Schooled: The Podcast

In his 1968 classic, Life in Schools, Philip Jackson coined the phrase “the hidden curriculum”, the implicit rules, values, norms, and behaviors in any school that students must learn in addition to the stated classroom curriculum. Learning this hidden curriculum becomes even more challenging when students’ backgrounds differ from the “dominant cultural context” of their school. In this episode we speak with Elly Fishman, author of the recent Refugee High: Coming of Age in America, a book that chronicles a year in the life of Sullivan High School, a Chicago Public School where over three dozen languages are spoken and where half of the student body consists of recent immigrants and political refugees.

Amanda Gorman electrified the audience at President Biden’s inauguration in January with her poem “The Hill We Climb.” Many have commented on the impact her poem has had — especially with young people in her audience. That was the same spirit behind a nationwide contest inviting young people to write their own inauguration poems, started by English teacher Seth MacLowry and the Academy of American Poets. The judge of that contest, Richard Blanco, was himself an Inauguration Poet, for President Obama in 2013. In this episode we talk about the value of poetry in school and in society with MacLowry and Blanco and with this year’s student contest winner, Hallie Knight.

More of our lives are spent on screens each year. At the same time we are living in an era of divisive partisanship with unprecedented assaults on truth. So what role can schools play in helping students navigate the competing media sources they are bombarded with every day? We’ll hear from Renee Hobbs, author of the recent Mind Over Media; media scholar, Dr. Jayne Cubbage; and a public school media teacher from Maryland, Alex David.

In this episode we hear three stories of people with dyslexia who overcame their struggles through explicit reading instruction, their own hard work, and the powerful advocacy of parents and allies at school. Host John O’Connor interviews Dr. Shawn Robinson, who graduated high school with a 3rd grade reading level and is now on the faculty at Madison College, and Josh Stoller is an electrical engineer in Massachusetts. We also hear a personal essay from English teacher Sarah Gompers, who is also the mother of a 12 year old son with dyslexia.

In this episode we’ll focus on schools in the time of the Covid-19 Pandemic. We’ll discuss the effects of social distancing, the adjustment of curricular goals during this time of so-called “remote learning” and we’ll consider the inequities and challenges that digital learning has troublingly brought to light. To tackle these difficult questions we’ve assembled a terrific panel including Bay Area classroom teachers Ruby Goodall and Sara Mohktari-Fox; Rick Ayers, a professor of teacher education at San Francisco State University; Kyle Beckham, an adjunct professor of education at Stanford and SFSU; and Joel Westheimer, an education scholar at the University of Ottawa.