Lessons for the future: How past practices help reimagine education

Maisha Winn (00:00):

History matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter.

Denise Pope (00:12):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Education and Co-Founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:35):

And I'm Dan Schwartz, I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the Faculty Director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:45):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Well, hello Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:56):

Well, hello Denise. So I have a question for you. Surprise.

Denise Pope (01:02):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:03):

So I'm going to see if I can channel my 11-year-old voice.

Denise Pope (01:08):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (01:08):

You ready?

Denise Pope (01:09):

This is an eleven-year-old question?

Dan Schwartz (01:11):

Yeah, maybe 12.

Denise Pope (01:11):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:12):

So why do we study history?

Denise Pope (01:15):

Why do we study history? Okay. What a lovely question, Daniel. Why do we study history? I believe that it is really important to study the past, a lot of people say so that we don't repeat the mistakes of the past. I think it's really important to look back at the history of countries, the world, et cetera, and figure out why we are in the state we're in, for better or for worse, right? It's a sense of kind of looking back so that you don't screw up the next generation. That's what I would say to little Danny. What do you think?

Dan Schwartz (01:59):

Little Danny stopped listening about halfway through because... No.

Denise Pope (02:04):

Cause it was boring?

Dan Schwartz (02:05):

I thought that was interesting. It's a very instrumental response. Rather than following that, I thought we'd just introduce our guest who actually does it.

Denise Pope (02:13):

Okay, good.

Dan Schwartz (02:14):

It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Maisha Winn at the Graduate School of Education. She's also a Director of Initiative on Equity and Learning at the Stanford Accelerator. So Maisha studies the Black student experience in and out of schools, and like many of our guests, she was a teacher before becoming a professor. So welcome, Maisha.

Maisha Winn (02:34):

Thank you for having me, Denise and Dan.

Dan Schwartz (02:37):

So here's the question, you are maybe a historian of the future or maybe you study history and the future, why do we study history?

Maisha Winn (02:47):

I love that you started with that question, Dan. And Denise, I love that you offered a response that I think many of us are familiar with. You hear this over and over again, that we look at history because we don't want to repeat mistakes. However, I might bring a different perspective in thinking about why we look at history. I think about history as an opportunity to learn about actions and activities of people that we may want to tap into, especially in the case of education. I think that a lot of times we think about innovation as something that is ahead of us, something that has yet to be discovered, something that is inherently futuristic. However, there have been people, especially in non-dominant communities, Indigenous communities, who have been engaged in ways of teaching and learning for a very long time that we can learn from and learn with. And so I might offer to that traditional story about why we teach history and think about history this other avenue of exploration about how we might find innovation in the past.

Denise Pope (03:53):

I love that. And so what does that mean exactly?

Maisha Winn (03:58):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (03:58):

What have you found?

Dan Schwartz (04:02):

You particularly specifically looked at people who changed education, isn't that right?

Maisha Winn (04:07):

Yeah. So my most recent work has been looking into the work of Black institution builders who were a part of the Black arts movement, which is typically situated between 1965 and 1975. These institution builders were poets, writers, they were parents, they were everyday people who were concerned about the conditions of their schools, particularly public schools. The group that I write about is a group that was located in Chicago, they started the Institute of Positive Education in 1969. Two years before that, one of the co-founders founded a Black publishing house. And they were very concerned about math scores and reading scores. And even though we didn't use the language of achievement gap or educational debt, as Gloria Ladson-Billings often says, we weren't using that language, but that was in existence. And so this was a time period where many Black Americans were deeply disappointed that after civil rights legislature, that things still had not improved in their communities and in their schools, so they took it upon themselves to start their own preschools and elementary schools and even high schools. And this was happening throughout the country.

Dan Schwartz (05:22):

It's amazing how important local action has been for minoritized communities. But so I got to bring it back, Maisha, so what have you learned that's going to help me borrow that into the future?

Maisha Winn (05:35):

Yeah, well, one of the things that I have learned and really think is important to share is this idea that education and many of these institution builders' minds was about three pillars, identity, purpose, and direction. And that if young people had those three pillars as anchors in their lives, that would help launch them as civic actors in our country.

(06:03):

And I want to really hone in on that because I think that sometimes people miss some of the sort of underlying foundation of the Black power and Black arts movement, people think it was just about the liberation of Black people. But if you ask institution builders about this time, they would argue that it was not just about the liberation of Black people, but the liberation of all communities that had experienced some sort of oppression or had been overlooked in some ways. So those movements really launched Brown Pride, the Chicano movement, LGBTQ movements in places like San Francisco and Northern California, Asian solidarity work.

(06:43):

And so this notion of identity, purpose, and direction, I map that onto thinking about our past, our present, and our future. Because when you think about identity, that takes us back to what are our different individual histories? How do we show up? What are the stories that our families tell about us, about our community, about our lineage? And then when you think about purpose, that's the now, that's why are we doing any of the things we're doing now? And then direction is where are we headed into the future? And so I think a key piece of this work is around civic engagement, civic literacy, civic discourses, and how to show up as a full participant in the country.

Denise Pope (07:25):

So I love that. And I think identity, purpose and direction speaks volumes to what, if you just think of every kid, think about who am I, how do I show up, how am I in relation to others, what is my purpose, why am I here and where are we going?

Maisha Winn (07:44):

Yeah. So when I was on faculty at Emory early in my career, there's a psychologist there whose work was very influential to me, her name is Robyn Fivush, she runs the Family Narratives Lab. And she found that young people who are able to articulate a narrative of their family lineage and sort of who their people are, if you will, had better success academically and socially in school settings. And I thought that was always so powerful and it always sort of stayed with me, I would even say dare haunted me a little bit, I thought about it a lot throughout my work, what does it mean to support young people in developing a really strong narrative about who they are?

(08:29):

And one of the things that she found was that the narrative was not supposed to just be some ascending narrative like, "Our family is great. Everything we've done is wonderful, we're fabulous people." And it certainly didn't help when the narrative was, “Wow, we've just always had bad luck and we're just a downtrodden group and community of people." She found that what she called the oscillating family narrative was one that helped anchor kids. So the oscillating family narrative would be, "We've had these really amazing times in our family and we've had some times that have been challenging, and this is how we dealt with those challenging times," so that young people would then know that when they are struggling, there are ways in which they can change things, they can use their own agency to turn things around for themselves, but everything is not just upward and onward, which can feel very isolating, I think, for young people.

Denise Pope (09:26):

And is there something about having it be from your family even more powerful? Because I know Jeffrey Cohen, one of our colleagues, looks at when people come and tell stories and, "Hey, you know what? It was hard for me and it's okay if it's hard for you," we see that that's been very influential. But there's something more here that you're saying, which is it's intergenerational. What piece is that?

Maisha Winn (09:50):

Yeah, I think it's the intergenerational piece. And I think what's exciting is we have breakthrough work, even our colleague Tom Dee and colleagues do some really beautiful work around the power of ethnic studies and young people learning about the contributions that their people made and how that made them want to engage even more in school to, one, show up, to be there. It improved things like truancy and it improved things like being present, and improved their academic participation. So those kinds of findings are really powerful and compelling.

Dan Schwartz (10:22):

So do you think this sort of discovering my history and where I sit in it is particularly important for minoritized communities?

Maisha Winn (10:30):

Absolutely, absolutely.

Dan Schwartz (10:32):

As opposed to the dominant where everything around me tells me where I am?

Maisha Winn (10:37):

Yeah. And I think that's why part of these schools, they had an African-centered or Pan-African education, but in addition to that, they taught hardcore math, science, all of the foundational disciplines. And so what they did that I think might be different, because I interviewed one of the math specialists at the Institute of Positive Education, and I asked her, I said, "Is there a difference between African-centered mathematics and regular math?" And I asked her this because I learned that she was actually headed to Stanford to do one of Jo Boaler's trainings and I thought, "Wow." And she said she loved Jo Boaler's work, and she was still active tutoring young people, primarily African-American young people.

(11:20):

And so one of the things that we sort of drilled down to was it wasn't that the math was different, it was the orientation toward math. It was lifting up the fact that Black people, people of African descent have had a long relationship to mathematics and making sure that children are anchored in that so it doesn't feel like it's somebody else's discipline, but it really is something that is a core part of who you are, is part of your identity.

Dan Schwartz (11:54):

So Denise, I have kind of an academic question for you that in the last maybe decade, the amount of research on identity in the psychological space has really increased. And so I'm trying to decide, is it because we've discovered how important this is and people have figured out how to study it, or is it that issues of identity have become more important for people and therefore people are moving towards studying it? So has like the role of identity in people's lives changed, is that what's driving the increase in identity research? Or is it that we just figured it out that this is really important?

Denise Pope (12:33):

I think we are slow to roll in this world, and I think identity has always been important.. particularly if you feel like you're othered in some way, you feel it, you live it, you don't have to be told it. It's like the fish in the water thing, right? Anyone who is not benefiting from the majority culture has been feeling this all along. I think we are finally understanding the connection between that and having a positive learning experience, right? I think it's often been split, "That's a home thing, that's an identity thing, that's a person thing, that's a culture thing," and then you learn math, right? And it took a while for us to figure out, oh wait, it's a system. And cognitively, our processes are all intertwined neurologically that if you feel like you don't belong, you're not going to learn. If you feel like you're being bullied, you're different, you don't see yourself reflected in the curriculum, you're not going to learn. So I think it's the former.

Dan Schwartz (13:35):

The former meaning it's always been there and we're just finally discovering how important it is?

Denise Pope (13:40):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (13:46):

So I want to go back, people may not know how strong the assimilationist view was of education.

Denise Pope (13:54):

Do you want to explain what that word means?

Dan Schwartz (13:56):

It was that everybody needs to be assimilated to kind of whatever the vision of the American way was. And so the idea is you replace some values with American values. This was extremely strong, right? This was how to make America. So I think the group that you study, for them to find a way to stand up to that and kind of say, "No, you don't want to do that. You want to hang on to the culture, here the argument is educational, it's good for the kids," I'm sure there are other arguments as well. So how did they manage to pull it off, right? I mean, there was so much push towards assimilation.

Maisha Winn (14:39):

Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Thank you, Dan, for that. And I would say that potentially many of these institution builders would say that what they were doing was fundamentally American. It was developing and cultivating a new generation of young people who would be active participants, who would stand up for themselves and for other people, who would notice when things were not right, not just for themselves, but for others, and would feel compelled to hold people accountable to do right by other people. That was part of the value system. And so I would say that this community of people would say that that's fundamentally what it means to be American.

Denise Pope (15:26):

And live in a democracy where you have to be educated and community-oriented in order for it to work.

Dan Schwartz (15:36):

Absolutely.

Denise Pope (15:38):

That kind of gives me hope.

Dan Schwartz (15:40):

So Maisha, there's a lot of wisdom. And so how are you turning this into action? I know you have Institute for the Future, I think it's called, tell us about this.

Maisha Winn (15:52):

Yeah, so my research team, the Futuring for Equity Lab, has been partnering with the Institute for the Future, which is actually based here in Palo Alto. I started working with the Institute for the Future in 2019 before the pandemic, and I'm really glad we launched that relationship prior to the pandemic. I attended their Foresight Essentials training, which is basically a training that is used for corporations and people who are trying to forecast what they need to do for their businesses, they're trying to-

Dan Schwartz (16:25):

Oh my God, how many Post-it notes did it involve?

Denise Pope (16:29):

Are you poo-pooing this, Dan? Are you being cynical here?

Maisha Winn (16:33):

They don't use just any old Post-it notes at Institute for the Futures, they actually use something, I don't have any around here, but they use something called Idea catchers, and they're really big Post-it notes, basically.

Denise Pope (16:43):

Big, big idea catchers.

Maisha Winn (16:45):

Big idea catchers, they're fabulous, lots of those. And one of my grad students at the time at UC Davis pointed me in their direction and I was really working on conceptualizing what I call five pedagogical stances for engaging in justice and equity work in schools. And those stances are history matters, race matters, justice matters, language matters, and futures matter. And when I was working on the futures matter stance, I was finding some of the ed literature a little bit limiting, but I also didn't find what I was looking for in sort of the speculative futures literature because I wanted to drill down on things that we could actually do. And so that led me to the Foresight training at Institute for the Future.

(17:32):

And what I learned were some really powerful activities and steps that people can take to think about, to plan for what we call preferred futures. Part of that are collecting signals, signals are like innovations, data, current trends maybe even about what's happening in education. So foundational work was collecting these signals. And I have to tell you that when we found ourselves in the pandemic, I had this historical work covering my dining table, analyzing all of these primary source materials, and I remember moving them over to collect signals for the future of education because I just thought, "I don't know what else to do right now, and I feel like this historical work, I'm not sure if this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now so let me collect these signals."

(18:24):

And as I was collecting these signals, some of them were about how parents were putting together these co-ops, they were figuring out who on the street in the building and the neighborhood were like the humanities/social science parents, and who were the math/science families and how they could cover the kids' school day so that somebody could get some work done. And I just started to look at all of these different ways in which parents were putting their children's education together.

(18:53):

And then after the murder of George Floyd, I started seeing signals around how many Black and Latina families were saying, "Well, we're not really afraid of COVID, we're afraid of racism and racial terror and violence, and we might just want to keep our kids home longer until we can see how other things play out in this arena." So then I started collecting those signals. And all of this ended up leading me back to this historical work around why these parents had started these schools in the first place. A lot of their concerns were very similar to some of the concerns of parents who were deciding not to send their kids back once things were sort of cleared for children to go back to school in the pandemic.

(19:39):

So the Institute for the Future has talked a lot about democratizing the future, and I thought, you know,  these skills that these business people are getting are amazing and they're really expensive and they're pretty much inaccessible to everyday folks, and what if we thought about how to adapt some of these tools and make them user-friendly for parents? And then what we decided to do was not just have parents involved in learning the activities and learning the steps and learning the processes, but have them do work with their children.

(20:16):

So we had a pilot, and we have more workshops coming up, where we bring parents in with their children to actually go through different processes where they're planning and thinking about their education futures 10, 15, 20 years out. And it's not just an exercise of, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But more like what kind of person do you want to be? How do you think you can get there? What are the kinds of things that you do now to prepare for that? And some of those things are in the arena of your academic intellectual work, some of those are in the financial arena, some of them are in the health arena, the mental health arena especially. So we really think about what this looks like across domains.

Dan Schwartz (20:56):

It sounds incredibly useful. Denise, I asked the wrong question. It should have been “How do I think about my future?”

Denise Pope (21:03):

Yeah, for sure.

Dan Schwartz (21:04):

“While honoring my past.”

Denise Pope (21:06):

While honoring my past. I mean, I think that's absolutely right. Here's a question, and I hope I'm not watering it down too much, is there something that you could teach some of our listeners who are parents, just maybe a little baby tool, a little baby way to get started with this, with their own kids are in their own communities?

Maisha Winn (21:22):

Absolutely. My husband laughs at me all the time because when I came back from my Foresight Essentials training, I came back and did all this stuff with our kids at the dining table and he said, "What is going on here?" So I will shout out Lyn Jeffrey at Institute for the Future for helping me think about some of these activities. But she takes you through this activity called Finding Future Me, where basically you're imagining we are 10 years out from now. So it is now the year 2035. First of all, how old will you be?

Dan Schwartz (21:51):

Old.

Denise Pope (21:54):

Old. Dan says old, but yes, okay.

Maisha Winn (21:57):

Where do you think you will be physically? For my kids at that age, I think they were going to be later on in high school thinking about college. What ways will your body be different? How might it change? One of my kids said they were going to have more muscles, one of my kids say they were going to be taller. I wanted to say I was going to be taller too but that probably is not going to happen.

Denise Pope (22:20):

Probably not a good futurist speculation there.

Maisha Winn (22:22):

And Dan, it's funny that you said old because-

Dan Schwartz (22:25):

I said older. No, I said older.

Maisha Winn (22:27):

Older.

Denise Pope (22:27):

I think you said old, my friend.

Maisha Winn (22:29):

I thought you said old, but okay, we'll give it to you.

Denise Pope (22:31):

Okay, all right, okay, all right. You're nicer than me, Maisha.

Maisha Winn (22:35):

But I will say that it's important at this stage in the exercise to also offer up the fact that maybe we can think about how we're going to get better, so not just older but better at something. I want to be one of those women who's swimming laps in the pool. I'm not that person yet, but I hope 10 years from now I'm one of those people who's doing that in the morning when it's freezing cold. I'm not there yet. So what ways will your life improve? What kinds of skills will you have in 10 years that you don't have now? And so finding your future me is a way to just start putting yourself in the head space of thinking about 10 years from now where you would be.

(23:14):

And then we do some exercises, some thinking around if we're feeling optimistic, hopeful, somewhere in between, because I think it's really important for people to talk about how they're feeling about this current moment and what they think is possible 5, 10 years from now, and then what role will they play in creating that kind of future that they want? And children can talk about that. I think my youngest was in first grade when we were doing this, my oldest was in third grade, and they had a vision for themselves. And I think the sooner you start talking and processing about that vision can be very powerful. And it's more than, "What do you want to be when you grow up? What college do you want to go to?”

Denise Pope (24:01):

Or, "What's your passion?" Which gets thrown around a lot too to kids.

Maisha Winn (24:04):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (24:05):

No, I think people will be surprised at how good kids are at this. So I was doing a study once and I was asking this kid, "Let's say you took a math test and you thought you did well, and then the score comes back and you did badly, you got a D," I said, "What would you do?" And he said, "Well, it's over. I'll do better on the next test."

(24:26):

So then I said to him, "What sport do you play?" He said, "Basketball." And I said, "Well, imagine you're in a game in basketball and you only make three out of 10 free throws. What are you going to do about it?" And suddenly he laid out these plans where “I would work this many hours a day, and if I stick with it, I'll be able to get on a basketball team when I go to college. And then from there I'll get support to get stronger.” He had it all laid out, but I don't think he'd ever thought about it until I asked him, but he could generate it right there. And so if you go into a space that they think about, you'll be surprised at how good they are at this.

Maisha Winn (25:03):

Yeah. And I love this idea that in something that this young person, this example that you're sharing, something that they cared deeply about, they could imagine the steps. And so I think one of the tangible things that we can do right now in schools is we actually need to support our young people with the steps that it takes to get to wherever they want academically.

(25:26):

And we talk about that in terms of executive functions. I remember when I was in this magnet program in my high school, and I didn't realize that most of the students in my school were not getting the same kind of learning experience that I was getting, we were just a small select group, but we actually had human study skills classes that helped us plan and map out how we were going to write a paper, how we were going to attack this math exam. So we had that kind of thing, and a lot of students in the school did not have that. So we were sort of ushered along that kind of pipeline.

(26:03):

And I think about in hindsight how powerful that would've been for so many of my peers who were not in that kind of program. And you see the same thing now. In a lot of our independent schools, we have classes, we have support systems around human skills, around study skills, around just trying to get your ducks in order and have a plan, and we don't necessarily have that for all of our public schools.

Denise Pope (26:30):

It's something I know we're working on at Challenge Success where just even building time in the schedule to have that is one big piece and then you have to find teachers who feel comfortable teaching it and all of that, but it makes such a difference.

Maisha Winn (26:43):

It really does.

Denise Pope (26:44):

First of all, thank you, Maisha, because we've learned so much and we can go on forever. But I do want to just put to you kind of to have a sense of if you were going to sum up, which is hard, some key points that you want our listeners to walk away with, what would those be?

Maisha Winn (27:00):

Well, let's start asking young people about their futures, how they're imagining their futures. And let's not always have that be embedded in what college you're going to or what you want to do when you grow up, but what kinds of things you care about, what kinds of things that you're interested in, in and beyond school and academics, I think that that's very important.

(27:26):

I think that it's important to think about this notion of identity, purpose, and direction and supporting our young people in developing really solid narratives about their lineage, about who they are, about what their goals are now and kind of where they see themselves going. I cannot express enough how important I think it is for young people to have this strong sense of identity that allows them then to connect with other people in really powerful ways. Because when you have a sense of who you are, it's really easy to connect and build with other people. And I think some of the social pressures and complications in schools with young people, and quite frankly even with our adults, are around people sort of searching and trying to measure themselves against someone else's measuring stick. And I think that we have to invite our young people to be agentive in telling their own stories.

Denise Pope (28:28):

I love it. Maisha, thank you so much. It's such important work that you're doing, it's really caused me and the listeners, I'm sure, to think so much so this was great. So thank you and thank all of you for joining this episode of School's In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (28:50):

Oh, I'm the same guy as always, I'm Dan.

Maisha Winn (29:00):

That was so fun.

Denise Pope (29:03):

I'm glad. You see what I go through here? Yeah.

Maisha Winn (29:06):

I'm just afraid that I was laughing at Dan half the time.

Denise Pope (29:10):

No, you were perfect.