Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Another Education Is Possible

In this episode, we speak with Glen Coulthard about Indigenous Land-Based Education at the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning. This episode builds on our previous discussion with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson about Dechinta. Glen is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories).

Learn more about Dechinta at https://www.dechinta.ca/

For more on Glen's work, see https://cis.arts.ubc.ca/profile/glen-coulthard/

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer and academic. She is the author of eight books and a member of Alderville First Nation. Our interview with her is the first in a pair of episodes on indigenous land-based learning. In the second episode of the pair, we speak with Glen Coulthard. Leanne and Glen are both faculty and board members with the Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, an indigenous land-based study project based in northern Canada.

For Leanne's writing, music, and films, see: https://www.leannesimpson.ca/

For more on Dechinta, see https://www.dechinta.ca/

Writer and professor Abdaljawad Omar joins the podcast to discuss the history, hollowing out, and lingering possibility of Birzeit University in Palestine.

Historian Mark Bray joins the podcast to discuss Spanish anarchist and educator Francisco Ferrer, the Modern School that he helped start in Barcelona in the early 1900s, and the way Ferrer's work continues to resonate (or doesn't) with current radical education projects.

Another Season Is Possible! On the first episode of season 3, hosts Jordan Corson, Eli Meyerhoff, and Olive introduce the podcast and explore what the new season is all about.

In the final episode of the second season, host Jordan Corson joins M.A. in Holocaust and Genocide Studies students from the Education, Genocide, Liberation course to explore education's role in this world and the one to come.

In this conceptual episode, professor and organizer Alexandria Hollett takes listeners through an exploration of the relationship between anarchism and education.

As we have explored several times on this podcast, education can be an opportunity. But, for what is it an opportunity? Who gets to pursue which opportunities? In this episode, Dr. Molly Hamm-Rodriguez poses these questions to explore youth workforce programs in the Dominican Republic and U.S. Where these programs aim to make education serve the racialized logics of human capital, Molly shows how youth navigate, resist, and negotiate. In doing so, they pursue language learning and other kinds of education for many purposes, including those that escape human capital.

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Haeny Yoon and Dr. Nathan Holbert, hosts of the podcast Pop and Play. Host Bosco engages in a conversation about how education can and cannot be play both in and out of school. Is play present in school even if it is not apparent? What do cooking recipes have to do with play in schools? Additionally, Haeny and Nathan discuss the nuances of play, when play is both a “good” and “bad” experience, though both play important roles in experiential learning.

Ndindi Kitonga, PhD - educator, organizer, activist and co-founder of Angeles Workshop School - joins guest host Roy Danovitch to explore the pedagogical and political meanings of solidarity. Drawing from her experience growing up in Kawangware, Kenya, and her teaching and activism in Los Angeles and beyond, Ndindi frames anti-colonial pedagogy, democratic schooling, and mutual aid as inseparable and mutually constituting practices. We talk about alienation, abolitionism, youth voice, and why another education isn't just possible - it’s already being built.

Find more of Dr. Kitonga’s work at angelesworkshopschool.com, liberatedethnicstudies.org, and palmsunhousedmutualaid.org

For the next couple of episodes, guest host Dr. Roy Danovitch will be guest hosting. In this episode, Dr. Erica Colmenares joins Roy to discuss growing up in Venezuela, the work of affect theory in social justice teacher education, and how teaching might move beyond technocratic mastery.

Dr. Amanda Tachine threads stories for listeners. In doing so, she engages the complexities and possibilities of how indigenous people might engage with institutions of higher education. In this episode, Amanda's stories critically explore questions of visibility, access, and sovereignty. She thinks with indigenous youth and communities to present a vision of educational research and educational life that is deeply anticolonial and brimming with possibility.

Building on last week’s conversation regarding disability justice, Dr. Susan Baglieri joins Samantha Hoelhe and Bosco to discuss various aspects of disability education. We interrogate segregationist spaces and curricular guidelines, emphasize ways to create networks of collective access and caring, and highlight the importance of student autonomy and practices of resistance within and beyond spaces for people with disabilities.

Continuing our series of conceptual episode, Dr. Rae Leeper joins Sam and Jordan to talk about disability studies and education. The conversation explores disability justice, the ableism of schooling, and the awesome work of places like Castle Bridge School in New York City.

Early on in this episode, Dr. Roozbeh Shirazi, an Iranian scholar living and working in the Twin Cities, tells listeners that he sits at the center of a lot of Venn Diagrams in this political moment. But this "emergency" episode is not a dispatch. Instead, Roozbeh invites listeners to imagine ways that education can be a reclamation and reconfiguration of time. He presents an idea called "pedagogies of meanwhile" that open space to think what else is possible in this moment and the next.

In this episode, Dr. Thea Renda Abu El-Haj joins us to discuss her book Unsettled Belonging and her current work with Palestinian Nakba generation teachers. The discussion moves from how education invisibilizes U.S. empire to the ways that student encampments illuminate alternative spaces of scholarship and resistance. Dr. Abu El-Haj also explores the relentless censorship of those writing about Palestine and how people, especially those in Palestine, still do the work of fighting for a free Palestine.

In this episode, hosts Emmy and Jordan speak to Dr. Jason Wozniak about debt, debtor power, critical consciousness, and collective power more broadly. Jason shares strategies, experiences, and philosophies that help us imagine and fight for educational worlds beyond debt.

In this episode of Another Education Is Possible, hosts Y and Jordan speak with Dr. Ahmed Junina, a Palestinian academic reflecting on education amid displacement and the destruction of universities in Gaza. The conversation explores scholasticide, teaching as a political and ethical practice, and how education functions as a way of resistance any kind of erasure and also survival under conditions of war.

In this episode of Another Education Is Possible, hosts Jordan and Neli speak with Diana Rodríguez Gómez, Assistant Professor in the Educational Policy Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The conversation explores what education looks like in the context of armed conflict and examines the everyday rhythms of schooling in these challenging environments.

Dr. Mark Leier, in many ways, grew up at Simon Fraser University. From visiting the campus as a child to later teaching there, he has consistently sought to introduce democratic pedagogical methods into education. In this episode, he joins guest host Ermioni Vlachidou to reflect on his journey through different stages of being an educator and discusses how both he and his classes have evolved over the years.

On this week's episode, Dr Harper Keenan joins co-hosts Emmy and Jordan to discuss trans pedagogies and non-prescriptive curriculums. While these terms might be on the newer side of things in educational discourses, queer and trans people are not. Their educational experiences tell a multitude of stories that have all too often been invisiblized in schools. While attending to the relentless forces of repression, Harper shows the possibilities of building classrooms and other educational spaces that affirm queer and trans students.

Sanctuary in school can be a way of thinking about how to protect immigrant students. As Dr. Chandler Miranda shows in this episode, making schools into sanctuaries requires shifts in the very foundations of schooling. This means reframing what knowledges are centered, how teachers think with their students (particularly marginalized students) from an asset-based perspective, and altering common sense elements of schooling like classroom layouts and assessment structures. Moreover, this shift rethinks the notion of sanctuary itself. Sanctuary is here not static and isolating but rather a mobile and active building of space that forges constellations of care that resist anti-immigrant forces.

In this episode, Chandler takes us through the history of one such network of schools, the Internationals Network for Public schools. She also guides us through everyday life in one of their schools. Throughout, she explores how this school community contends with and continues its work in this heightened moment of repression.

Continuing our series of short, conceptual episodes, Dr. Monisha Bajaj joins the podcast to describe what peace education looks like, its limits, and how educators might engage in it.

Dr. Noah Romero thinks with skaters, punk rockers, and unschoolers. Guided by indigenous knowledges, he conjures collective forms of decolonial education. Dr. Romero joins co-hosts Jordan and Sam to discuss what these diverse topics have to do with one another and how decolonial anarchist pedagogies might offer possibilities for public school teachers.

Within radical education, solidarity is a popular topic. What does it actually look like? How is it taught, learned, studied, and practiced? In this episode, hosts Jordan and Y chat with Dr. Shatara and Dr. Saleh to explore educational solidarity with and for Palestine and Palestinians.

In her recent book, Indebted Mobilities, Dr. Susan Thomas explores migrant students' material and affective encounters with debt in U.S. universities. She joins the podcast to explore the ways that higher education institutions specifically and empire more broadly aim to produce indebted migrant subjects. This wide ranging conversation also emphasizes how students negotiate and resist. That is, even as they are surveilled and disciplined, immigrant students forge educations as part of an internationalist form of solidarity.

Dr. Cath Goulding has been a constant presence in our Education, Genocide, Liberation course. She joins the podcast to share intimate and haunting stories of education within the concentration camps in which the U.S. incarcerated more than 120,000 people. In this conversation with hosts "Bosco" and "Sarah," Cath weaves narratives of her mother being born in one of these camps with an urgent call to teach this history capaciously. The episode also engages Cath's experiences visiting these camps to explore the possibilities born of place-based education and public pedagogy.

In our first episode in a series of short, conceptual explorations of education's role in the world, Dr. Abby Emerson joins us to discuss how education acts as a form of critical whiteness, how it can be anti-racist, and how abolition exceeds these framings to offer world-making possibilities.

In the season two premiere, Dr. Dani Friedrich returns to the podcast to explore education in relation to collective traumatic past. Dani takes us through education leading up to and during the Argentinian dictatorship. He also details the curriculum shift that led to Argentinian schools teaching about the dictatorship. Moving outside of schools, we also discuss different sites of public pedagogy and collective memory. The episode explores the educational conditions that make dictatorships possible and education's limits in reckoning with it.

What is the force of education? Is is liberatory? Genocidal? Does it reproduce social conditions? Challenge them? How does education guide social movements? What role does education play in making and maintaining fascism? When is education a tool of colonialism? Why do anti-colonial struggles center education? On this season of Another Education Is Possible, we grapple with education's many roles as part of the graduate course Education, Genocide, Liberation.

For the season 1 finale, we're flipping the script. Our first guest, Raz Segal, returns to the podcast to play host and Jordan takes a turn as a guest.

Finally, our episode about the student encampments! In this episode, J & A tell us about the paths that led them toward helping build and participate in an encampment at a small liberal arts college in the U.S.

Hannah Mermelstein's Palestine solidarity and education work spans decades, settings, and forms. Whether co-founding the Birthright Unplugged program or Librarians and Archivists with Palestine, Hannah's work remains committed to working for justice in Palestine. In this episode, Hannah takes listeners through delegations, book clubs, zine making, and many other anti-Zionist educational projects.

Members of the internationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist organization Jews Against White Supremacy (JAWS) join the podcast to explore principled anti-Zionism, revolutionary struggle, and political education. While we spend a lot of time discussing educational experiences and the role of education in social movements, we also talk about how these experiences relate to engaging in direct action and mobilizing other Jewish folks to join the struggle against Zionism.

Sarah Ema Friedland's work as a filmmaker and educator shows the wild, radical potential of documentary. In this episode, Sarah takes listeners through unlearning liberal Zionism and college lessons that helped her avoid Birthright. She also describes how Cuban film school and Palestinian filmmakers influence her work. Sarah and Rami Younis' sci-fi documentary about the city of Lyd offers an opportunity to nerd out on third cinema and speculative fiction. More importantly, the film shows the complexity and radical possibility found in the collective work of imagining and struggling toward a free Palestine.

On a show that keeps mentioning mutual aid, we haven't yet explored its meaning or role within education. Luckily, abolitionist Rachel Joy joins us to talk all about this exact topic. We look at mutual aid as educational, part of Jewish tradition, and something urgent in this moment. We also discuss Rachel growing up queer in South Florida, discovering Judaism beyond Zionism in college through participating in SJP, and ongoing abolitionist work within the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

Researcher, activist, founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and fellow podcaster Emmaia Gelman joins guest host Eli Meyerhoff to discuss the role of radical study in organizing for Palestinian liberation. From being a Jewish kid in New York City to queer and anti-racist organizing, Emmaia shares a complex story that reveals the many ways people encounter Zionism, how to uncover it, and how we might collapse Zionism's superstructure. Eli and Emmaia's conversation offers forceful critique and thinks toward an expansion of our collective vision.

Teacher Dan Cohen and organizer Julie Kosowki take us through their decades of work in the Palestine Solidarity Movement in Chicago. The episode includes stories from Dan's public school teaching and Julie applying lessons from her survivor father to her activism. Dan and Julie are also married and close collaborators. They tell listeners about date nights watching Noam Chomsky documentaries and going to marches together. This is an episode full of grief, struggle, rage, and love. As Dan and Julie share, our work is about trusting and caring for each other, not because of shared identities but because of connected liberatory values.

In this episode, we talk to writer and activist Dave Zirin about the political potential of sports. Dave takes us through his childhood in New York City Jewish communities, which included playing street ball with Kenny Anderson. He describes life lessons from anti-Zionist writer Mike Marqusee and former NBA player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, who refused to stand for the national anthem in the 1990s. It's a packed episode that touches on the role of BDS in sports, Zionist attempts to sports wash, and the ways that sports can be a site to struggle, escape, and imagine other possibilities.

In this episode, writer and organizer Anna Rajagopal shares experiences from a Jewish upbringing in Texas. They describe the failures and frustrations of the NGO-ified so-called Jewish left and the ways in which their own political education has been shaped by Palestinian comrades "calling them out and calling them in." With compassion and critique, Anna invites listeners toward the quiet work of unmaking Zionism. As the episode shows, anti-Zionism is not the outcome of internal, individual unlearning for Jews but an endless, urgent, and collective praxis.

Writer and activist Alison Glick shares a story that moves from Jewish cooking in Cincinnati to experiential unlearning on a kibbutz (or, as Alison puts it "learning what Zionism actually is"). Alison discusses the First Intifada, the student encampments, and her novel, The Other End of the Sea. This is a moving and engrossing episode about family, writing, and so much else.

A quick note about today's episode. Parts of the interview have been edited to protect identities and stories.

On this episode, we're pausing. Producers Yardain and Sam join Jordan to ask what a podcast does and what small role the slow work of a podcast about education can play in the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

In this episode, host Jordan Corson chats with two friends, Roy Danovitch (an associate head of school based in Oakland), and Dani Friedrich (an associate professor of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University) about the ways in which anti-Zionism has created new dynamics and stronger foundations for relationships with family and friends. The episode reveals how integral friendships can be in building educational community. As anti-Zionist Jews and educators, Roy and Dani also explore how they've navigated educational institutions during the genocide in Gaza.

As a number of recent articles suggest, the genocide in Gaza has thrown the field of Holocaust and genocide studies into crisis. Meanwhile, a new generation of students and scholars are actively naming the genocide and opposing Zionism. In this episode, Ren Bell, a graduate student in Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University joins guest host (and Another Education Is Possible producer) Samantha Hoehle to explore Ren's trajectory as an anti-Zionist Jew. The conversation moves through Ren's work in theater and performance and questions the future of Holocaust and genocide studies.

From a Zionist upbringing in Cincinnati to radical political organizing in New York City, Rabbi Alissa Wise takes us on a vast educational journey. Across time and space, she remains devoted to tending to Jewish people and Jewish life. Our conversation touches on her years working for Jewish Voice for Peace and pushing the organization to support BDS and become explicitly anti-Zionist. Rabbi Wise also shares intimate stories of learning with Palestinian shepherds and people tending to Jewish graves in Ukraine.

Researcher Joe Grim Feinberg joins us to talk about bagels, doykeit, and ecstatic Jewish performance. The conversation moves from the Midwest of the U.S. to New York City to Prague as Joe explores what might count as Jewish values in the face of Zionism. Throughout, Joe speaks with compassion and clarity about the possibilities of diaspora.

Listeners may have heard Maura on a special episode we aired last year about academic freedom and Palestine. In this episode, Maura returns for a more in depth conversation about her educational journey in the Palestine solidarity movement. We discuss her being fired from her tenured position and hear stories from her everyday classroom practice. She offers a glimpse of her time as a principled high school student encountering Edward Said's work and reminds of a need to be as loud and forceful as possible in the fight for Palestinian liberation.

Anti-Zionist education doesn't just mean unlearning Zionism. Many Jews, including today's guests, have undertaken educational projects where anti-Zionism is a starting point. In our conversation, the Haiven family take us through community building and ostracization from the Jewish community in Canada, learning and practicing their own version of Jewish traditions, and the sustaining power of rage. The whole episode is like listening in on an everyday conversation around a radical dinner table.

Whether at the Penn encampment or marching in the streets of Philadelphia, the Jewish Boomers Against the Occupation in Palestine have been a visible force of Palestinian solidarity work. In this episode, the group's co-founders, Sukey Blanc and Rachel Martin, take us through decades of friendship and intersectional organizing.

In this episode, comedian Jess Salomon talks about growing up in Montreal and "getting the Zionism" from her famous synagogue. She then tells us about her former life as a human rights lawyer in The Hague (and offers an impeccable Dutch accent). There's also a lot of conversation around learning about Palestine and Palestinians through love and comedy. Throughout the episode, Jess tells us about the small yet robust world of anti-Zionist Jewish comedy. The episode also includes us imagining an anti-Zionist remake of The Jazz Singer!