Worldwise Learning w/ Carla Marschall & Elizabeth Crawford

Chris McNutt: Hello, and welcome to episode 93 of our podcast at Human Restoration Project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Jeremiah Henderson, Skylar Primm, and Megan Lambert. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Today we are joined by Carla Marshall and Elizabeth Crawford to cover their upcoming book World-Wise Learning, a Teacher's Guide to Shaping a Just Sustainable Future. I was fortunate to receive an advance copy, and World-Wise Learning is all about inquiry and experiential education, shaping global citizens by tackling real-world issues and projects. The book walks teachers through the inquiry cycle, which helps students connect, understand, and act. It's filled with activities, diagrams, and charts to co-create with students in planning a serious, in-depth project. Carla is an experienced educator who has worked in various international schools, from Germany to Hong Kong to Switzerland to Singapore. She is now the Director of Teaching and Learning at UWC Southeast Asia, and previously co-wrote Concept-Based Inquiry in Action. Elizabeth is an Associate Professor of Elementary Education at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She specializes in global education and works with teacher educators and organizations to advance the sustainable development goals, tackling interconnected global challenges in the classroom. You can pre-order World-Wise Learning on the Corwin website, which is found in the show notes which releases in September. Starting off, here's Carla. 

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Carla Marschall: Through my work with concept-based teaching and learning, so as I was working overseas, I got really interested in this idea that we can future-proof the learning by making sure that students walk away with deep conceptual understandings that transfer to new situations and contexts, not just facts and skills which represent today's most important learning. I wrote a book with Rachel French called Concept-Based Inquiry in Action. Elizabeth started using that in her graduate class. I zoomed in and talked to graduate students, and then we were like, hey, I'm really interested in this idea about bringing together issues-based learning and identity-centered learning and culturally-sustaining practices and global competence and kind of putting it together, and she's like, I have the same idea, too. We got started on this right before the pandemic started, actually, which is not a great time to start writing a book when you've got young children, but it worked out. It's quite interesting how our paths kind of connected. We actually haven't met each other in the flesh. Our whole relationship has been mediated through digital spaces because of the pandemic, so it does show you kind of the possibilities of the current context, but also then challenges as well. 

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CM: That concept of having a framework or guide to help you plan this stuff definitely rings true. I remember when I first started teaching, even after student teaching, when I stepped into the classroom for the first time and realized, man, I'm kind of doing this all on my own, I kind of assumed when I was younger and going through the motions that it was just some plan that someone had that we were all just following, but there is so much freedom and with that responsibility to doing this stuff, and that kind of builds into the need for worldwide learning, this book that guides, as you say, a just sustainable future through experiential education and many other things involving global consciousness. I want to call out a graphic that appears really early on in the book. It showcases purposeful engagement. You call it Pedagogy for People, Planet, and Prosperity, which I've got framing a lot, and it highlights how we can move through connecting and understanding and acting towards addressing issues at all these different levels. Could you just talk a little bit about the title of the book and also what the frameworks call this worldwide learning versus maybe more and more broader concept like experiential learning? 

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Carla M: I think it really comes down to the intention and purpose of the learning. Just to have that counterpoint, you mentioned, okay, how does it differ to experiential learning? I think experiential learning is sometimes framed as a way to engage students or to increase motivation, but it's within the same educational paradigm that we currently have in many schools around the world. We want to use experiential learning as a way to connect students to neighborhoods and to communities. The broader idea is really about transforming schools to become humanizing spaces, whereas the learning relates to the lived experiences of students. The idea of experiential isn't like, oh, I'm going to give you a nice experience now because it somehow engages you more in this topic. It's nowhere going to engage in experiential learning because that's the way that you can actually see what's happening around you in the world. That purpose is slightly different. What you referred to, the worldwide learning cycle has a few components of it that helps to synthesize what we mean by worldwide learning. The first is that we center the curriculum on issues of significance, which might be local, global, or intercultural, with this idea that if we use these issues as organizers for learning, then we can actually create cohesion and connectedness for our students and provide access points for interdisciplinary thinking. It doesn't have to be that everything in the curriculum is abstracted, disciplinary, partitioned into these boxes, but actually, if we start using issues, which are naturally interdisciplinary, we can start to use that as a focal point that brings together these disparate pieces of knowledge. This allows for a student-interest-led or passion-led or concern-led approach. We're actually able to ask students, what are they interested in in the world, and try to bring that into our teaching and learning experiences, so it gives them an opportunity for voice and agency. Then also, through this cycle of connecting, which we mean by taking perspectives or thinking through narratives and stories as a way to understand issues, understanding, so looking both at the conceptual level, but thinking at the systems level, too, so thinking holistically about issues, and then through acting as global citizens, then we can close the loop for our learners. It doesn't have to be that you learn something in English or mathematics, and then you're, hypothetically speaking, going to be able to use it in 10 years. It's like, no, no, no, no, you're going to use it tomorrow or next week because we've constructed this environment where the intention and assumption is that you're going to be an active participant in the environment. 

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Chris M: So both of you are educators. What does it look like in practice? Could you give me an example of what a good unit or project or whatever you might want to call it, a day in the life of worldwide learning is? 

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Elizabeth Crawford: I can give an example from kindergarten. I also teach grade seven social studies, so in terms of what this looks like for younger students because I think the question is always, oh, well, that's fine, you can do that with high school students or maybe 13-year-olds, but you surely can't do that with five-year-olds. So kindergartners using local garden spaces as a way to inquire into pollinators, so we know that pollinators are a significant issue, both at the local level, but also globally because we're having dieouts of colonies, so colony collapse disorder, and we need them for our food production. So 70% of all food is pollinated by bees, butterflies, wasps, et cetera. So this is really significant for us to be able to tackle as an issue. So it's age-appropriate because what young child is not interested in that life cycle, and that's something that you would normally see in a kindergarten class, oh, it's the egg, and then it's the caterpillar, and then it's in the chrysalis, and then it's the butterfly. But the question is then how do you contextualize that learning about life cycles? How do you make it meaningful? I've engaged in a project with five-year-olds where we've gone to local pollinator gardens looking for different stages of pollinators, so looking at them in their different forms, taking photographs, looking at the relationships between pollinators and other animals in that environment. The fact that there are some birds that also drink nectar so they have competition in the habitat or predator-prey relationships, so you'll have lizards or spiders or whatnot that are also potentially eating the caterpillars and the butterflies. And so doing that over time. So not just like a one-off, I'm going to visit once and then maybe do some artwork about butterflies, but actually going multiple times in multiple conditions, so going in the morning, going in the afternoon, going when it might be before a rainstorm. And then you actually start to see how the behavior of the animals changes based on their local conditions. And you're also able to go and kind of check in on chrysalises that you knew were in certain spots and see what happens. So with this particular unit, there was so much motivation and interest and kind of sense of agency over these creatures that there was the question of how do we create our own conditions to support pollinators where we are? So how can we have more flowering plants, how can we make sure we find out what host plants might be for the caterpillars to be able to eat? How can we be stewards of these animals so that they have these little niches where they can survive and thrive? And so I think that that's just like a very short example to illustrate that the power comes through giving students space to actually start seeing the interconnectedness between this issue of pollinators and other things that are happening in the world, like farming, and the need for pollinators to be helping us in farming, and then thinking about, well, what should we do about this now? How should we help these animals? And it's not, oh, we're going to tell the farmers what to do. It's actually what can I do? How can it start with me? 

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Chris M: That empathy and compassion piece seems to be really underlying a lot of this. We're not only gaining, obviously, academic knowledge, but I'm assuming that as these students will grow older because they feel that connectedness to these ideas that should, in theory, make them more empathetic as they grow older. And I think making that ongoing is super key, also just to recognizing the importance of other subject areas, whether that be the core subject areas or everything else. I teach digital design. So I am usually the person who someone just finished a unit and they're like, hey, can you do an art project with the kids about the book we read? And it's like, I can. That's not really the coolest thing to do. We could do something a little bit more meaningful with it. So I really like that concept of you can instill art through it, but it's not the end product. The end product is meant to actually change something or make a difference or even self-reflect on it and make a difference through that. 

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EC: I work with adult learners. So they're practicing designing these type of learning experiences, and then they go into the field and pilot them in their field experience. And a lot of the curricula that my students design and take into the field is a completely new approach for public school teachers here in this region. And I think it opens up the teachers' eyes to the opportunities of the standards because we see the standards very concretely like a checklist. And because my students design these integrated issues around local matters or also global issues that the teachers see connections they didn't see before. So I'll give one example. Some students designed a unit of study on consumerism piloted in a local fifth grade classroom and it connected across subject areas to so many different concepts related to supply and demand, properties of materials. They took a field trip to the local landfill. They were able to learn about leachate and then what the university is doing, what kind of innovative practices they're using with developing these marine environments to filter the water and how people are designing solutions to solve these problems. And so because my students bring them into the classroom, they're able to show public school teachers what's possible in ways they weren't doing before. Because as I was as a teacher, most subjects areas are taught very discreetly because you're given a pacing guide and you're expected to prepare for this benchmark test every nine weeks. And so the curriculum is sort of dictated backwards from those tests. And so what I try to do is show them a different way to approach teaching and learning. 

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Chris M: Right, right. I wonder if you can then help me with a hurdle that often comes about in planning PBL. This is something that our school struggled with for years until we cohorted, which fixed this problem. So there's a system that does fix this. What happens when, this is especially true in middle school and high school, you're planning a project and you're starting from the standards and you're planning like, hey, I want to do a project involving pollinator gardens. And then you have students in three different levels of math or two different levels of science who are in your class. And then all of a sudden, then you have students who are working in this science class who aren't in your class anymore. They're in the next level up. Like they're not in ninth grade English, they're in 10th grade English because how do you deal with all the different classes that start to get involved when you start co-planning? 

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Carla M: So I think there's a few ways around the challenges that you described. So one thing that some schools do is they collapse a timetable for a certain period of time to do projects. So we worked with a school in China who does SDG projects across the range of kind of 14 to 17 year olds, where they have them get in mixed groups and then they choose an SDG of interest, explore that and think about what solutions they could devise within a week that would relate to that particular issue. So I think that in that way, you can actually have those opportunities for just right teaching for kids who maybe don't have the content knowledge or skills to be able to be successful in a project, but you more generally change the way that time is allocated so it doesn't become disjointed for our learners. Because the timetable is a huge impediment to be doing quality, deep learning in an interdisciplinary way. So that's one thing. I think the other thing that I think about when you describe that is just universal design for learning. So how can we make sure that whatever we're doing with our students works for all students? So in my last year's grade seven class, I had three or four kids with ADHD, I had a child with dyslexia, I had some kids who had some social emotional problems in terms of them feeling comfortable and confident to be in this environment. I had kids with different linguistic backgrounds. And so I think the question I have to ask myself as a teacher is, okay, this issue is significantly interesting and compelling for my learners. How can I make sure that there are sufficient access points, given where students are at so that everyone can be successful? And that might be through scaffolding, the note taking process, I do a lot of guided note taking. So for example, through tools like Edpuzzle, where they'll watch something, they'll have to answer it, then they'll have a small group discussion or whatnot. So universal design for learning is also one of those key ways. And then I think the other, the third thing I'm thinking about as you're speaking is making sure that there are mapping documents to see what prior learning has come, that teachers should be able to draw upon in the design of a project or an issues based unit. So if most students have had these experiences in grade nine, then in grade 10, you should be able to not have to reteach everything, maybe review, and then be able to use that piece of knowledge or the skill set in that unit in an authentic way, where it actually supports kind of consolidation application. 

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Chris M: Right. I think that reteaching and reviewing component, not necessarily like diving all back into it, is a part that's often lost that I think should be focused on a little bit more, especially considering if you teach at a public school where kids shift in and out all the time. And then 10% of your class has no idea what you're talking about because school to school is so much different from one another. And I can speak from personal experience. The thing that changed it is the systems based approach of just switching it to be a cohort or to a project period. We had both of those. It was revolutionary and us being able to do projects together, it got rid of all the headache and we can do so much cooler stuff together as well as accessorize the project, which I like a lot. So we do four block periods with a project period. So after the project period in our individual classes, we can play off of that and do our own honed in thing that doesn't necessarily have to be something super grandiose, but a cool study into something, which has been very enjoyable. Something I didn't want to talk about though, you keep talking about student interest and you talk in the book about Freire's, I knew I was going to mess up saying it, conscientization. And at many points you reference drawing and building upon students' interests and experiences, talking about critical awareness, taking action on different things. But the question I have comes when the projects are balancing between student interest versus when a teacher introduces a concept that might spur interest. And there's a dissonance there, I think, because there is one frame of sometimes progressive education that advocates for self-directed, interest-driven learning. And then there's another frame that's like, well, what if the students don't want to be interested in something, or maybe a better way of phrasing that is they wouldn't normally be introduced to these topics and they might be controversial, for example, Black Lives Matter or climate change, things that used to be a given that now are not. 

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EM: So that's a great question. And Carla and I interviewed probably dozens of educators throughout the writing of this book to see how they approach that. And they all had different ways of integrating student interests into the curriculum, but the common thread is that they create that classroom culture of connection and belonging, first and foremost, where they have open discourse and deep listening to students' interests or passions, concerns, and help them make sense of themselves, who they are, and then how they relate to others in the world. So I'll share an example from one of your board members, Julia Fliss, whom you know. We interviewed her for our book, and she's a middle grades language arts teacher. And she has presented in several of my classes sharing how she approaches this student-driven learning. So she believes it's essential to start the year with a collective experience, a shared guided reading, for example, of a book like A Long Walk to Water or documentary film like Girl Rising to provide sort of a frame for using stories as lenses for understanding the world in which she introduces the SDGs and concepts like gender equality, clean water and sanitation, quality education, and so forth. So that shared experience allows students to consider how do they impact that issue? How does it relate to them? How can they make a difference, which she calls making a dent in the universe. So following this shared experience, she then allows that time and space that you just referenced that she calls a personalized action campaign time where students can identify what they care about as related to the SDGs and how they want to make a difference. And what makes Julia's approach, I think, really unique is that she's very transparent about the standards that she's expected to follow. And she has them work alongside her, deconstructing the standards, identifying how the standards relate to them, what they mean to them. And I think that transparency is really key as a teacher. So being transparent about what you're doing and why you're doing it. But whether it's guided or self-directed, all her experiences align with the standards she's expected to address. And she also empowers students to take action and use the language arts as their voice to make a difference. 

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Chris M: And it seems like too when you introduce students slowly and are transparent about the process, you aren't going to necessarily be the one that introduces the controversial topic, if that makes sense. I found that students tend to be the ones that introduce the topics, and that makes it way easier to talk about those things. 

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EM: Yeah. I asked Julia because she does work at a public school, has she received any kind of pushback from some of the controversial or challenging topics? And she hasn't because the students can explain to their parents and to the administration or whomever why they're learning what they're learning. And it's like you said, it comes from them. It's their questions, their interests, what they want to learn about, but they all ultimately align with the standards that she's expected to follow. 

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Chris M: Right. And it's all from that place of creating a shared space. It's transparency, it's compassion, it's loving empathy. It seems like things that you would hope the projects spur within students as they learn. And I want to talk about for a second what you just hope classrooms will look like when educators pick up the book and then incorporate these ideas. How would you expect or how do you hope teachers change as a result of reading this, picking it up, seeing what's going on? 

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Carla M: Yeah. So I think the first and foremost kind of building on what Elizabeth just shared, we would want to see more reciprocity and dialogue between teachers and students. So one of the premises that underpins children's rights is that children are experts of their own lives. And I think we don't often build from this starting point, this assumption that students are experts about their own lives and can share things from their perspectives that can shape the learning experience more broadly. And that doesn't mean it has to be individualized where it's each child's individual interests or passions. It's about creating a collective sense of identity in a classroom. But the starting point for that is that dialogue where people are actually sharing what they've experienced. And my experiences in doing some co-planning with my own learners is that they will tell you when they are done having explored a topic. I mean, we were going to do some plastic waste like inquiries as part of our unit on resource allocation or resource extraction and then allocation. They're like, no, we've done plastic waste number of times. We don't want to do that. We want to do soil as a global commons or one kid said, oh, let's do more sustainable power grids, like just things I would have never thought of, ghost fishing. I mean, like if you actually create space for them, they will bring these ideas, but we don't often do that. So I think that's the first one. And if then their voices are more embedded in the design of our classroom experiences, I think we hope that that means there's more cohesion and connectedness for the learning in general. So their identities are affirmed. They can see some of their concerns and interests addressed through the way that the curriculum is being kind of chunked or provided in those experiences and that the disciplinary knowledge and skills are used for a purpose. So they can actually see, oh, I'm learning about this persuasive text and how to create my own because I'm going to be writing some letters to local government about these particular issues which are concerning for me. And of course, we want them to understand issues and the world around them better. We don't want it to be tokenistic or shallow. They need to have a deep understanding of what's actually happening in the world. It needs to be informed. It needs to be evidence based and it needs to be kind of conceptual as well so that if they see an instance of discrimination with one case study, they can actually recognize it in new case studies now and in the future as well. And hopefully that will help build the agency that's required for students to see themselves as able to enact change in what is becoming a very complex, interconnected, ambiguous, kind of volatile world. To build from that, I think that notion that schooling happens with students and not to them is really important. And their teachers are also learners and co-learners with them in the classroom. And we saw that in the teachers that we interviewed in the book. But I wanted to emphasize the cultivation of passion and purpose and why that's so essential. And I start my courses with that idea of what's the purpose of schooling and then followed by what are your passions and how do you connect to the curriculum. And something that stood out to me a year ago, one of my mid 40s adult learners said to me, no one has ever asked me what my passions are or what my interests are. We do a lot of reflecting on what our own schooling experiences were like, positive and negative. How do you want your future classroom to look? And it's so hard to break those habits of teaching that we teach how we were taught. And so I'm trying to sort of break that trend to help students identify their own values and interests and passions and how they relate in the world so they can do that with their own students. Because we have experienced K-12 schooling in certain ways that shape how we then become teachers and go into classrooms. 

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Chris M: I think that this process that you're describing, that idea of co-developing the project or the unit and talking about these things together, at least helps me tease apart some of the authoritarian issues I have with teaching. As a teacher who also is deeply, deeply, deeply interested in progressive pedagogy, it feels really awkward to go into the room and command all authority, but it's also very difficult to find ways to give that up in a way that's not weird for the teacher and for the kids. I think being able to have some kind of structure in that co-planning process allows us to give up some of our power and allow students to be involved with that. And I think about when you're talking about students seeing interest in what it is that they're doing, I think it's actually John Warner, shout out to another board member, who talks about the idea that writers, when they get to college, he asks them, what do you enjoy writing? How do you see yourself as a writer? And no one can answer the question, even if they're English majors. It's because we spent so long just telling kids exactly what to do or exactly what to do and how to do it. It's all become so standardized in a non-autonomous sense that this is where we're at. So something like this offers an anecdote to that. And then I'm curious to know, okay, so they go through this process. What's the big picture of worldwide learning? What do you hope that this spurs in the long term as more classrooms shift to a model with this type of environment? 

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Carla M: Yes, I think for me, I'll speak on my own behalf here, that there's a real systems change that occurs with more students and teachers exploring what's possible. I think at the moment, schooling is in a rut. We're trying to use the same system for a different purpose, for a different world that's around us. We know the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We've seen that firsthand with the COVID pandemic. We've seen how globalization is creating more interdependence and connectedness across the world. And we've seen how we need to create solutions in an interdisciplinary way to actually address some of these things. It's not good enough for our students to walk out the door when they're five or 13 or 18 and be passive. We need more active citizens actually saying, you know, we need to we need to address these things. They're not going to go away by themselves. So I think we're reaching a precipice here in terms of what are the extent to which our schooling systems are sustainable, given our current conditions. And I think for myself, I think Elizabeth would agree, but I don't want to speak for her. I think we want to see large scale systems change and schools becoming different spaces which value recognize their learners. So in identity affirming, culturally sustaining ways that support students of all ethnicities, races, sexualities, et cetera, but then also empower those students to become agents of change in their community that make a difference. 

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Chris M: Yeah, I think that's very well stated. And I guess I'll wrap it up with this question, which is talking about systems of change and I want to support teachers as an administrator. What systems could I implement to the typically overworked, underpaid teacher who wants to pick up 300 plus page book with a bunch of cool charts and diagrams that I need to analyze and integrate? How can I help them do that in a meaningful way? 

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EM: First and foremost, we need to trust teachers, trust teachers as professionals who can design meaningful, rigorous curriculum that meets their students needs. I do a lot of work in Finland and one of their cultural values is trust and teachers have high workplace satisfaction. They're respected in society. And I think so getting back to our values, I'll speak from the US context, it's really important that administrators, parents and colleagues support teachers and trust teachers. So just that value of trust. Second, I think more and more teachers have lost dedicated planning time and a lot of my students will say this is really hard work designing units like this, it's time consuming and challenging and teachers have more and more responsibilities given to them where they've completely lost their planning time in some cases. So I think administrators in particular need to remove a lot of those barriers and responsibilities that aren't really worth their time and give teachers time to plan. And then third, I think it's essential that teachers have support either within their school or beyond. That's probably one of the reasons I left the classroom as I felt isolated and I didn't have a community. It was before Twitter and all these networks where you can find like-minded people online, but teachers need a community. And so that's actually something Carla and I hope to do is create this community of educators who can test ideas, share what worked, what challenges they faced and come together via our companion website to share different practices in their different contexts. 

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Carla M: So I will add something, but I know that it's very easy to say this when I'm not in the U.S. context and experiencing what teachers on the ground are. I think teachers need to be incentivized instead of punished for making the curriculum relate to students' lived experiences. I know there's a number of laws that have happened in places like North Carolina and Arizona, et cetera, that are asking parents or students to basically call in when a teacher has brought up a contentious issue. And I think this really works against the purpose of schooling, which is to create a laboratory, a safe space where students can actually engage with these issues in a meaningful way with their peers who are going to be from diverse experiences and backgrounds instead of just kind of the echo chamber of the family. And of course, the family will have values and beliefs and they need to be they need to feel like those values and beliefs are being affirmed by the school community and not discredited. At the same time, we need to learn how to deal with people who may not be the same as us because that is just the way the world works. Right. So I think recognizing that teaching is a political act, it is. That doesn't mean that you're talking about partisan politics. It doesn't mean you're talking about political viewpoints of particular politicians. Doesn't mean you're talking about what bill is on the Senate floor or whatever. But it's about recognizing that whatever choices we make in the classroom, we are tacitly communicating what we believe students role is in society. So if we tell them be quiet, sit down, it's not your time to talk. We're teaching compliance. We're teaching through that kind of disciplinary authoritarian lens versus let's sit in a circle. Let's actually have a discussion about something that's tricky. How are we going to get through this? So we feel uncomfortable and creating a space where we say, yes, we will experience comfort as part of exploring issues in the world, but that doesn't mean you have to do it alone. And we're going to make sure that we have protocols and structures in place to make sure everyone feels respected and safe. I hope that those issues, which are actually at a much higher level than at a school district level, will be addressed over time. But in the meantime, administrators can just keep supporting their teachers in the classroom and saying, you know, this is what we should be doing. We should make sure that the learning works for our learners. 

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Chris M: What do you do in a circumstance where administration doesn't support you? So an instance where you don't have any planning time, where what is deemed as a political issue is not supported in the classroom, our parents are calling in, especially for rural educators that are trying to make a difference. It's really tricky. Is there a way that you can use some form of like creative noncompliance to get away with some of the things that you're talking about or does it even have to go that route? Is there another way that you can enact change? 

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Carla M: The thing I'm thinking about is the way that you can do this work surreptitiously through integrating the community, because what administrator will say, no, you can't talk to people in the community. I remember when I was working in Germany and we interviewed our janitor and he was talking about paint getting clogged in the pipes and whatnot. And so the question is there that those are first grade students. What are they learning about whose work is valued and important in society by who are bringing into the community, who are bringing into the classroom rather? And so we can be doing some of this work, I think, through local engagement in meaningful ways, because they will it will come up anyways as you're engaging with someone who's down the road or around the corner from the school. And so as long as we keep getting kids out of the school environment and engaging meaningfully with the community, I think that might provide a way for teachers to have a bit of a workaround. 

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Chris M: That's a fantastic point. It's also a way to get around. We've been doing a lot of research into the concept of divisive concepts, because it's been a huge thing here in the States where they're banning the use of teachers using divisive concepts. What was interesting is, is that the bill explicitly states that if a student brings up a divisive concept, you can talk about it. So by using open ended PBL structures where you're just posing questions about, let's say, inequity and someone brings up a, quote unquote, divisive concept, you can talk about as much as you want, which is kind of what you're saying you should do anyway, because that allows it to be a safe space for the student to talk about it. So it's a win win, even though it's kind of an absurd policy to begin with. Thank you again for listening to Human Restoration Project's podcast. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.

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