there's independent reading where you're reading a book below your lexile for fun and fluency. You need moments where there's a read aloud and you're just kind of curled up collectively in the teacher's lab, and then you need to be kinda hit in the face with the challenge and text and 10 questions that you're struggling with. And all of that needs to happen and you need your own stories, and so it's just gotta be like a studio where all these things are happening, and then I think those moments where you are being stretched make more sense for you. The other part of your question, I've really been thinking about this more and I worry sometimes that the directions that we give to parents or asking to be like teachers, and I want parents to only be doing the joy part. I don't want parents to be the homework helpers necessarily, it's just... If we just read with kids for 15-20 minutes, or created a quiet place for them to read for 15-20 minutes and talk to them about what they were reading and have really good relationships with librarians and teachers about how to choose books for kids and had access to those books that would do much more value than correcting the homework at home.

 

0:38:43.7 EM: And what parents say is, I don't have the skill set of the teacher to be able to guide them through this homework, but I can certainly read stories to them and talk of that story and that's better. I'd like for there to be less of that kind of engagement at home and more in the school, in the home, really just be... How to be a great interlocutor around text and how to have better access to books that I can have in the home, and just some simple guide points for me to be a parent having a dialogue with my kids. Then in school, there are gonna be those places where you're doing language work and you're doing grammar work, and you're expanding your vocabulary, you are increasing your level of comprehension. Hopefully, there's enough of the authentic story that's around that practice, and much of the curriculum I see now is really, you are guided by good stories and good questions as you're developing those skills or not, discreet from the practice of getting into story and making your own story. So, I think we're moving in the right direction Audrey. If there's one quip I have, it's I think we're not using parents in the right way, and we need to bring that work back in the school and have the work at home be much more joyful and authentic for kids and parents.

 

0:39:54.2 AS: I think many parents are now breathing a sigh of relief.

 

0:39:56.8 EM: Yes.

 

0:40:00.5 AS: We're speaking about this sort of being a unique moment in time. Why is this an important conversation to be having right now? Is there an equity and justice element that you believe is critical in literacy right now? 

 

0:40:11.0 EM: I do, I do think that it is a unique moment in time for us. Even outside of this moment that I have often said that literacy is a civil rights issue of our time. And I think about it in a couple of ways. One question that I ask is, "What can education do or what kind of education do people need to live faith filled lives of decency and dignity in the 21st century?" A lot of the problems we have in terms of inequity, in terms of life outcomes, have their origin in inequity, in terms of educational input. And the more literacy skills that people have, and the more they're able to read the word in the world and do things we've been talking about the last half hour, the more likely they are to be authors of their futures, and the more likely they are to have lives of decency and dignity. And sometimes we see inequity and we say it's because the people are unequal, when what really is inequitable is the distribution of resource, the literacy education.

 

0:41:06.8 EM: And so, you see in some of these social movements, people are talking about this unemployment and ghettoisation and segregation, a lot of those problems are caused by unequal access to education. And they become exacerbated in a time like COVID where you have unemployment, and here in South Bend, we consistently hovered over 25% employment, you can map that right on the education. And we know that across every demographic group, the more educated a person is, the healthier life outcomes they have, longer life expectancy, the health and wellness of their children, so it's a real issue for us, and it's one that... It doesn't have to be a problem. There's another part of the literacy, and you think about the meta stories in the news in the world, and the harm they cause, and so in this particular moment, you can read the news and begin to see yourself as lesser, and so how do we help kids to be able to read the world in a moment like this and not become people who are filled with hatred and bitterness and rage, but to bring a love and understanding even as you're insisting on your own right to your own dignity.

 

0:42:13.7 EM: And that's a challenge. I've taught across the elementary to graduate school, and reading the world can be hard sometimes, because you don't want to reciprocate the hatred, but you wanna be aware of it, and this is a test we all share. I talk about critical media literacy and law, but part of that critical media literacy is being able to understand how to engage these stories and how to keep yourself safe from the harm those stories can cost, but to engage the world where these stories proliferate. How do we give our kids access to better stories is also an important part of literacy in this time. The books that we choose, how do we help kids understand their place in the world? How can we expose them to authors who might share a different way of looking at the world? How do we tap into our own family stories in our own histories? 

 

0:43:03.0 EM: So, there's some... A lot of places where literacy can intervene really powerfully. I think of justice as a word you used. Justice is access to our true selves, and it's an imitation to true being in the world, and there's a lot of ways that we can talk about it kind of arbitrarily or tangentially, but it's really about what access kids have in schools and outside of schools. And so we have to talk them through interactions, and we have to talk them through brutality, and we have to talk to them through crises and health, and talk to them through the struggles that we face in families and communities, and in the Seven Strengths work that Pam and I do, we end with hope, but you want an audacious hope, not an unreasonable hope.

 

0:43:48.8 EM: Why should I be hopeful for my future? And one of the reasons you can say is because you're receiving an excellent education. It's because we have access to the kinds of products in the home and in the community that are gonna help you to learn. You've got a platform where you can talk and share your opinions and grow and we can help you here, we can help you in school, you can get help in your parish, and we wanna make sure that we have those supports in place. This is not a country where anyone needs to drop out of high school, it's not a country where anyone needs to walk into a classroom and there aren't books on the back shelf. It's not a country where anyone shouldn't be able to go on foot to a library and there's a treasure trove of books that are free for them. And we have, we have moved the needle, I guess... So, the high school graduation rate now is 85%, it was probably 20% lower when I started.

 

0:44:35.0 EM: So we're moving in the right direction, but there's so much more that we can do instead of saying it's a shame that the world is like this. How do we get more books in the hands of kids? How do we become reading ambassadors to the people in our neighbourhood, in our parish, in our home? How do we become reading advocates for the local school? How do we as adults take better care of the stories we share with children? These are things that we can do better and more, and to me, that's what adds up to equity in justice. You just talk about those terms, and they just seem like Mars and Jupiter, but I can figure out how to make sure every book in my local Catholic and public school has a classroom library. I can figure out 15 minutes a day to FaceTime with my nephew and read to him, and have him read to me.

 

0:45:15.9 EM: And these are the things that matter. And so, when I drill down and work with parents, it's like it's very tactile, let's do these things, and that's what's gonna get us to equity and justice. When you're talking to teachers and principals, let's do these things, that's what's gonna get us there. And then it doesn't seem like Mars and Jupiter could just be down the block, could be Meijer's and Martin's. Those are grocery stores in South Bend by the way, closer than the planets.

 

[laughter]

 

0:45:38.7 AS: Can we walk through a few more of those things? What can people do? They're like, "Well, I'm just one person."

 

0:45:44.1 EM: So first and foremost, I would go back into the reading of being a reader and an audience's reader, whether you're parents of school-aged children, or you've got nieces or nephews or neighbors, "Who are the people in my life that I need to read for and be read to from?" are really important, and just understanding that and just being, "How can I get them books for birthdays or whatever? But I want to be a reading friend to these folks, family, and neighbour." And then I think being a reading advocate, the beauty of the American education system is that we can almost all walk to an elementary school. And you can walk to that school and say, "How can I... What can I do to be a reading advocate?" And it could be volunteering a certain amount of funds to contribute to a classroom library, it could be volunteering to read to kids.

 

0:46:34.0 EM: I think it's also kind of a faith community question, "What can we do to be advocates for reading?" That there's always books in the parish or... That we've got a way to do that very tangibly, right? Because these are the institutions right in our neighborhood. Promoting really positive stories of the past and present, being a storyteller, sometimes we talk about is counter-storytelling. And how do we tell a story very explicitly to those around us? And how do we keep those... We're in the public discourse, accountable for the kinds of stories that they tell. And we can go a long way in helping those in our families, in our communities to be more positive receivers and tellers of story. Like I see what you're seeing on the television, but that's not how we do it, right? And so when Pam and I talk about the strengths, and practicing kindness, and friendship, and if our kids or our neighbors, or our nieces and nephews, grandchildren see us enabling our humanity and unlocking the humanity in others, they will learn from that. Just like I could rat off a bunch of things that I learned from my father, it's very tangible, so... And our sphere of influence is large.

 

0:47:51.1 EM: And then finally, practicing the seven strengths, belonging, being someone who kind of welcomes people into a community and forming a community. I think our communities are so afraid, the churches are empty, the markets are empty, people are behind closed doors, and... Talk to the neighbor, talk to the people around you, have a sense of curiosity and asking questions, "And what can we do?" And practice friendship and kindness, and think about what that means from just shoveling an extra half block of snow to volunteering to virtually sit with a kid in your family or a child of a friend while the parent has a meeting, and saying, "Well, we'll FaceTime and I'll read to them."

 

0:48:25.6 EM: And then practicing courage and hope, "What would I like to have happen? What would I like to be a part of?" One of the things I think I've learned with kids is the gap between their hopes and their confidence is what determines whether there'll be world changers or not. But they all have those hopes, but they don't always have the confidence to like, "I can do it." We have to drill down and say, "You know, who's gonna hold me accountable? Who can I walk with?" We have to become re-tethered. And that's why we start with belonging, just... In some ways, document it, write on the back of an envelope, "These are all the people that I can touch, and this is my world, and this is what I'm gonna be responsible for. These 25 people, they will hear from me, I will pray for them, I will read to them, I will fight for them, I will love them, I will be kind to them. I'll pass on the wisdom of my grandmas and grandpas to them." Right? We all have that reach. And we just have to kinda challenge ourselves to dig in.

 

0:49:15.5 AS: Very well said, of course. There's hope in being able to change that voice inside, in someone's head. Does that make sense? 

 

0:49:22.0 EM: It does, you know? And I think it's a question of reach and access. That's why I say being re-tethered is important in thinking about those kind of immediate experience. But you're right, some people will get lost in that. And I don't know how far we go down this road, but I... You can't have a complete community without stronger faith communities. We've... The government can go so far, and schools can go so far, and families can go so far, but we... It could be a parish, it could be a synagogue, it could be a mosque, it could be a church, it could be a community-based organization. We probably want to think about how we live in community. I think about the call of the Holy Cross is to live in community, and it's a big deal. It's not an overnight thing, because a lot of industrialisation has led to us being pretty atomised from one another. And that's become clear to me just through the cancer and the COVID, how atomised one can become. But we have to challenge ourselves to find these people. We can find ways to be more connected to others.

 

0:50:32.0 AS: You have a unique perspective, right now, tell me where you find your sources of hope? 

 

0:50:38.2 EM: I think I find my sources of hope, really, in my ancestors and those who came before me, and who maintained hope and dignity under far more dire circumstances than I find myself in. And you know, there are a lot of pictures of our immediate ancestors around the house, and it just... What I see when I look at them is dignity. I want them to be proud of me. I want my dad and my grandma, and those who come before me, I look at them, and I say, "I hope you're proud. I hope I make you proud." I also find hope in the next generation who will look to me and who will follow me. And I think, "What kind of example have I set for them, for my sons and for my students?" I find hope in my faith. And you have to... You know, when you're down and the odds are against you, you say, "I've been blessed and I owe." Right? 

 

0:51:28.8 EM: I mean, we have a debt, and I think it's a beautiful debt. We're giving grace, but our debt is that we share love. You be love, you live love. Every day that you get to do that, there's hope. Yeah, I don't know, I count my days on my hands now. And I think that it's a privilege because I just... There's not time to waste. I think sometimes the discourses of the world lead us to believe that we've all been beaten down and we haven't been given much, and we don't look at what we've been given. We've been given life, we've been given sunlight, we've been given air to breathe, and flowers to smell, and people around us, and neighbors, and... We have to be better caretakers of that hope. We have to be more humble in the grace that we've been given and the mercy that's been shown to us. Even though many of us have faced things in our lives that are unfair, we still have a debt to pay. And so that's kind of where I am. I don't worry about myself so much, I just worry about what can I do with the time I have left to reach people, to make my grandma proud, and to move us one step closer? What can I do to repay what I've been given? I can't repay it, but I can do everything that I can to move toward that goal. And that's kind of... That's... My life belongs to people I love as it should.

 

0:53:01.6 AS: Something tells me all those people will be very proud of you, so... And thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate it. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.

 

0:53:11.5 EM: Thank you, Audrey. Likewise.

 

0:53:14.6 AS: And thank you all for joining us for Think-Pair-Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. Check out our website at iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening. And for now, off we go.

 

[Closing music]

 

[Opening music]

 

0:00:09.7 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas to the theories and practices behind entire systems. Think education is cool, so do we. So we pair two conversations, learn about our guests then learn from our guests, share your takeaways and come back for more. You're listening to Think-Pair-Share. With me Audrey Scott.

 

0:00:43.4 AS: Today's conversation will focus on mathematics, and to say it's not your mother's math class is a fascinating understatement since I remember quiz as being a staple in the math classes I was in. Well, a more than lighthearted get-to-know you quiz for our guest today. First, I'm excited to introduce her, Chrissy Trinter, is an associate professor of Mathematics Education of the ACE teaching fellows, and in the Notre Dame Center for STEM Education, as well as a faculty member and a fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives. Her work focuses on teacher development, primarily on teacher leadership and curriculum design in the mathematics classroom. She is particularly interested in the elements of curriculum and teaching that lie within the intersection of creativity and mathematics education. Prior to joining Center for STEM Education, she was a faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University and a Research Scientist at the University of Virginia where she earned her PhD. During this time, she was the lead author on several award-winning differentiated curriculum units. Dr. Trinter works with schools nationally and internationally on ways to provide all learners access to meaningful mathematics. So without further ado, welcome Chrissy.

 

0:01:49.9 Chrissy Trinter: Thank you for having me. So fun to get to talk to you, Audrey.

 

0:01:54.1 AS: It's so nice to see you too, and even though it's over Zoom, it's nice to see your smiling face Chrissy, so thank you.

 

0:01:58.9 CT: Yours too, thank you.

 

0:02:01.0 AS: We look forward to learning all sorts of things during this podcast, but we're going to begin with a couple of kinda like fun... I don't know, you're probably like, "Those were not fun at all."

 

[laughter]

 

0:02:11.2 AS: But just sort of some things to kinda warm us up, okay. So choose your favorite: Star Wars or Star Trek.

 

0:02:17.6 CT: Oh gosh, neither. [laughter] Sorry, do I have to take one of those two? 

 

0:02:21.9 AS: No, it's great.

 

0:02:24.5 CT: I think every... You know what, yeah, If I had to pick one I would do Star Wars only because all of my colleagues like it, but... Just... But no, neither, thank you. [laughter] I've just turned off over half of the audience. They're shutting it off right now.

 

0:02:40.3 AS: There are couple of... [laughter]

 

0:02:44.1 CT: Nothing more to hear here. [laughter]

 

0:02:46.9 AS: Delete.

 

0:02:48.1 CT: Delete, probably she's not interesting.

 

0:02:52.7 AS: And yet the other half are like, "She's my kinda lady." But yeah, I have heard that there are some people that really go all out for Star Wars in the office, so I wasn't sure if you were one of them, so okay. Okay, cake or ice cream? 

 

0:03:07.9 CT: Oh, definitely ice-cream. I'm an ice-creamholic, and I don't really care for cake, honestly.

 

0:03:13.2 AS: Same thing for me.

 

0:03:14.9 CT: I love... Really? 

 

0:03:16.4 AS: Yeah, that's why people always bring me donuts in the morning at the office, and I'm like, "I'll actually forgo a donut so that I can have more ice cream later."

 

0:03:22.7 CT: Absolutely, I would forgo everything so I can have ice cream. I had worked in an Ice Cream shop as a teenager, and I ate all the profits, it was so good. Oh, so good.

 

0:03:35.3 AS: So... Alright, I love it. So, so far you're saying everything right. So I thought... [laughter]

 

0:03:39.5 CT: So you still wanna interview me? 

 

0:03:41.9 AS: Those are the right answers.

 

0:03:43.3 CT: So, you wanna continue talking to me? 

 

0:03:44.6 AS: Oh, good. Okay, yes. We've been working on...

 

0:03:45.9 CT: What happens to the people that say things wrong? [laughter]

 

0:03:51.1 AS: We have a little lab. Have you seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? 

 

0:03:52.9 CT: Yes.

 

0:03:55.4 AS: Willy Wonka, where they go somewhere else.

 

0:03:58.5 CT: I can shout out Mrs. Veronica one of blueberries she's...

 

0:04:03.1 AS: Yeah blueberry.

 

0:04:03.2 CT: She's choked with blueberry.

 

0:04:03.9 AS: I thought she was blue in somewhat... Okay so, checkers or chess.

 

0:04:09.4 CT: That's a great question. Checkers or chess? It just depends on the mood I'm in. I wanna think chess. If I just wanna have fun, checkers.

 

0:04:20.8 AS: I actually have to learn how to play Chess. I asked my husband to teach me how so that's on the agenda. Okay, see you passed with all those. There's a few more fun ones. As a child, crust or no crust? 

 

0:04:32.3 CT: Oh, as a child. Crust or no Crust. I don't really remember. I think no crust as a child, but honestly, my mother would have never spent the time to... She's a wonderful mother, but she just wasn't gonna spoil me with cutting the crust off, so I think I probably just ate around it and left the crust.

 

0:04:52.2 AS: I knew you'd suffer.

 

0:04:58.2 CT: A requirement.

 

0:05:00.5 AS: Do you have a favorite childhood book? 

 

0:05:03.5 CT: A favorite childhood book? Gosh. I guess the little prince maybe, because my grandmother used to read it to us. My grandparents were from France, and that was... I don't know, it's kind of a fond memory, maybe that one.

 

0:05:15.1 AS: That's a really nice one. It's a very nice one. Yeah, good. One other in the fun category, if you had to sing a song for karaoke, what would it be? 

 

0:05:21.8 CT: Oh my gosh, something very silent since my voice is so bad, but... That's a hard question. I don't know whether I can answer, I don't really know.

 

0:05:34.1 AS: I would be completely stumped too 'cause I... People pay me not sing.

 

0:05:38.6 CT: Sorry. Yeah, that's kind of... My family laughs at me when we sing Happy Birthday. It's really, going to church... Growing up where you have been in church and my family all have really great singing voices and I really don't, and I, but I love singing in church and... I'm not kidding you. My siblings would turn and look at me... They would look at me with their faces like, "Please stop." [laughter]

 

0:06:06.7 AS: I'm proud.

 

0:06:08.8 CT: So funny.

 

0:06:10.6 AS: Okay, well, we'll give you a pass on the Karaoke then.

 

0:06:14.3 CT: You should. Give yourself the pass and don't have me do it. [laughter]

 

0:06:20.3 AS: Oh my God, siblings are the best. Too funny. Okay, to lead us into the next part of the conversation, what did you wanna be when you grow up? 

 

0:06:29.6 CT: At one point when I was a child, I wanted to be a lawyer, but it was only... I really think it was only because my father used to tell me to be a lawyer since I always had an answer for everything. So I think that kinda got stuck in my head and then, yeah, I don't really know that I knew what I wanted to be. I was an artist and I thought, "Oh, maybe I'll be an artist", and then I had a great math teacher in high school and I thought, "Maybe I'll be a math teacher", but I've explored lots of different career paths.

 

0:06:58.6 AS: It's interesting to me because you have an art background and also math, those two subjects I don't normally associate with each other, are you sort of, do you feel sort of unique in that? 

 

0:07:07.3 CT: [laughter] Yes, yeah. Unique is a really nice way of saying it. Split personality.

 

0:07:12.9 AS: I mean that in the nicest way possible.

 

0:07:15.6 CT: I know. No, I know. No, yes, definitely. Yeah, I just always loved both really, equally, so I really never had more of an affinity for one or the other and I try to bring them together as much as I can in my work.

 

0:07:34.7 AS: Do you do anything artistic creative now, do you paint at all or draw, or are there elements that you still like to foster? 

 

0:07:43.3 CT: Yeah, so I honestly haven't painted in a while and I keep saying I'm gonna get back to it. My children are 10, 13, and 15, and I'm now just starting to see a potential for finding time to be able to do something like that. I had done it, really, I continued... So I loved to paint in watercolors. I like oils, but I think my heart's always been with watercolor and I really had painted my whole life, really until I started having children, and my first child was born the third day of my PhD program.

 

0:08:20.4 AS: Oh, my gosh.

 

0:08:21.3 CT: Yeah, so it was just busy. [laughter]

 

0:08:25.2 AS: [chuckle] I guess.

 

0:08:25.3 CT: So then I had two more children throughout the program and, you know, continued on. So, the past 15 years I have not done much painting but I'd love to get back into it.

 

0:08:37.3 AS: Awesome, that's great. [chuckle] You blinked and 15 years later, you're here.

 

0:08:40.5 CT: Yeah, and here I am.

 

0:08:41.5 AS: Like in the CRE. On a slightly more serious note, and if you do or don't have one that's totally fine, but do you consider yourself to have an educational philosophy, or is that not something that you formulate that way? 

 

0:08:53.9 CT: So I'll give you another immediate reaction. [chuckle] What's my educational philosophy, is love your students. So love your students, you'll figure out how to get them to learn. I mean, that's not really a formal philosophy certainly, but that's really the key to being a good teacher, in my opinion. And that's where it starts. And then more formally, certainly, I think collaborative and active learning is very powerful. Differentiating learning, so recognizing how and when students wanna learn in different ways, and really getting to know your students and knowing your discipline well, and bringing those two together.

 

0:09:37.1 AS: Do you think that's a relatively new way to look at things? Did you feel like your teachers growing up got to know you or is that sorta been a shift in? 

 

0:09:48.2 CT: I think some teachers did for sure, and then others maybe were more traditional in their approach to teaching, kinda of based on... Kinda of with the focus more on the discipline and the strategies and the structure of things. But I definitely remember many teachers really getting to know us, and I should add, and loving what you do. So if you don't love teaching, then that will come across.

 

0:10:20.4 AS: Is there a moment when you kind of felt like... That you loved teaching? 

 

0:10:25.5 CT: Yeah, definitely. So my first teaching job was in 1998. At the time, I was... You had asked earlier, what did I wanna be when I grow up? And I wasn't really sure, and I was trying to figure it out, when I graduated college and I did a year of service in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and I really recognized my call to service in some way. And so I was working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and trying to figure out where I was meant to be. And I'd always... I had a seed planted a few different times in my life for education, although nobody in my family were educators, but I was really kind of discerning trying to think about what I wanted to do, and I remembered coaching rowing when I was in college and loving being with the students and teaching them how to row, and I thought maybe I should try teaching. So I found this job on Monster Board, or I forget what platform we used then to find jobs, but it was basically like finding a...

 

0:11:28.6 AS: I think it is.

 

0:11:28.7 CT: Right? Was that what it was called? Monster Board? 

 

0:11:30.6 AS: I think it was Monster Board.

 

0:11:32.2 CT: I think so. [chuckle]

 

0:11:32.9 AS: I think it was, yeah. [chuckle]

 

0:11:34.1 CT: Yeah. And it was an all girls Catholic school in Boston. I thought, "Oh, well, why don't I just apply to that? And see what happens, teaching math." And so I applied, and I remember going up to the school, I met Sister Maureen Cane, the principal. She gave me the job right there and literally handed me the stack of books and said, "School starts in two weeks", and I said "Okay". [chuckle] So I drove back to New York City, gave them my two-week notice, rented a U-Haul, drove back up to Boston, moved in with some friends, and I taught at this school called Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School in Dorchester, Massachusetts, South Boston. And I just... Oh my gosh, I loved that job. It was the best job ever. I jumped out of bed every day to go to that job and that was really, really when education stole my heart, I just... That was it, I was done. So I'm still in touch with some of the girls who I taught at that school and they're grown women and with families, but we just had a great time.

 

0:12:41.5 AS: That's a great story. And I can tell, I know, podcast audience can't see, but the smile on your face tells the story too.

 

[laughter]

 

0:12:47.9 AS: That you really, really enjoyed that, so that's great. I love hearing that. When someone loves their job, it just makes all the difference in the world, you're right. It is. To me, I feel like that's half the battle, especially... I'm gonna be honest, full disclosure, math makes me nervous.

 

[laughter]

 

0:13:04.5 AS: Not that I didn't have probably decent teachers or whatever, but the more I hear about different ways of teaching now, I'm encouraged by all the steps forward that seems like you and others are taking to make math in general more accessible, more understandable, more relatable. I say, thank you.

 

0:13:21.6 CT: Well, thank you. Hopefully, we're trying [laughter]

 

0:13:24.8 AS: You're doing a good job. I know you are. I'd love to sort of do a big picture look at a concept that I know is near and dear to your heart, but seemed more foreign to me, which is sort of mathematics and Catholic social teaching. Am I correct in that? That that's something that you tie very closely together? And can you tell me a little bit about it? 

 

0:13:41.4 CT: Sure. So, I teach the A students, the math content A students who are middle and high school teachers. They all teach in Catholic schools across the country. And so I really try to integrate these ideas of our Catholic faith and Catholic social teaching with both how you teach and the discipline of mathematics. And so... Yeah.

 

0:14:03.8 AS: For me, I feel like that's not my...

 

0:14:04.1 CT: Because that fit...

 

0:14:05.0 AS: Yeah. It's never been something that I recall people sort of bringing those two ideas together, in my opinion. And I realize it's been a few years. But it was more like, "Here are the numbers. Here's how you solve the problem. Memorize this." Those kinds of things. And it just sort of didn't seem like a larger picture thing for me.

 

0:14:21.0 CT: Right. Well, and you're actually describing one of the reasons why I do this, is because so many people will talk about how math is intimidating or they say they're not a math person. And I don't think that everybody is going to love math. But I do think that we can help students feel like they have a place in the math classroom. I think when students are in a classroom and they feel anxious or like they don't fit in, then that speaks to our Catholic social teaching and our faith and call to community and the dignity of the individual. I feel like as teachers in Catholic schools, we really should be thinking about every student in there, and how do they feel in this space. Because if they're uncomfortable, obviously, then they're not gonna be successful. So, that's the first step. So in my class, when I teach my students, we talk about these different ways of integrating our faith life into our teaching. And so one of the ways is the way you teach, the how you teach, the choices you make when you teach. And so, for example, in education literature and education research, like we were talking earlier, more recently, we see a lot of collaborative learning. So, small group work, that social aspect of teaching and learning that we have seen can be really effective for helping students learn different concepts.

 

0:15:44.0 CT: In our... This classroom... In my class, we talk about the importance of bringing people together socially in this collaborative learning, both to learn the mathematics, but also build community and help them help one another. And we're all in it together. And we're all in it for the common good. So we talk about the choices you make aren't just about learning the discipline, but it's about who we are as humanity. And your classroom is your world for that 45 minutes or whatever. So, what do you want that to look like? And how do you want people to treat one another? And why? And then another way I think about it is students dispositions towards mathematics. And this is what you were talking about, like your identity as a math person. So, we want students to feel like they are... They can be doers of mathematics. And that gets at what I was saying earlier. It's just helping them live into their dignity while they're in your classroom. If they can't... If they don't feel a sense of solidarity with their fellow students, their peers, and then their teacher, then you're never gonna be able to get them to figure out how to divide fractions. [chuckle]

 

0:16:54.5 AS: I hear that.

 

0:16:55.8 CT: So, I kind of bring it in in that area as well. And then the third way I bring in is really through some of the content. So, I expose my students... In math education field, there's a whole body of work around social justice math. And what this is, is using math in basically authentic contexts such as what is a living wage, or say, race relations or different kind of civic situations. And then how can we use math to make sense of what's going on in the data? And there's... I will say there's a debate. There's a group of people who don't think that should be brought into the math classroom and a group of people who do think it should be brought into the math classroom. And I share that with my students and they get to read both sides of that debate. Because I really feel that as teachers, they need to decide who they are and what they want to bring into their classroom. Regardless of whether they do it or not, the students need to learn the mathematics. And that's the debate on the other side, the people who say, "No, this shouldn't be brought in," say, "You're watering down the math. You're actually not preparing them well for the real world. You think that you're empowering them, but it's getting too into the context and not enough into the discipline."

 

0:18:06.8 CT: So, there's two sides to the story. But I expose them to lesson plans and ways of thinking about using their community as a context for lessons when it's appropriate. And I tell them not every topic is going to lend itself to some sort of a community context. And you have to decide what makes sense and why you wanna do this. But I think that using math to do good in the world and to help people make sense of the situations that are going on in the world, I think is really important.

 

0:18:39.0 AS: If you feel like you're lost from the beginning, or that... As you said, the doer of mathematics, I think that's an interesting concept. Because I would have said I'm not a doer of mathematics. [chuckle] And I know I'm not alone. But at the same time, I always felt like I wish that could be different. And now that I've seen how it's useful and how it's not just a bunch of numbers on a sheet of paper, you're not just doing it for memorization sake. There's ways that can help you and your community in figuring out an application of it. Is that sort of a universal turn toward making or is there...

 

0:19:16.6 CT: Yes. That's a huge push in mathematics education today, is to try to make it authentic and meaningful. Again, when it's appropriate. Otherwise, you're just trying to fit a square peg through a circular hole. There are times when the students need to learn a skill or a procedure. And that's what they need to do. You might not have an authentic or meaningful context for every topic, but you can still do things in the classroom that make it interesting, turn it into an investigation. Using a manipulative or a technology or giving the students choice is very powerful. There's lots of ways of providing access to students so that they feel like they can be successful in the Math classroom.

 

0:20:01.1 AS: I like that. I feel like that's very encouraging. It might help people to hear examples of how you implement Catholic social teaching into your own practice.

 

0:20:09.5 CT: Sure. So yeah, so I think about my course in three movements. And the first one is that classroom culture, creating a community in the classroom, and that starts with introspection. Because I think that if you're going to be able to teach somebody something, you need to understand kind of where you are, and where... Your perspective and your lens, whether it's on the discipline or just on your classroom community. So the goal of our first class is to help the students really understand that students are coming into the class with all different backgrounds and experiences and families and insecurities and confidences, and all of those are going to play a role in the teaching and learning process. So it is so worth spending the time in the beginning of the school year to develop a really strong classroom community, because it'll pay dividends later when they're trying to get somebody to factor a polynomial. So my first... [chuckle]

 

0:21:08.9 AS: What... I'm kidding.

 

0:21:11.2 CT: My first class with them, we do a privilege activity. And it really helps them kind of examine what privilege means and what it looks like. What privileges they have, what privileges their students may or may not have. And the privileges span a range. So whether it's the color of your skin, whether it's how many parents you have at home, whether you've had a teacher who believed in you, whether you've been successful at Math before, there's a variety of privileges that students are bringing to the classroom. My students typically haven't really thought about it this way, and as a teacher, what does this mean? And then we do a collaborative learning activity where they have to engage in this activity in such a way that the only way to finish the activity is... They're all put in groups, everybody in their group has to complete the activity, and it's too long to describe right now, but basically, it's a nobody wins unless everybody wins. It's designed in that way.

 

0:22:10.4 CT: Now we've looked at privilege and all the different kind of walks of life that students are coming in with. Now imagine those students that we just examined are in this collaborative learning environment. So how do those... Their what we call classroom status, how does that impact their ability to collaborate with their peers, and how they feel in this space? And then we tie it all together with the Corinthians reading about, the eye cannot say to the hand, I do not need you, and if one part suffers, every part suffers. And so that kind of whole first piece is about setting the foundation for your course. And so we don't get into much Math the first day, because what I have found over the years is, as a new teacher, you're so focused on the Math right away, and everything that you have to cover, and how do I teach this concept, that sometimes you can miss the human part of it, and I think that's the more important part. Like I said when we started this podcast, if you love your students and really get to know them, you're gonna figure out how to teach that concept.

 

0:23:14.4 CT: So that's the first movement. And then the kinda middle part of the class, I really get into the research-based practices for teaching Math, setting goals, the balance between procedural and conceptual fluency, the types of questions you asked. So there's eight practices in the Math field that are research-based, that are called these equitable Math teaching practices. And so we focus on those and we really focus on each one and how do you enact those in the classroom and pull your students in. And I integrate, again, that all with the Catholic social teaching, and we reflect on how they are congruent and where they surface, the Catholic social teaching tenets.

 

0:23:56.0 CT: And then, once the... We're getting to the end of the course, I feel like now we are at a place where we have kind of a good handle on the discipline and how to teach and the foundational pieces, so now let's look at something that's a little bit more complex, which is really the application and the context. So that's when we get into activities where we're trying to contextualize the mathematics maybe in a social justice context, or even just an authentic context. So, for example, the students are living... My students are living in communities or houses across the country, all different cities. So one activity that I do with them is I print out the newspapers from that day, from all the different cities that they live in, and then they go through the newspaper and they create a lesson based on some... One of the newspaper stories, and it has... And I give them criteria. It has to be really rich in the mathematics, it has to be authentic. But trying to help them see how you can use an authentic situation to teach them mathematics.

 

0:25:00.9 CT: Some of the students are really interested in doing something that's very social justice-oriented, equity-focused, and they do beautiful job with that. Some students are... Do something that's just more kind of happening in their community, is something that's maybe not as much of a civic... A social justice situation, but there's a new theme park, so we're gonna create an engaging lesson around that, and that's fine too, so...

 

0:25:31.5 AS: That's really interesting. So would they make a new roller coaster? 

 

0:25:35.4 CT: Somebody actually taught... One of my students had a great unit using roller coasters for Calculus. It was really... He did such a nice job with it. Yeah. The students really enjoyed it.

 

0:25:44.5 AS: Wow. That's cool.

 

0:25:46.1 CT: Yeah. And they brought in the Avengers too.

 

0:25:49.5 AS: Woah. Alright. I can see it...

 

0:25:52.0 CT: It's an Avengers theme park.

 

0:25:54.6 AS: Oh. I like that. We'll get some funding behind it. I think it's gonna work. Do you find that your students are kinda surprised at the focus, or...

 

0:26:08.8 CT: Yes. Yeah. For sure. [chuckle] What I find is with my students, and I should also say that I... So they're surprised at a couple of different things. One is the collaborative nature of mathematics. So many of them will tell me over the years that they never saw Math as something collaborative. It was something they did by themselves, it was right or wrong. So when they come to my class and they realize that there are some ways that you can make it very effectively collaborative, and certainly there's... You don't just kinda throw a problem in the middle of a table and say, "Everybody work on it. That's ineffective." But there's structures that you can put in place and questions and designing the task in such a way. And not all tasks are group-worthy, I should mention that too. There are definitely many Math tasks that you do do on your own. And eventually, you gotta do 'em all on your own. But when you're learning them, there are some very well-designed group-worthy tasks. So that's something that's typically new to them.

 

0:27:13.1 CT: And then, I love using non-routine problems with my students as well, meaning, something that you can't just grab an algorithm and solve or find the solution in a book or on Google. So there's a lot of really kind of thought-provoking types of tasks that make you reason and critically think. And typically, Math majors aren't doing... I mean they're doing... They're certainly critically thinking and reasoning, but they're not doing these types of problems that are really non-routine, where they don't have an algorithm to use, they have to really think through. So I like doing that, because I think it gives them a good challenge. And I really like having them feel the way their students feel. Even if their students are getting a Math problem that does have an algorithm, but they don't know what it is, so they have that kind of cognitive dissonance. They're just a little like,1 I don't know. And so I think it's helpful for the teachers to feel that, and then also feel the joy when they get through it and they realize what happened. So the solution. So that's always a surprise. And then, yeah, the context, kind of authentic meaning-making math, using authentic situations or social justice issues, that's also something that's typically pretty new to them, and I think they take up really beautifully.

 

0:28:37.2 AS: I like the idea of sort of getting them out of their head a little bit and maybe making them feel a little of that trepidation that... Nobody likes to stay there for very long, but that's something that you're like, Okay, now I feel for the other person a little bit.

 

0:28:50.4 CT: Yeah. There's a body of work in Math education that we focus on called productive struggle. And the idea is that you need to struggle, but you need to struggle productively. So as a teacher, you have to find that sweet spot where students are working hard and grappling, but they're not crying and feeling dejected. [chuckle]

 

0:29:13.4 AS: This lady.

 

0:29:14.2 CT: Yeah. So you need to give them enough supports so that they can productively struggle through it and feel that sense of belonging and success. So when I'm teaching teachers, they already know how to solve the middle and high school problems, so I have to think of ways to have them productively struggle, so that they know what that feels like, and that they can then identify it and be able to use that strategy with their students as well.

 

0:29:43.1 AS: There's an equity piece that is very important to you, is there not? And can you build on that? 

 

0:29:48.5 CT: So yeah. I guess just along those lines, I just think all people should feel that they are able to thrive and flourish. And so like I was saying, that should drive all of our decision-making. So I certainly feel that that idea of human flourishing really drives a need for diversity a need for giving people opportunity for equity, for justice. That's just kind of how I think about it. So I think it's helpful, at least for me, to make that really explicit. That's the first part, and then that's why we do all of these other things.

 

0:30:28.1 AS: Yeah. And actually, maybe we can tie that into the idea of achievement gaps and opportunity gaps? 

 

0:30:35.0 CT: Oh yeah. Often, people will hear about achievement gaps, like if we have a newspaper story about Math scores, and the story will say, There's an achievement gap. And the achievement gap is between White students and students of color. And that's really important that we have that data. And we need to know this so that we can rectify it. But that's the kind of output. And so the opportunity gap is the fact that people are not getting the same opportunities, and that's why we have that output. And so as teachers, it's really important for us to be thinking about the opportunity gaps, because that's the input, and that's what we have control over.

 

0:31:14.2 CT: So sometimes if we look too far out, we just stop at the achievement gap, you may just kinda feel like, "Well, I don't know where... I don't know what to... What I can do about that." But what you can do is reduce the opportunity gap of our students. So within your classroom, within your school, how can you reduce opportunity gaps? I work with schools at the systems level, and we look at how to reduce opportunity gaps in the mathematics classroom from, say, a whole district level. So for example, are students getting tracked, are they not tracked, what makes sense for your school in terms of Math programming. From the classroom level, as a teacher, we wanna look at our students in the class, and is everybody getting an opportunity to learn? So as a teacher, this is something that we try to do all the time. And whether, again, it's at your classroom level, or your school level.

 

0:32:08.1 AS: There's two follow-ups I'd like to ask from that. 'Cause, one, I wanna introduce differentiated instruction in that conversation. And the other is, are there concrete ways that you can do that? Or can you give us an example or two of how you might work to reduce an opportunity gap? 

 

0:32:25.3 CT: Well, that... The differentiated instruction is one way. So differentiated instruction just really is a philosophy of education, it's a philosophy of teaching. So it's really what I've been talking about, but I haven't used those words, and it's just really about getting to know your students, getting to know what their preferences are, how do they... When... One of my colleagues uses this example that I like, that says like, "When you get a newspaper, when the newspaper gets delivered to your house, do you read every single word from the beginning to the end?" Do you, Audrey? 

 

0:33:03.7 AS: No.

 

0:33:06.4 CT: No. What do you typically do when you get the newspaper? 

 

0:33:10.0 AS: Read the headlines.

 

0:33:12.2 CT: Read the headlines, and then you pick...

 

0:33:12.7 AS: Go to a section...

 

0:33:15.3 CT: What's interesting, right? 

 

0:33:15.4 AS: Right. Yeah.

 

0:33:15.5 CT: So similarly, students have different interests, so they might have a preference, and that's not to say they're gonna have that preference or that interest every day, and that's who they are, it's not to pigeonhole them, but designing a lesson such that I give my students choices and maybe you get the choice of doing these math problems on the laptop, there's a station over there that has paper, there's another station that you have manipulatives... As long as it's designed that all of those areas have the same learning goal and that the teacher is able to monitor that everybody is meeting the same learning goal, but there may be approaching in different ways. So that's just one of many examples, but just one example of how you might provide students more of an opportunity, because I might be a student who really needs to... For this particular topic, being able to, like you said, visually see and hold on to this area model and piece it together might be much more powerful for me, than if I'm just working with the numbers without that.

 

0:34:23.9 CT: And again, this is not to say you just kind of throw these in front of your students and hope for the best, there's a lot of teacher input and guidance in all those ways and the teacher has to bring it all together to make sure that everybody is learning the concept and the procedure, but you're giving students opportunity to access the mathematics.

 

0:34:43.4 AS: Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification there, and actually a good example, and I'm wondering, do you get... What's the feedback from teachers, maybe new and seasoned? Is there some push back or they feel like, "Oh, this is gonna be... How could I possibly monitor all that?"

 

0:35:03.3 CT: Yeah, so great question. Once they really understand it and recognize that... So, one of the misconceptions about differentiating instruction is that it's a different lesson plan for every kid in the class, or you have to do it all the time for everything. It becomes kind of bigger than it needs to be. The professor, I really learned this from, about differentiated instruction at UVA, Carol Tolson will say, "It's good teaching." So, what I try to help teachers realize is you're doing a lot of this already, it's not like this is a new thing, this is not wildly different than what you're doing. It doesn't have to be that big of a deal. Take baby steps, try something small. When they do that, when they try a small thing, they make a small tweak, they just kind of enhance what they're already doing and make one small change, they are bought in right away and they realize and they really see the effect. Pre-assessment is very important in differentiating instruction, so being able to get a sense for where students are and then use that data to inform your instruction, that's another area that a lot of teachers...

 

0:36:12.4 CT: Not a lot of teachers, but some teachers don't feel they have the time for, so then when we're able to help teachers recognize low prep, easy ways of sneaking in some pre-assessment and then they use that data to then design a lesson, it's so powerful. I think I just love watching human flourishing. It's such a gift as a teacher to get to experience that with students. There's so many different ways of seeing mathematics. Many of us remember a very traditional approach, and now we have so much more information about how students access mathematics and, absolutely, algorithms are important, but there's an importance to this balance between concept and procedure and tying those two closely together. And so, when we think about our heterogeneous students in our classroom, we need to be thinking about what are they coming in with? What do they already know mathematically? What are their life experiences? How are they feeling? 

 

0:37:14.7 AS: When you give them a window to see it through and you welcome them into a math conversation, the shoulders can relax a little bit.

 

0:37:24.6 CT: Yes, yes.

 

0:37:25.7 AS: Sort of take away that fear factor.

 

0:37:28.1 CT: Yes. I often find that people in, just general, are searching for that with mathematics. "But how is this meaningful to me?" There are definitely ways of making it more meaningful to students and is absolutely something that we do, and even if as small as Starbucks coffee and the prices and... Just little things that you can do, little tweaks... The context being their school, or a movie, or just something... That definitely is worth taking the extra step to do that. Sometimes, like I said, there are just concepts and procedures that we learn out of context, but maybe they can feed back into a more meaningful context later or within a unit somewhere. When possible. And when appropriate? Absolutely. I heard somebody say once people go into teaching because they want to give, they want to do good, people wanna help each other, so it's just a matter of creating the space to make that happen.

 

0:38:29.0 CT: Everything I do, I think is... I'm trying to provide students opportunity to be invited into the community of mathematics. I really just take such joy in human flourishing, and that's what I see as a teacher's job, no matter what subject they teach.

 

0:38:46.9 AS: I think that's great, actually. I think that might be the perfect way to end. Thank you, Chrissy. Really.

 

0:38:52.9 CT: Okay, thank you.

 

0:38:54.6 AS: Yeah, I really appreciate your time. I had a great time talking to you, and honestly, I don't think I would have ever said that about a conversation that included math and...

 

0:39:02.2 CT: Thank you. No, it was so fun to talk to you.

 

0:39:05.4 AS: Alright, thanks.

 

0:39:06.7 CT: Alright, bye Audrey.

 

0:39:09.7 AS: Again, a special thank you to Chrissy Trinter for the great conversation, and thank you all for joining us for Think-Pair-Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. Check out our website at IEI.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening. And for now, off we go.

 

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0:00:10.8 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this Modern Education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas to the theories and practices behind entire systems. Think education is cool? So do we. So, we pair two conversations, learn about our guests, then learn from our guests, share your takeaways, and come back for more. You're listening to Think-Pair-Share with me, Audrey Scott.

 

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0:00:42.2 AS: We open with a candid visit with our guest, then we'll turn our attention to the current state of Catholic schools in the midst of this pandemic. We'll talk about some challenges we're facing, but also about some bright spots we've seen over the course of the past few months and some possible next steps forward. First things first, an introduction. My guest today is a member of ACE Five and earned his JD from the Notre Dame Law School. He's the senior director of teacher formation and education policy for the Alliance for Catholic Education. In this role, he leads the Teaching Fellows Program, which is the largest provider of Catholic school teaching talent in the United States. He also leads the program for educational access and advocacy and leadership formation enterprise that helps develop and implement policy that expands financial access to faith-based schools. In addition, he serves as a faculty member and fellow of Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives. And last, but certainly not least, he's an avid fan of Liverpool Football Club whose motto sounds like it could be an unofficial ACE motto, "You'll never walk alone". Mr. John Schoenig, welcome, and thanks for being here.

 

0:01:43.9 John Schoenig: Thank you. Good to be with you.

 

0:01:46.6 AS: So, Liverpool, I get the impression it's a pretty dedicated fan base, and some of the teams are... Let's say they have a healthy rivalry.

 

0:01:56.7 JS: Yeah, yeah, Liverpool will play their regional rival, though those regional rivalries are really important in British soccer and so on.

 

0:02:05.8 AS: Yeah, that's awesome.

 

0:02:07.5 JS: It's Everton.

 

0:02:07.9 AS: Everton? Is that what you were gonna say? 

 

0:02:08.6 JS: Everton, yeah. It's a really interesting rivalry, 'cause Liverpool and Everton they're very, very... You can see the one stadium from the other. It's known as the friendly, they're called derby matches when rivals play like Manchester City and Manchester United. Evertonians and Liverpool fans don't hate one another per se.

 

0:02:30.3 AS: Okay.

 

0:02:30.9 JS: And the reason why is because Liverpool's not a big city, so it's like they kinda all have to see one another constantly, and...

 

0:02:36.2 AS: [chuckle] Yeah, too many brawls over fish and chips in a paint.

 

0:02:41.5 JS: That's right, yeah.

 

0:02:43.6 AS: Okay. So, I'm gonna just ask you a couple of questions about your experience, and then we'll get into some more education as a whole and some of the sort of more pertinent issues right now.

 

0:02:50.7 JS: Yeah.

 

0:02:51.9 AS: Okay. As young people are discerning about their next stages in life, you help inspire them to listen to their calling and join the mission of ACE, so I was wondering, when you were a child, what did you wanna be when you grow up? 

 

0:03:05.6 JS: Goodness, man. Wow. It's ridiculous that I don't have an immediate answer to that. The earliest memory I would have, some of these would be like early high school, and it was probably to be a lawyer. I just figured, I like arguing, I like making arguments, and I like to read and write, and I think lawyers do that. And I also think that I just had seen... The lawyers that I knew seemed financially secure, so I was like, "Well, what I'll do is I'll go and I'll do whatever lawyers do." Again, most people's image of lawyers is like, you're in the courtrooms, I don't know, be with like Tom Cruise and a few good men or whatever, like you just... I just make these arguments and then I'll be financially secure. So, I think that would probably be it, yeah, yeah.

 

0:04:00.6 AS: That's a good answer. Yeah, you just wow the courtroom, and then everybody would stand up and cheer and Jack Nicholson would go to jail? 

 

0:04:05.9 JS: Yeah, yeah. [chuckle] And you have to have the difficult conversation with Santiago, and I can't remember the other guy's name, yeah.

 

0:04:15.1 AS: You've actually a good memory, a good memory.

 

0:04:17.4 JS: Yeah.

 

0:04:19.8 AS: [chuckle] I would ask you to do your Jack Nicholson impression, but I might be going a step too far. [laughter]

 

0:04:22.3 JS: No, no.

 

0:04:26.5 AS: But speaking of in your down time as a youngster, do you remember the first concert you ever went to? 

 

0:04:31.2 JS: So, the first concert that I went to, I'm pretty sure it was a Steve Miller Band concert, and that would've been like freshman, sophomore year of high school, something like that. It was a big concert venue, not too far away from where I grew up, right on the water called the Jones Beach. I think that's the first one I went to.

 

0:04:53.3 AS: Mine was like Rick Springfield.

 

0:04:56.3 JS: Wow.

 

0:04:56.6 AS: But my husband was Prince, and I was like, "Really?"

 

0:05:00.8 JS: The best concert I've ever seen in my entire life.

 

0:05:03.6 AS: Exactly.

 

0:05:03.7 JS: The best concert. And I saw Prince in, I don't know, 2015 or something like that. It was unbelievable. And my brother who's ten years older than me, he was an enormous Prince fan, and I had this kind of obsession with Prince, but that experience, you can sort of build something up to a point where then when you get to do it, you're like, "You know what, this is gonna be bad because I'm setting myself up for disappointment." That was one of my worries actually about going to that Liverpool game a couple of years ago. But the Prince concert I remember very specifically sitting there with my friend JJ, and sitting in the stands just as the concert was about to begin and all of a sudden I started to get like... I had this anxiety because I was like, "You know what's gonna happen? I'm gonna be here for two hours and I'm gonna get to the end of it, and I'm gonna be like, 'Hmm, he was okay, but I wish I had seen him a few years earlier or something.'" Now, no, no, that... It was absolutely amazing. So, that's cool. Yeah, I mean, I would have loved to have seen Prince when I was in high school.

 

0:06:06.8 AS: He had such a great talent.

 

0:06:08.2 JS: I remember in that concert, and I'm just trying to remember, yeah, so he had a saxophonist, he had Maceo Parker, who played saxophone for James Brown. And that was just like someone in his ensemble, it was unbelievable. I'm trying to remember who opened for him. Was it...

 

0:06:30.0 AS: It's not Janelle Monáe that you're trying to think of? 

 

0:06:31.6 JS: Yeah, Janelle Monáe, Janelle Monáe.

 

0:06:33.0 AS: Okay. Okay.

 

0:06:33.6 JS: She opened for him.

 

0:06:34.9 AS: That's ridiculous, because she's awesome, too. So, yeah. That's 'cause he could ask anyone and they would drop everything they were doing and pretty much come to his concert.

 

0:06:43.3 JS: Wasn't it an incredible concert? 

 

0:06:44.7 AS: It really was. I really did enjoy the concert.

 

0:06:46.2 JS: I remember at the end of... At the end of Purple Rain... I shouldn't say at the end, when he started the guitar solo in Purple Rain, I started to get sad because I was like, "This is gonna end soon, and I just want this song to go on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. I never wanna leave here, I just wanna be here listening to him do that."

 

0:07:05.8 AS: Look how amazing that was that we all had a similar experience and he just did it so many times.

 

0:07:09.7 JS: Yeah. There's an incredible story. Most people in entertainment have a great Prince story, but you may already know it. Jimmy Fallon, he played ping pong against Prince? 

 

0:07:20.4 AS: Oh no, I don't.

 

0:07:20.8 JS: Oh, it's unbelievable, it's absolutely unbelievable, 'cause Questlove was friends with Prince and he connected them. Anyway, it's a great... You could just find it on the Internet. It's so good.

 

0:07:32.5 AS: I am doing that right after this.

 

0:07:34.7 JS: It's real... It's just... Prince he was one of those people who was never not himself, he was never pretending to be anybody other than who he was.

 

0:07:45.3 AS: I'm gonna have to look for some of these things. I feel like I've seen so many, but I haven't seen the ones that you're referring to, so I'm gonna look at the ping-pong one for sure.

 

0:07:53.2 JS: That's the... That to me, that's the best one, the best story of his. It's so good. [chuckle]

 

0:08:00.3 AS: Okay, alright. So, I shall look forward to that. Thanks for the tip. I don't even know how I missed that one. But anyway, that was enjoyable, so thank you very much for sharing that. Do you think there's something that people would be surprised to learn about you? 

 

0:08:16.5 JS: [chuckle] Man, this is a silly thing, but the first thing that comes to mind is that I'm a leap-year baby. But people who... I guess people who are somewhat close to me might know that. When you're a leap year baby, it is funny the ghosts from your past who come out on your birthday. This past year, I had a birthday, I turned 11, and it's actually really weird, that was the last night, February 29th, that was the last time that people were out and about. And it was a trivia night at our parish, and I remember sitting there at this... And I can't stand trivia nights. But sitting there and people from way back in the day, who I don't even know how they had my phone number, they were texting and emailing, and it was really, really incredible. So, that might be one.

 

0:09:04.6 AS: That's great.

 

0:09:05.0 JS: Yeah, that would probably be...

 

0:09:07.3 AS: And you gave me a bonus one, you don't like trivia nights.

 

0:09:10.7 JS: Yeah. [chuckle] Yeah. There's a lot... There are a lot of things about trivia nights that I don't like.

 

0:09:20.6 AS: Okay, that'll be for part two of our podcast.

 

0:09:23.3 JS: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:09:23.7 AS: When we honour Prince. Anyway, okay, so I'm gonna tie some stuff back into ACE now. I know some of these answers, but the listening audience might not. Can you tell us what cohort of ACE were you in, and where you were placed? 

 

0:09:36.8 JS: Yeah. So, I was in the fifth cohort of ACE, and I taught in Shreveport, Louisiana.

 

0:09:41.9 AS: When you first got your assignment, happy or sad? 

 

0:09:46.7 JS: Surprised. I didn't even know where Shreveport was. I am sure I had heard of it, but I had no idea where it was, and so the kind of adventurer in me, if you will, was like, "Well, I'm gonna get to go to an entirely new place." Yeah.

 

0:10:02.4 AS: It sounds like actually that was a pretty cool assignment.

 

0:10:07.5 JS: Yeah, it was good. See, if you know Louisiana, Northern Louisiana and Southern Louisiana are very, very different places, but Northern Louisiana is, it's pretty rural, it's more Baptist, whereas the South would be more Catholic. The advantage to a place like Shreveport is that it was kind of close to some other site, so it was only a couple of hours away from Dallas. So, yeah, it wasn't a bad place to be at all. I learned a ton. I wasn't a good teacher, and I struggled a great deal, but it was a neat place to be. And we also had a lot of teachers. To think... When I was... Let me think about this now. When I was in ACE, my first year, we had nine teachers in Shreveport, that's more teachers than we have in any one place right now. So yeah, there were like a lot of other ACErs there, I guess is my point.

 

0:11:03.2 AS: And did you all live in the same house? 

 

0:11:05.2 JS: No, so there were five people in my... In the house that I lived in, and then there were four people in another house, but they were like, I don't know, five minutes away, not even by car, like two minutes.

 

0:11:17.4 AS: Okay, okay, great.

 

0:11:17.8 JS: At least that's what I remember. Again, that could... You forget things.

 

0:11:24.1 AS: [chuckle] It's an approximate.

 

0:11:25.2 JS: Yeah, yeah, of course.

 

0:11:28.5 AS: Okay. So, one more sort of silly question. If you could have had a super power in that ACE house, what would you have wanted it to be, and why? 

 

0:11:38.0 JS: Probably something related to slowing down time. And if you're talking about specifically in the house, it would be true, it might be true, like slowing down or speeding up time, it would probably be true in the house and as well as in the classroom. And the reason I say that is, so the other day my oldest son said, "Are there times when you wish time would go slower or faster?" And I said, "Oh sure." And he was all excited 'cause the next day was his brother's birthday and a bunch of his friends were gonna be there, so I really want time to go slow so we can enjoy ourselves. And I think looking back, there were so many... I'm sure this is true for everybody, but I just... How immature I was back then, how many bad decisions I made, just how many people I mistreated that to this day I feel very, very bad about. But when you asked that question, what immediately popped in my mind was I... And I really don't mean this to sound silly, I didn't get enough sleep, I just didn't get enough sleep, and so I wish I could have slowed down time while I was sleeping or something, because it made me a grumpier person, it made me a weaker teacher because I wasn't... I just wasn't budgeting my time well.

 

0:12:47.9 AS: That's interesting though. That's actually... That would be amazing if we could do that actually. [laughter] I think a lot of people would make use of that superpower. And I'm sure that you're harsher on yourself than you probably should be. But I'm certain that you've done a good job, or I don't think you'd be sitting here today, so we always have things we might adjust a little bit, but I have on pretty good authority that you were good at what you were doing.

 

0:13:14.7 AS: [chuckle] Okay, so great, thank you so much, that's really great. I ask some of those things because I think some people who are thinking of doing ACE or whatever, sort of, it's important to kinda know if people aren't just plucked out of obscurity, etcetera, there's history to people and decisions made and things that go into who people are. And we like people to be able to sort of see themselves in these roles of these new teachers taking on these new adventures as it were. So, I think that's helpful. Okay, let's start talking about the sort of, broadly about education, which is what this podcast is gonna be sorta focused on. I think to have a conversation about the current state of Catholic schools and some of the things that are going on right now in the midst of this pandemic, it would be good to get a little bit of history, and I'm not asking you to be a complete historian, but if I asked you, what's the history of Catholic Schools in America, would you be able to kinda give us some place to begin? 

 

0:14:10.8 JS: I can try with the caveat that I'm gonna probably get more wrong than I'm gonna get right, and I'm sure plenty of people will correct and criticise what I'm about to say. So, in brief, Catholic Schools, like, if we think of them as like something close to a system. Catholic Schools really started to grow and develop in the second half of the 19th century, you know, through the work of, well, all sorts of people, like Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katherine Drexel, and John Newman, and many folks. In particular, in response to the waves of immigrants that are hitting the shores of the United States, largely the eastern shores of the United States, and cities like, you know, Philadelphia and New York and Boston, the Church, it's really pretty incredible to think about it. No faith tradition in the United States has as kind of explicit a focus on schooling as the Catholic Church does. The idea is like, we have schools, we do schools, right? 

 

0:15:20.8 JS: So, like, as these immigrants were coming to the United States, obviously faith communities are being set up, parishes are being set up, and with parishes, you have these schools. And actually in the Second Baltimore Council at the end of the 19th century, there actually was a mandate, the bishops of the United States said that every parish had to have a school within just a short number of years, and they never got to that point. But my point is that, one, we have a focus on schools, and two, from like, I mean, whenever, let's say from like 1880 to 1960, you see this explosive growth in Catholic Schools, unlike anything in American education ever, like just this incredible growth in schools, in particular, in inner cities, in particular, serving recently arrived immigrant communities, in particular, not exclusively.

 

0:16:19.2 JS: So, you see all of this growth. And then in the 1960s, we start to see a decline, and there are many, many things happening that I think the apex of or the high point of Catholic Schools enrollment was 1965, I believe were as about 5 million students. Again, I'm moving quickly here, I don't have the exact number in front of me.

 

0:16:41.8 AS: [chuckle] Yeah, it's okay.

 

0:16:42.1 JS: So anyway, so then you start to see a decline. There are a whole bunch of things going on, the Second Vatican Council, all sorts of things are happening within the United States, right? So, like this is, we're in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, we're moving into kind of, just all sorts of struggles with the Vietnam War and many, many other issues, there's kind of a retreat from the inner cities, all kinds of things happening. So, Catholic school enrollment is going down and down. Really, it's been an uninterrupted decline in the enrollment in Catholic schools from, say, 1965 to today with... Like, there have been some exceptions, like, there were, as a decade, enrollment, I believe was up in the 1990s. Now, a lot of that has to do with like new schools being built and those sorts of things, but we've seen this kind of this decline.

 

0:17:32.7 JS: American education as a whole changed a great deal beginning in 1990 with the advent of what we could call a Choice Policy, and that would be both funding for families that would elect to send their kids to a private school, like a Catholic school, so that would be like vouchers, tax credit scholarships, that's like a private school choice, and then you also have charter schooling right around the same time, around 1990, both of those things are launched, and that really changes American education. In some ways, that is a critical moment, that's a transition point, an inflection point, I should say, in American Education, would be 1990. And I think you can't really understand Catholic Schools today, especially in certain parts of the country without understanding what happened in 1990. So, I'll stop there, that was too long an answer, I apologize.

 

0:18:31.6 AS: No, no, it's not too long at all, and I think it was great. Thank you. I think nobody's expecting that I'll have a historian on for that, I suppose, but this has been... This is great to give a general feel. Tell me a little bit more about that inflection point.

 

0:18:46.0 JS: Yeah. So, essentially two things happened right around the same time in 1990, not exactly at the same time, right around the same time. The first is that the State of Wisconsin passed the voucher program, which is the nation's first voucher program, where families residing within Milwaukee, depending on income level, were eligible for a voucher that they could use to send their kids to a non-public school. Now, in the beginning, this program was not available to families sending their kids to faith-based schools, ultimately it was. But that's the advent of like Private School Choice Policy, 1990, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Voucher Program. Right around the same time, a few months later, the State of Minnesota passes a Charter School Bill, and then like soon thereafter California passed a Charter School Bill. And really what you have happening there is this idea that states can, and some would say that they should, empower families with the ability to determine where their kids should be educated. Now, there are plenty of counter-arguments to this position, I'm not making a normative claim right now.

 

0:19:54.6 JS: But the reason why that matters, in terms of this inflection point, is that if you think about it, before 1990, essentially what's going on in education is that parents are either sending their kids to the school that the state has assigned their child to. Like, you live at this address, so you send your kid to this school. Or maybe there might be a magnet school that they could try to get into, they might be able to do something within the public system, or they're sending their kids to a private school.

 

0:20:25.0 JS: Now, if they're sending their kids to, say, a private school, like a Catholic school, they're either paying tuition to send their child there, or there's some kind of a privately-funded scholarship. Beginning in 1990, now what's happening is that the state is saying, "No, no. You know what, we will provide some support for families to get access to schools other than the school they are assigned to." Vouchers are giving them access to private schools, like Catholic schools and other faith-based schools, but not exclusively faith-based schools, like non-public schools, and charters are literally opening up an entire... An entirely new sector of education. They're allowing for like a new school sector.

 

0:21:06.5 JS: So, that's important for at least two reasons, Audrey. The first is well now, families that couldn't afford to send their kids to Catholic schools maybe now they're gonna have an easier time doing that because they might be eligible for a voucher or a tax-credit scholarship. That's reason one. But the other reason why this is important is that now we have the advent of this new school sector, the charter school sector. Now, charter schools are public schools, so they are publicly funded, but typically privately operated. They're operated by like, in most cases, a non-profit group. They're publicly funded, and because they're public, they have to be free to the family, so now what you have is you have another operator in the K-12 landscape that, and I don't like this term, but just for the sake of this conversation, that is now competing with Catholic schools that is free.

 

0:22:07.7 JS: So, for those two reasons, that moment that the 1990 matters a lot. Now there's more money available for families that might wanna... That would like to send their kids to a Catholic school, but can't because of financial obstacles, but there's also now this new operator, there's this new player in the sector that could serve as competition, if you will.

 

0:22:28.4 AS: Why were the charter schools started? If it's free, why not just put that money into the public school? There had to have been something more.

 

0:22:34.9 JS: Yeah. So, there are a couple of different... Well, the origin of charter schools is absolutely, absolutely fascinating. I'm gonna highly generalize it, I think, to get at your question here. Actually, one of the people who had been arguing for something like what we would now know as charter schools is a man named Albert Shanker who was the head of one of the nation's largest teacher's unions. And the idea was essentially, is there a way to create a space within public education where teachers themselves could be essentially like... Entrepreneurs might not be the right word, but they could kind of experiment and create their own educational models that could be more customised not only to their skills, their interests, but also those of families, say in a given area. Could we allow for schools that were publicly funded, but maybe not governed within the typical structures of district governance? So far so good? 

 

0:23:39.5 AS: Yes.

 

0:23:39.7 JS: So then the other related... But the other idea would be that in many places, and there are a whole bunch of folks who are like the kind of... It's... It would be unfair to say that one person is the progenitor, the architect of the charter sector, because this idea had been discussed for many, many years. But another kind of sentiment behind this was, in education, you sort of have two things going on in public education, you have the state as regulator of schools, and, as we know, the state can regulate all schools, whether or not they're public or private, the state can regulate all schools, and the state does regulate all schools whether they're public or private.

 

0:24:28.0 JS: And then you also have the state as operator. The state operates many schools, most of the schools in the United States, the overwhelming majority. The idea behind charter schooling was, could we create a system in which the state... Could we say the state doesn't have to operate every school it regulates? So, could you have public schools that we're regulating, but we're not operating? 

 

0:25:01.5 AS: Gotcha.

 

0:25:02.5 JS: Does that make... So, they're still public schools, it's just that the state isn't operating.

 

0:25:07.5 AS: Gotcha, yep, okay. Now, these are complex complicated issues. I don't wanna... I'm not trying to over-simplify them and I know you aren't either, but to just at least get some of that information sort of situated to ask, okay, if we're looking at the landscape now, the history of where we kind of were at the beginning of the year and where we kind of are now, can you talk a little bit about the state of Catholic schools? And then also in light of this year's pandemic, which has thrown everything on its head, no doubt.

 

0:25:39.3 JS: Yeah, yeah. So, to draw a circle around all Catholic schools nationally, it's hard because we've got 50 states and all kinds of different policies and landscapes and contexts, but I think in general, the last 20 to 25 years in Catholic education have been challenging, but I think that the last 10 or so have shown... More bright spots have emerged than at least in my limited experience, than what I had seen before, a great deal of hope for Catholic schools, the all sorts of new educational models developing, all sorts of just great teachers and leaders are coming into the sector, there's just a lot to be proud of. There's a lot of vibrancy in different pockets. Nonetheless, it's been challenging. I would say that like the... There are a lot of, if we go to last January, a lot of headwinds.

 

0:26:38.3 JS: And in particular in places, states that don't have publicly-funded private school choice, like Michigan, or Massachusetts, Texas, California, my home State of New York, any place like that, it's particularly difficult because those very low-income families do not have access to any financial support, they may want to send their kids to a Catholic school, but they just are financially unable to do so. In general, I think most people have said that we face a lot of challenges, but there are some bright spots and things are... In the future, we have some hope that things are gonna be getting even better.

 

0:27:11.4 JS: Obviously, the pandemic was just... It presented universal challenges. I think, you know, somebody once referred to the pandemic as... How did they put it? It is a Darwinist pathogen. And what they meant was that the strong are gonna get stronger and the weak are gonna get weaker, right? And that both in terms of physical infirmity, financial stability, etcetera, right? Unfortunately, that is the case. So, in many ways, what's happened with the pandemic is that it has... It's not... What it's done, essentially, is that it has accelerated or amplified a lot of the vulnerabilities that existed in schools beforehand, but it's just accelerated and amplified it to a degree that many people couldn't have anticipated, and nobody that I know of could have anticipated. So, schools that were doing quite well beforehand, and I mean in terms of like enrollment, you know, in terms of their financial management, they're probably not as well off today as they were before, but it's not perilous, right? 

 

0:28:24.8 JS: It's not, you know... And it's like really, you're at a critical point. But schools that were like right on the margins, again, it accelerated and amplified their fragility. So, I should know the number right now, but I think from like last... In the beginning of last school year, so the 2019-2020 school year to today, somewhere around 150 of the school, Catholic schools that were open at the beginning of last year's Catholic school year are not open right now, and surely more will close, right? To me, you know, again, I think that what the pandemic served to do was to accelerate or amplify conditions that were there before. You've probably heard a good bit about the, you know... There are a handful, I should say more than a handful, in dioceses across the country, suburban and like ex urban school communities, some of them find their enrollment up, especially in places where public schools have not yet gone back to in-person instruction, either because of state government mandate, or they've just elected to not do so themselves.

 

0:29:38.5 JS: So, families are saying, "Okay, well, if I can't get my kids in in-person in what had been like our local public school, I'm going to send them over to this Catholic school." I don't think that things are progressing at the same level, I'm sorry, whatever they say like, it's a bad radio bit 'cause I'm using hand signals here, and nobody can see what I'm saying, but I don't think that it's progressing at the same rate. Again, I think that the strong just have... The stronger schools have more resources, both financially and in terms of human capital, they have more at their disposal than there's more fragile communities. I think that this is an opportunity across the board, and this is not for me to like, you know, proselytise or something like that, I think of this as just like even societally outside the context of Catholic education. This is a gut check moment for us societally. How... We have to ask ourselves, what are we willing to do for the communities that are so obviously at that critical moment? 

 

0:30:40.7 JS: Are we... What are we willing to forsake with regards to our own comfort, our own privilege, for the sake of these other communities? And I mean this, I mean, this is true in every single diocese across the country, that there are schools just a few miles apart where one it's abundantly clear they're gonna be okay, but there's another one where if they don't figure out something in the next couple of months, it's gonna be hard to meet payroll long term. Now, I will say that as the year has progressed, we are seeing more and more and more bright spots from Catholic schools. I mean, this is really in some ways a lot of what I have been seeing personally. I can't remember being more proud of being affiliated with Catholic schools. It's incredible what is going on out in schools, in classrooms across this country. So, I'll stop there.

 

0:31:46.6 AS: Well, don't stop there. That's actually gonna be my next question, and I'll circle back on some of this other. But tell me more about... Tell me some of those things, share some of the bright spots, share some of the stuff you know about that's going on that's so inspiring to you.

 

0:31:57.1 JS: Yeah, I mean, so... My best access point, like why I would have some line of sight into this would be because of our ACE teachers, and Remick leaders, and ACE alums. And, you know, I could get into a litany here, but it's... One, it's just the kind of abiding passion for serving kids, serving these schools, whatever the cost, just not counting the cost, whatever it's going to mean to be with those kids. Now, a good number of our teachers are doing hybrid, so they've got some kiddos right there in person with them, and then they're doing some virtual, and some folks are teaching all virtual. So, sometimes, you know, in a given week I might marvel at a lesson that a given teacher is doing virtually and then I'll hear a story about something else, you know, that like an after-school program that somebody else is putting on. I actually just had a conversation with a principal earlier today, and she just talked about the reopening plan that they developed in anticipation for the school year.

 

0:33:08.6 JS: This is what I come back to, that anyone that takes even a cursory look at Catholic schools across the country can't help but see these schools exist to be there for those kids. Their "why" is to be with the kids and to have the kids with one another. That's ultimately the "why." And to do so, in introducing them and bringing them into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.

 

0:33:46.0 JS: But it's just... I keep, throughout this pandemic I've just thought about so much of this comes back to understanding risk, really understanding risk, and then kind of determining what level of risk is worth what we believe we would get out of taking the risk. And so, we talk about this a lot here on Notre Dame's campus. But again, I look at how hard some of these schools... So many of these schools have worked to understand and then manage the risk so that they can be there for those kids. Obviously, I am biased, but I don't think that this is some sort of cash grab for Catholic schools at all. I think that really it's... This is exactly why Catholic school communities were founded back in the... So many of these schools were founded back in the late 19th century.

 

0:34:44.7 AS: Actually, this... Maybe we can tie this together with that. The community aspect and element of it I think is an interesting one in that, as you were mentioning, and whether we should or shouldn't be surprised at how fragile some of these schools are, but also how very important they are to the community as a whole. Can you talk a little bit about why that is so important? And if that school or those schools were to close, about the larger impact on the neighborhood and community? 

 

0:35:17.0 JS: Yeah. So, I think the best, most well-researched, thoughtful analysis of the externalities associated with closing a Catholic school are in a book that was written by a colleague of ours here... Two colleagues of ours here at Notre Dame, Nicole Garnett and Peg Brinig. It's called, "Lost Classroom, Lost Community". And they looked at a handful of cities and just what happened to a given neighborhood or a given community in the wake of a Catholic school closure, so what happened with regards to like crime reports and all sorts of other things.

 

0:35:54.8 JS: So, first of all, just the research would show that closing a Catholic school can have very clear consequences with regards to a rise in crime and just civic engagement and all sorts of things like that. But more and more what I come back to is, in so many communities Catholic schools represent so much more than a place where parents can drop their kids off or have their kids go for a few hours during the day so they can learn, they represent so much more than that. In some, they represent a commitment on the part of a faith community that would say, "We believe that we are in the business of helping form saints, and we believe that education is part of sanctification." So, for us, it's not... People constantly quote this line, "We're not educating them because they're Catholic, but because we're Catholic." Fine. That is one of the most oft misattributed quotes I've heard.

 

0:37:07.9 JS: But I come back to something I said earlier, the idea that the church would say, "We must have schools. We must have them." Operating schools is a very complicated, challenging enterprise to take on, but the idea that we couldn't... There's no way we could not do that, we must have these schools, not just because of the learning that that's taking place there, but because we believe that that learning, we believe that that sacred dialogue that takes place between teacher and student, between the school community and the family, it's fundamentally who we are. When a place like that goes away from a community, regardless of one's color, creed, affiliation, politics, whatever else, it just has consequences to the community.

 

0:38:00.6 AS: I do think it's hard, it's intangible sometimes. Do you wanna say anything else about why school choice? 

 

0:38:07.8 JS: The way that I've come to think about this over time is I think it's helpful to... When a person considers what is school choice, and is it good? I think the first question is, is choice a means to a greater end or is choice an end unto itself, primarily? So, there are many people who would say, "Choice is a means to a greater end." So, publicly-funded private school choice is a means by which we can introduce competition into education, it's a means by which we can help kids get access to, quote-unquote, "better schools". Some people would... I don't agree with that proposition as framed. That choice is a means towards greater fiscal efficiency or something like that.

 

0:39:04.7 JS: Now, all of those things can be true, none of them can be true. The research on this, it's not worth getting into right now. I think the better way to think about this is that choice is an end unto itself. And what I mean by that is that choice is fundamentally a matter of human dignity, it's a matter of human dignity. So, if you think about the ways in which those on the margins of society are script of choices, just every day of their life, they just... They have... So that I have so many more choices in a given day than someone living on the margins here say in Southern, I have so many more choices about how I'm gonna get to work, and what I'm gonna wear when I go to work, and what I'm gonna eat, and all of these sorts of things, right? When you think about it, like if there was just one area of life that the state might be able to say, "You know what, we're not gonna make the number and quality of choices be a direct consequence of socio-economic status", one of them, I think education would probably be... It would be in the top three of those choices that we would offer.

 

0:40:23.6 JS: So, to me, fundamentally, I think it's helpful to think about choice as a question of human dignity, of giving those on the margins the same kinds of choices that the more privileged enjoy. Now, that is not to say that the policy should be unregulated, to the contrary, I think there's all sorts of things that need to be done once you start offering that kind of incentive, absolutely, it needs to be well regulated. But my point is, I think it's best to start with this question of like, do we believe it is a good, it is a good to offer those on the margins more options? The ways in which those options are regulated, the ways in which the families get information about those options, all of those are important nuanced conversations that we need to be doing much, much better on, but just as a principle, I think it is helpful to start with that proposition.

 

0:41:24.3 AS: I like that very, very much. Actually, that's extremely helpful. I really would love an action... Let me just say this sentence, we want to empower people to work toward positive change where they are able, are there steps individuals can take to help? 

 

0:41:36.8 JS: Yeah. Again, I think it's so case-specific, but people who say that, "I'm looking for something to do," there are at least three things you can do. The first is that you can find a school, a school community that's doing really, really good work, that has probably had its fragility accelerated, that's probably... That is imperilled, and you can help that school, you can support that school. Now more than ever, I think the philanthropic sector needs to not be thinking about like return on investment and needs to just be as an active charity supporting schools, so anything that we can do to financially support these schools goals, I think we should be doing. That's point one.

 

0:42:26.4 JS: Point two is, I don't think that we say thank you enough to the people that are elected to support our communities, especially people who may be doing something for our Catholic school communities. Now, it doesn't matter if it's the mayor, a state rep, a state senator, the governor, or someone on city council, and it doesn't have to be something where they're trying to get a voucher program, it can be, "Thank you for putting a new stoplight in," whatever the case may be, whatever, I think that thanking people in elected office goes a long way, and I don't mean... My grandmother used to say like, "Gratitude commanded is no gratitude at all," so I guess I'm not commanding it but requesting, but I think that that matters a lot, just to thank people who are doing their best for... Especially the people we've elected to office, to thank them. And the third is kinda related to the second and the first, and that is to find ways to validate, to celebrate Catholic school teachers and principals. This is an exhausting ministry any year, but in particular, this year is exhausting, so what even... The most basic sign of gratitude will go a long way, I suspect.

 

0:43:44.3 AS: Thank you. Can you repeat what your grandmother said 'cause you went a little bit technically out, so tell me what your grandmother said about gratitude.

 

0:43:50.2 JS: Yeah, she would say something like, "Gratitude commanded is no gratitude at all." So, it's the same thing as like, if you tell somebody to clap for somebody else, what's actually going on there, right? Or it'd be like going to a comedy show and after every joke, "Now you all need to laugh", that's not so... To say to someone, "Say, thank... " that's what I do to my kids, "Say, thank you to so and so."

 

0:44:13.5 AS: That is the beginning of a good practice. How about that? 

 

0:44:16.7 JS: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:44:17.0 AS: Okay, good. Alright, well, thank you so so much. It's been a pleasure, and we'll talk to you again real soon, but thanks for joining us.

 

0:44:23.0 JS: Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.

 

0:44:25.4 AS: Thank you so much. Take care.

 

0:44:25.5 JS: Yeah. Bye-bye.

0:44:26.0 AS: Again, a special thank you to John Schoenig for being our very first guest. And thank you all for joining us for our inaugural episode of Think-Pair-Share. Check out the show notes, and subscribe to the podcast at iei.nd.edumedia, and listen to us next month. For now, off we go.

 

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