[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today, we welcome back Dr. Linda F. Nathan, who spoke with us in June 2021, and Jonathan Mendoca. Dr. Nathan is an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Cambridge College Puerto Rico. Jonathan Mendonca is Director of Scale at Shikha Institute of Education and co-founder and director of strategy at Barefoot EDU Foundation, both in India.
Dr. Nathan and Mr. Mendonca are two of the co-editors of the recently published open access book, “Building Democratic Schools and Learning Environments: A Global Perspective.” Welcome, Linda and Jonathan.
[00:00:58] Linda N: Thank you.
[00:00:58] Jonathan M: Thanks for having us.
[00:00:59] Amy H-L: Linda, would you briefly describe the book, “Building Democratic Schools and Learning Environments”?
[00:01:06] Linda N: I will. I know your listeners can’t see it, but I’ll hold it because it’s a tome. I’ll start by saying this is an open access, open source book, meaning that it is free. And this was a very important decision that we made, and Jonathan and Gustavo really helped me understand what it would mean for their respective countries to have a book that you could download for free.
So, it’s filled with 38 different chapters, many of whom are my former students and colleagues, not all, but the majority, who developed their work in my class, which is called Building Democratic Schools, at Harvard. I’ve been teaching that for actually a quarter of a century now. And so this book brings together some of the best ideas from around the globe about what it means to conceive of and to operate a school founded on principles of democratic education.
We say again and again that we’re talking about little d, not big D. We are not talking about a political system. We’re talking about a way of thinking about teaching and learning, about a way of thinking about voice and agency, and most importantly, about a way of thinking about how can schools and the young people and the teachers involved in them address some of the most urgent problems of our time.
So. We think the book is incredibly timely and we think the fact that there are literally examples from, I don’t know, Jonathan, not every continent, but almost every continent, is really important and makes an important contribution to the field.
[00:02:48] Jon M: How did you and your co editor, whom you mentioned, Gustavo Rojas Ayala, who couldn’t be with us today, come to write it?
[00:02:57] Linda N: Well, let’s let Jonathan tell that story because it’s a lovely story of how students approach a teacher. That’s what it starts with. So go ahead, Jonathan.
[00:03:06] Jonathan M: This was an interesting one because up till now, I’d encountered a lot of people who would speak about democratic education from an academic lens, and there were people who practiced it. But Linda’s class was the first time where I encountered someone who had the vocabulary to describe in detail what she was going to do in the class and at the same time was able to create a really fantastic democratic space where students had much more voice than we even imagined. And quite often she would have to encourage the batch to avail of this opportunity that was presented to them. And I thought this was rather interesting because when people have the vocabulary and they’re doing something, they are best poised to talk about what is being done, right? And it made Gustavo, who was in the class with me at the time, and me think about how many more people are there like this and we should definitely find them and give them a platform to be able to speak about the work that they’re doing. So we wrote Linda an email telling her that it would be nice to find some of these schools, reach out to them and do a comparative analysis and try to see what emerges out of getting many schools like this together, right? And we took a chance and sent her the email, but Linda responded incredibly enthusiastically. And in no time, we were on a call, we were planning the book. We reached out to around 20 schools, but we heard back from over 70. And that was the first time that we realized how important a topic like this was, that there were people who were just waiting to speak about the work that they were doing, because they hadn’t been given a platform before and that’s pretty much…
[00:04:44] Linda N: …how we did it. The only thing I would add is that Jonathan and Gustavo, in their youthful exuberance, thought we would do this book in about four months and they said, you know, we’ll just invite people and they’ll just say yes. And I was like, there’s no way we’re doing this in less than two years. But if you guys are game, I’m game. And yeah, we did reach out, I think the number was even higher, to over 100 different colleagues and then we winnowed it down.
And I think one of the most important things that we did in creating this book was every author had to agree more or less to be a co-editor with another, to be in conversation, with another author. And I think that way of producing a book like this, we tried to model both in our editorial team, Jonathan and Gustavo and I, even though I was the, in quotes, “the professor,” we really tried to model, we were on equal footing, and my word was not the word. We all had to come to understand the perspectives that we brought, and then we did the same with the co-authors.
If I were to critique the book now, and I think Jonathan and Gustavo would agree with me, we took a light hand as editors, so we weren’t particularly concerned with writing style. You know, people were at all different levels in terms of their comfort with writing in English. And we were okay with that. And, and we were okay that we really wanted everyone to tell their story the way they needed to tell. And the three of us had lots of discussions about this. Well, what if not all four pillars are present? And we said, well, that’s okay. That’s okay.
And the other feature, and Jonathan really pushed for this, was that not all the chapters are written from the perspective of a school that is actually operating. So some of them, Jonathan coined the term “concept schools.” I think that was a really interesting feature of the book that we had authors who, probably because of politics will not be able to open their schools today or tomorrow. We really wanted to include their voices. Would you say that’s a fair way to say it, Jonathan?
[00:07:01] Jonathan M: Oh, absolutely.
[00:07:02] Amy H-L: In the foreword, Fernando Reimers, also of Harvard, writes that there is “not a single way in which schools can prepare students for democracy, but instead there are many.” What does Dr. Reimers mean?
[00:07:14] Linda N: Well, I always go to the chapter from Myanmar. One of my students wrote a chapter about her experiences in Myanmar during the coup. So she was writing during the coup and she was writing about democratic learning environments. She could not write about a school. She could write about a learning environment that she created outside the system, if you will, where young children had voice and agency. So the word “democracy” is probably never used in her chapter. And I know there are other chapters like that. There’s a chapter from Egypt, Pakistan. Where else would you say, Jonathan, that we had really different understandings of what democracy, little d, might look like.
[00:07:57] Jonathan M: Israel.
[00:07:57] Linda N: Oh, exactly. Yeah, that was before the war.
[00:08:00] Jon M: You mentioned, just a few minutes ago, the four pillars. Could you elaborate on that?
[00:08:05] Linda N: Sure, sure. And it was an interesting evolution to get to the pillars. You know, I’ve been in this work for five decades, and I’d been teaching this class for a really long time, but I hadn’t thought about it as a theoretical framework. And Jonathan mentioned that because I was doing the work. So when you’re doing the work, you tend not to say, oh, I’m running a school and it has this theoretical framework. As we reached out to our authors to say we want you to join us, we realized there was a need to develop a more specific and articulated framework. So the three of us, Gustavo, Jonathan, and, I spent a lot of time discussing the wording of the pillars, and they’re as important as anything, I think, but in broad brushstrokes, we talk about democratic education.
The first pillar is about open flow of ideas and choices, and I can hear Jonathan saying “regardless of their popularity.” And that was really important because coming from a context in India, I think I wouldn’t have thought about that wording, but that became really key to us.
The second pillar, which I think is really hard to refute, is about high quality, equitable education that is accessible and inclusive of all people.
And then the third one, we talk about the common good, that we want to see schools and learning environments that contribute to the common good through active engagement, consensus, and compromise.
And then the fourth one is one I mentioned earlier. It’s about how schools organize students, parents, family members, social institutions, all of the stakeholders, the community, to collaboratively achieve its goals and to solve society’s most urgent challenges.
[00:10:08] Amy H-L: And I’ll just tell a little story quickly about those very wordy pillars: I just last week took two of my current graduate students back to Boston Arts Academy, where of course these ideas were foundational. And we went through the pillars with a group of 10th, 11th, and 12th graders, so ages 15 to 18. And we went through them and we said, what do these mean to you? How do you understand these words? And we had a really wonderful discussion. And then one young woman said they didn’t know who I was. That’s important to say. So they saw me as the Harvard professor with two grad students. No, I was not introduced as the founder of the school. And then one young woman said, well, these pillars, they’re very familiar to us because see here at BAA, at Boston Arts Academy, we have something called “shared values. I don’t know if you know anything about that, but these pillars are very similar to the shared values.” And of course, I burst into tears and I said, well, yes, I am very familiar with those shared values because, in fact, I was the founder of the school and along with Carmen Torres and our faculty and our students, that’s what we developed together. And these pillars for me are very, very similar to the shared values. So I haven’t had a chance, Jonathan, to tell you or Gustavo that, but it made me awfully proud.
Linda, I have a question about the common good. Yeah. So who decides what is for the common good, and does this differ from one school to another? And then what about the global common good?
[00:11:47] Linda N: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m going to let Jonathan answer the global common good, but I’ll say I’ll continue the conversation we had with the young people because they struggled with the term common good. And I said, what does it mean to you to talk about common good here in your school? And within a microsecond, they were able to say, I think the common good has to do with what is good for all of us, not just one individual. So in our school, we have to continually be thinking about the sum of our parts, not just, you know, to quote Heather McGee, not just the one part. And then I think, Jonathan, you talked a lot about the global common good. So go ahead.
[00:12:32] Jonathan M: Absolutely. So when we think of something like common good, it’s so easy to try to default to a definition, right? And when we think about the world in different places, and we talk about getting diversity of opinion in. Typically what’s done is there’s a problem statement that’s put up and everyone is asked to think about solutions in their context, right. But very rarely do we crowdsource the problem statement itself. And very rarely do we say, hey, it’s not one problem. It’s a plethora of them and each one needs to define it in their context because only when they define it in their context do they have that connection to it. Is there that supreme desire to really want to work on it? And it’s not something that’s told to you is important, but you felt it in some way or the other. And we see that these perspectives change so much. Just the term freedom, for instance. In some countries, it’s thought of as highlighting individuality, but in a country like India, for instance, when we talk about freedom, we talk about community freedom, a collective freedom, because it takes many people coming together to create that microcosm within society for you to then get your individual freedom. And we realize that a lot of definitions are created by very singular perspectives that was typically deemed as WERID, which is white, educated, rich, industrial, and democratic context. And there are so many other contexts beyond this for which definitions are just not created in the first place. And this was one attempt for us to keep that open so that schools could be the definers of their own problems.
[00:14:12] Amy H-L: Jonathan, would you tell us about your two organizations and your work in each of them?
[00:14:16] Jonathan M: Sure. So the first organization I started when I was in college, Barefoot EDU Foundation, which is now the Unifly Collective. And what we do here is we work with principals, and we ask them to inhabit the mindset of an entrepreneur or leader of an organization. We tell them forget that you’re running a school, think that you’re running an organization whose aim is to provide high quality education. Now that you think about it, there’s a whole world that you can look to do solutions, right. And we try to empower school leaders at the grassroots to pick their own problem statements and work on it in many different ways. And what’s interesting is, because it’s conceived of from the grassroots, typically it’s easier to implement and requires less capacity building. So when we get a whole bunch of perspectives from the principals at the grassroots, we then try to find commonalities, the way we did for this framework. And we take that to the government and say, here are some ways that you can address challenges that you’re facing while trying to meet your own agenda, right. So that’s what Barefoot does.
While Shikha, on the other hand, takes a slightly longer term perspective. While Barefoot tries to improve education in the here and now, Shikha Institute of Education tries to say, what’s education going to look like in the future and how do you create a scalable model of education so that you can ask how teachers who don’t possess the skills that they’re trying to imbibe in students actually work in an environment like a school to make sure that those skills are in fact inculcated, right? At school, for instance, teachers may go from school to teacher training college and then back to school. And then they expected to teach about entrepreneurship or theory of knowledge or life skills, which they have not really interacted with, at least in the Indian context. And so what this does is tries to create the curriculum, pedagogy, and digital infrastructure to make that possible.
[00:16:13] Jon M: I believe that you’re the Director of Scale. What is that vision of looking further into the future of how to create those structures so that that happens,? What are some of the things that you’re working on or thinking about?
[00:16:25] Jonathan M: So as head of scale, the lens that I, I bring to the organization is how to not get lost in implementing in a few schools, but think of the education system as a whole. So we do have a lab school in which we experiment with everything that we think of and the new pedagogy or curriculum or digital infrastructure. But when we think of it as an education system, we then ask, how do you take this from one place to another? And an example would be is, let’s say you want children to work on certain projects or learn what it takes to be a lawyer. If you were thinking about one school, we would get a bunch of lawyers to that school and we would let the children interact with the lawyers. But when we think about the education system, we know not every school is going to have access to lawyers, nor are they able to bring them in. So what we do instead is we speak to a bunch of lawyers, and we study what the lawyer archetype would be. What is the process that they follow? And can we turn that process into a unit that children undergo so that they undertake every step of the process they research, they analyze, they look for past arguments, they try to inhabit the mindset of the other lawyer who will be countering their arguments and move on so on and so forth, right? And we then ask, okay, can a teacher facilitate this? And if they’re not able to facilitate it, do we need to build certain aids into the classroom like templates or rubrics or even artificial intelligence tools like chatbots? Or even feedback systems, so that when the children are engaging in this kind of problem solving, they’re able to get timely feedback and personalized feedback that really helps them develop this mindset of what it means to be a lawyer?
And then you can replace lawyer with every profession that is relevant. When we teach history, they inhabit the mindset of a historian. And suddenly you realize that historians don’t start off with content the way we do in history. They start off with a big question and they find content that has relevance to that big question.
So something simple would be to reorganize the content in the curriculum to answer big questions and begin the unit with that question rather than beginning the unit with the content. That’s just, these are some ways we think about packaging what’s happening in a few schools into a model of education that will be implementable even in under-resourced schools at scale.
[00:18:45] Jon M: These obviously sound like concepts and approaches that would be different from what’s happening in a lot of schools now. What kinds of reactions do you get? Do you find resistance? Do you find that people are excited?
[00:18:59] Jonathan M: So I think at this moment, if you look at the scale of India, at any given point, you’ll find people who are motivated about almost anything, right. And to start off with, we just approach the people who want to bring about a change. In a phase two, we’ll start working with the people who don’t necessarily want to bring about a change or may not be dissatisfied with the current status quo. But once we have enough proof of concept and work with a large enough number of schools then we can enter into that. So since we have the privilege of working with people who are motivated to make some kind of change in the education system, it’s usually welcomed. But we’ve realized that you cannot easily push an entire school, new whole school model, onto another school, right. So while we think about this, we also think about how to make it modular.
So our entire curriculum need not be adopted at once, but it’s broken up into 20 hour units. And each of those 20 hour units can be taken by a school. So if they want to just change one tiny little part of the history curriculum, or if they want to change the entire social studies curriculum, they have the option to do both. Or if they just want a teacher feedback tool using artificial intelligence that can listen to what the teacher says during the class and map that according to the learning objectives of the class, give the teacher instant feedback after the class is over ,and then delete itself from the memory, then that’s a tool that could give every teacher personalized feedback towards the goal of the school. And maybe that’s just something that a school wants while not the whole curriculum. So while thinking of scale, we try to think about how do you not just create a solution and try to scale that solution to schools, but how do you try to scale the ability to solve a problem. So how do you create enough tools that can equip people who do want to solve a problem to be able to solve the problem.? And typically, with that mindset, the feedback that we’ve gotten has been quite positive and enthusiastic.
[00:20:59] Jon M: Going from the question of scale to a very specific circumstance, you describe in the book an incident about language when you were working in a school in Madhya Pradesh. Would you talk about what happened and why it was important to you?
[00:21:14] Jonathan M: Absolutely. This was nearly a decade ago when I had just started a nonprofit, and as an enthusiastic little kid at the time, I thought I’m really going to serve the community that I enter. But even with that mindset, I had these preconceived notions that children should learn in their mother tongue or their community language because that’s the way in which they’d understand. And we have all these articles and talks about it. And I came in as the person who had read a lot about the problem statements and got into that. But when we reached the school, the teachers, the children, the parents all told us, don’t teach in the local language, teach in English. We thought that that would be counterproductive because it would take at least two years for the teachers to be equipped with enough English to be able to teach the children in English because no one in the vicinity spoke English. So we tried to explain this to the teachers and the students, but they kept insisting, teach English, teach English. And at a point we realized that, hey, there must be some validity in what they’re saying, and we should not carry this preconceived notion of how children should learn. At the end of the day, this is their school, and they should be the ones making this decision.
So we gave all the children a little project. We said, why don’t you all put up some modality to convince us that English is important. It could be something that you write or that you talk about or a small play. We didn’t really know what to expect but just the next day before the time frame that we gave the children, one of the children came back with a packet of fertilizer. Now, as context, we were in an agrarian community. Massive vicinity around us is nothing but farmland, and the water table had been extremely depleted. Right? So now this child comes with a packet of fertilizer and tells us that the ingredients at the back are written in English. So, whether his parents paid for organic or non organic fertilizer, they don’t know what they received because the ingredients are in English. And that was such a hard hitting moment for us to believe that even when people have a good intention and are committing their lives to service, you can still go so horribly wrong if you don’t ask the community what they want, right, and if you don’t remind yourself that the moment a decision is difficult, it’s probably not your decision to make. And that’s why it’s so difficult and you need to just rope in the people whose decision it is and instantly they make it so much easier.
[00:23:32] Jon M: Linda, you write about the tensions between autonomy and central administration with the pilot schools in the Boston Public Schools. Do you have suggestions of how to manage the tensions between autonomy and large scale administration in US school systems?
[00:23:48] Linda N: You know, the last project I did in Boston was a project to really understand the meaning of autonomy. It was a very forward-thinking project that then Superintendent John McDonough commissioned and asked me to spearhead. And we studied together school based folks, family members, students, and lots of district administrators these ideas of autonomy. And we had very skilled facilitators, and I think that’s the one time in my nearly 40 years working in districts that I saw district-level people and school-based people come together so productively.
So I would say the key is to have really strong outside facilitation. It required a superintendent who said, this is important to me and I want people to show up. Because my job was like herding cats was getting everyone to show up. And we met every Friday afternoon if you can imagine a worse time, and so just to get people to make that commitment. And what we were doing was having really well-facilitated dialogue about what autonomy meant for us, given our various positionalities. And I do think it was the first time that we were able to hear our differences. Our goal was to come up with a handbook, which we did, to govern school district autonomy. I’m very sad to say, though, that I think the Pilot Schools’ day has come and gone. I don’t think there’s much left in terms of autonomy in the Boston public schools, but if I believe in history repeating itself, it’ll come back again in another form, I hope. But I think the issue is always about how do you listen.
I now coach in two other districts outside of Boston, and so I’m really aware. I’m playing the role of bringing district people and principals together, so I’m acutely aware of the importance of listening and trying to understand the perspective that the other brings. And that’s hard.
[00:26:03] Amy H-L: Linda, could you guys give us an example of that?
[00:26:05] Linda N: Yeah, I can give many. From a school perspective, I want to be able to hire whom I think fits my student body and my particular needs, and I don’t want the district telling me how to do that. So I want the autonomy to be able to put my own committees together and to make that decision myself, and I don’t want a district person telling me how to do that. From a curricular perspective, and this is where it gets even more dicey, I actually believed, as a principal, that teachers should develop the skills to write curriculum. And I didn’t want them force fed a district curriculum just because that’s what we were all doing this year. So I wanted the autonomy to develop my teachers, given what I saw as my students’ needs. And I didn’t want the district to just use one brush to paint us all. And that’s the tension, right. The district wants to do 138 schools. And I’m looking at one particular school. So the autonomies that the Pilot Schools fought for and developed were about hiring, curriculum, even assessment. We didn’t want to just use standardized assessments. We wanted to use them ourselves. We wanted to have our own schedule and calendar, not necessarily the same early release days. You know, we wanted a whole lot of things that ran counter to what was easier for a district. And I don’t mean easier in a mean way or a bad way. But a district perspective is, I have to think about 138 people. You’re just thinking about one, and so therein lies the tension. And I will always say, you gotta trust me. When I do a lousy job, you can fire me, if I do a lousy job. But you have to trust that I understand my own school. So are those examples specific enough?
[00:28:10] Amy H-L: Absolutely. And, now we’re talking about school versus district autonomy, but there are some innovations in schools and curriculum that we would like to see scaled.
[00:28:23] Linda N: Right? Right. We had a responsibility, and that was part of this year of really listening. If one school is doing something really well, how do we take that and bring that to other schools? Not to say Jonathan’s school’s got to do it exactly the way Linda’s school’s doing it, but what are the lessons that we can learn from Linda’s school that teachers in Jonathan’s school might want to dig into? So this notion of scale to me is always a red herring. When people talk about scale, I get nervous because I think they’re really trying to paint us all with the same brush, and I’m very interested. Jonathan’s students may be experiencing a different environment than my students, and I’m happy to have a conversation about what’s the same and what can we do together. But I’m also interested in what’s different and what should we be doing differently.
[00:29:15] Jon M: It sounds like from an ethical point of view that if the goal is to meet students needs, that there has to be built into the system, sort of what you’re talking about, the ability to respond to the individual needs of the students in your school without saying, well, this is what’s been mandated and we have to follow it with fidelity, regardless of whether it’s meeting the students’ needs or not.
[00:29:43] Linda N: Well, it’s that age old question of equity and equality, right? We confuse those, right. Like we teach that picture of the kids standing on different levels of boxes to see the baseball game. And the whole idea of that picture is that those three kids each needs a different height of box in order to get the same view. Is that equality? No, that’s equity. And so the word equity, which is what I think we’re talking about, is about meeting kids where their needs are and not trying to jam everyone in through the narrowest eye of the needle. I mean, it’s what Jonathan’s working so hard on in India where there’s just a bazillion schools and more schools every day and not as much conversation as either Jonathan or I would like to see about meeting individual needs, as opposed to just saying, here’s the national curriculum, here’s the national test, and those few that can rise to the top will be successful. I think that’s a very narrow understanding of success. And if we could turn that….
I guess that’s why I appreciate this book, because I think in some ways it’s trying to turn upside down this notion of there being one way to success. I think Gustavo and Jonathan and I kept looking for the stories that show us that we are very narrow, particularly in the United States, but I think all over the world, really, in our understanding of what success is.
[00:31:19] Jonathan M: Just to build up to the points that Linda said, and what you all have been saying from the beginning, let’s pick specific examples. Right, so when we look at a school and we think about how you cater to every student’s individual needs, our mind immediately goes to the extreme. How can one teacher look at 30 individual students? But in reality, that’s not what happens. Students end up grouping based on multiple different reasons, right, based on their interests, based on learning levels, based on responding correctly to a check for understanding that is asked in class or incorrectly. And you find a million different groups depending on how you aggregate. Once that happens, you’ll find that the children that need additional support are not the whole class or not even half the class, but a very small percentage of the class. And that’s a problem that’s much easier to solve than when we think about meeting every child’s individual needs as one teacher catering to 30 students, right. So the moment we start embedding this thought into the reality of an example, we realize that it’s a little easier. Just a little than the overwhelming thought that we have regarding this. So that’s one notion with respect to addressing every child’s needs.
And the second, when it comes to scale, again. Our mind, I don’t know why the human mind does this, but we always tend to go to the polarity of the two extremes of situations, right. So we ask, will it work everywhere or will it work in one school? But there are hundreds of interventions that work in some schools. Not just one, but a couple of more. And there are some that work through the entire system. And I think that if we start to gradient the interventions that we select as scalable, kind of scalable, not so scalable, definitely not scalable, you know, to that extent we now start coloring interventions with the possibility to scale it to some schools or scale it to a block or scale it to a district. And then we ask, who should be in charge of administering this intervention? Should it be the principal because this is scalable in only one school to as many children are there, or should it be the district head because this intervention is scalable to a district size and can be managed to be implemented or rolled up by the district head? And then we start going into the nuances of what intervention is how scalable and who should be responsible for getting it done.
[00:33:35] Jon M: Jonathan, you described the large scale professional development for preschool teachers that you were able to catalyze in Haryana State through Barefoot EDU. Can you talk about this and how you went about it?
[00:33:45] Jonathan M: Yeah. So one of the problem statements brought to us over [inaudible] was that Anganwadi workers do not use the learning aids that are in the classroom so they should be trained on how to use the learning aids. And if you see this is a non-Badakian problem statement where the problem statement itself has the solution that teachers are not using the learning aids and therefore need to be trained. It’s a problem and a solution masked as a problem. So what we did is we did a needs assessment and we realized that it’s not that the Anganwadi workers don’t know how to use the learning aids in the classroom, but the incentive systems that existed around it did not incentivize them to use the learning aids because if they use the learning aids, there was no reward, but if the learning aid got damaged or broken or went missing, they were held accountable. And they thought that the safest option to do was to leave it in the cupboard and point to it and say, “hey, this is a tool that could teach you how to learn, but we’re not going to interact with it. Just look at it.”
So what we started to do is we scouted the Anganwadis and we tried to see really good practices that the Anganwadi workers themselves or the preschool teachers themselves had come up with. We try to probe a little bit more to make that good practice a best practice. Like for instance, one of the teachers did not even have a poster in the classroom, so she took a old cement bag and she stitched the alphabets into the cement bag and she put it up as a poster. And that was a good practice. She found a way to create a learning aid into the classroom .And then we pushed a little bit more to say, “Okay, what if you take that cement bag with the stitching off of the wall and put it into the hands of the students?” Then they can run their fingers over the letters that have been stitched into the bag and suddenly it becomes a little more tactile. It all becomes a didactic learning aid that gives them feedback about whether their fingers are moving in the right direction or not, right. So we would try to take a good practice and add a little bit to it to make it a best practice, but put that teacher in charge of disseminating that practice in the community.
So we were never going to be the trainers for that. That teacher had to be the trainer because she came up with it and we just did a little more probing. So that was number one. We allow people to retain ownership ,much like we did in this book, where we encourage people to maintain ownership over their chapter, right. Roll it out in your voice, feel the ownership of it, and then you become a stronger advocate for it. You also receive the celebration that is attached to it. So that was at one end.
And second, we realized that we focus far too much on capacity-building without freeing up people’s times or without tweaking administrative systems that encourage or incentivize you to actually make that behavior change. So in parallel to this training, we worked with the government and we tried to add points to the agenda of their monthly meeting, to say, you know, at this monthly meeting, why don’t you just ask about these questions? And the moment you ask it, it’s something that is being measured or being assessed and that automatically starts getting done. And as that needs to get done because it’s part of the agenda, you look in your vicinity for who can show me how to get it done. And hey, there’s a teacher who just came up with a fantastic practice in your vicinity who is available to do it. So what we try to do is invigorate the system with one, the desire to learn and get something done because it was incentivized, and two, make available the people who could teach you how to do that without there being much of a hierarchy. Because they’re your peers and they’re not this person who you have to think 10 times about before you drop a message or call.
[00:37:16] Amy H-L: So returning to the subject of success. We’ve mostly discussed success with regard to students as individuals, but not of students as part of the next generation, and how that generation can be perhaps more ethical than our generation towards all other humans, animals other than humans, and the planet.
[00:37:41] Linda N: I think we’re in a tough bind right now in this country, in the United States, because we don’t have mechanisms to really practice civic and civil dialogue, and I think, you know, we’re living in such a really polarized time that the reason we use the word democratic schools, little d, is I think schools are the only place left where you can hope young people and adults can practice civic and civil dialogue. How do you learn to disagree? Because success is a funny thing. I’m not sure I would use the word success as much as I would use, and we tried to talk about this in our introduction, this idea of well-being. What does it mean to live well? How do we help people economically, emotionally, spiritually, all those things?
And I do think it starts with how we set up civic and civil dialogue. I’m really thinking so much about that because in my graduate classes, I have students from all over the world, and they come with very little experience in critique, in dialogue, in feedback, in how you help a group move forward, right. I was talking to my teaching fellow last night and I said, you know, sometimes I think that what I’m teaching is how to dialogue with people you don’t agree with. That’s hard.
[00:39:08] Amy H-L: How do you make sure that students know that they need to nurture the planet, for example?
[00:39:14] Linda N: Because that’s all about dialogue, right, like if we don’t agree that there’s environmental issues going on. How do we discuss the fact that many of us believe our planet is in grave need? How do we have those discussions? I mean, kids know it, right. But how do we set it up so that they can feel some level of agency, efficacy, some ability to move forward? That’s what I love working with Jonathan and Gustavo, because I do think a lot of our examples and successes are going to come from places like India. I don’t, unfortunately, I don’t think they’re going to come from the United States.
[00:39:53] Jonathan M: Just to lend an example to that beautiful statement that you made about how much of this is going to come from the Global South. For starters, we need to relieve some of the agency that we think that we have. And we feel like we’re in control of everything, and it’s a very popular philosophy in India, to say sometimes the best way to clear a muddy lake is to leave it be. And that’s the quickest. Anything that you try to do just makes it more messy. And a way to shift this perspective and to get people to rely on nature or see the beauty in it or see how nature has agency too is to help create these experiences and get it into the classroom.
In the same village in Madhya Pradesh which we were talking about earlier we wanted to plant fruit-bearing or vegetable-bearing trees in the school’s pond. And we went around asking some of the locals what will grow here, what will stay in the long term. And the mindset that we occupied as the city folk is like, what do we plant here? What do we plant here? Right? Many of the locals told us you don’t plant anything. You got to go and collect the dung of goats And we were so confused as to how this made any sense, but we listened to them. We collected the dung of goats and we just planted the dung, nothing else. Now It turns out that goats don’t bite the seeds that they eat They just swallow it whole and those seeds get embedded in amazing fertilizer. So when you plant goat dung, whatever survives in that environment and has adequate nutrition to survive pops out and the land gave us the trees that needed to be planted rather than us thinking what needs to be done, right. And like, how many of us can inhabit that perspective to go to a plot of land and say, what will the land give us rather than saying, what do I want to build on this? And it starts with the educators. It also starts with the experiences. And only once we start engaging with this can we hope for perspective to change.
[00:41:45] Jon M: That’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you, Linda F. Nathan and Jonathan Mendonca, co-editors with Gustavo Rojas Ayala, of “Building Democratic Schools and Learning Environments, A Global Perspective.”
[00:41:58] Linda N: We hope people will download the book. We can send the QR code, Jonathan, put you on that, but we really want people to read it and let us know which of the chapters that are speaking to you. Thanks so much for having us.
[00:42:12] Amy H-L: And thank you, listeners. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website for more episodes and videos, and to subscribe to our monthly emails. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at [email protected] or on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.