S.E.E.D. Folk Transcript (024)

NAOMI RAQUEL ENRIGHT: This is Naomi Raquel Enright, educator, equity practitioner, and writer; author of the new book, Strength of Soul. You are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. I am very excited for this episode about the National SEED Project, an incredible organization that completely transformed my life when I trained with them in July 2015. Without SEED, Strength of Soul would have never come to be. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, the National SEED Project. For over 30 years, this unique teacher-led professional development program has cultivated multicultural teaching and learning across the globe and around the U.S. On today’s episode, we’ll hear the voices of four SEED folk. First, Dr. Willa Cofield: 

DR. WILLA COFIELD: I’m working for change, I’m working to reduce racism and sexism and all those other biases that plague our society, and when I got to SEED, I felt that I got new support and new ideas, and skills, and ways of continuing to do that work.

[VO]: We’ll discuss a couple of the ways that SEED sows equitable practices, even in its modes of discussion. Here’s SEED Founder Dr. Peggy McIntosh:

DR. PEGGY McINTOSH: Sharing of time, when you talked about your own experience, had a magical effect on a whole group. Making our lives parallel like that, one after another and all equally worthy. It felt wonderful!

[VO]: Longtime SEED Co-Director Emily Style will note what this project for more inclusive education is not: 

EMILY STYLE: So this isn’t watering down the curriculum for straight White kids. This is making straight White kids more human, stronger, more fluent about the fish they are in the sea. It’s the nature of fish that there are many types.

[VO]: And we’ll hear about a couple of hard, real moments that are difficult to imagine taking place among colleagues in any other setting. Here’s Nancy Rucker Livingston:   

NANCY RUCKER LIVINGSTON: And when the George Zimmerman verdict came down, we ended up having a staff meeting well into the night, trying to figure out what we were going to do about it. I didn’t even remember saying this, but Emily said to me that she would never forget that I said that I didn’t feel capable of taking care of White people at that moment. I mean, what a gift to be with a group of colleagues where you can sit in your pain and you can say, “This is what’s happening to me right now,” and still stay there, and they stayed there with me. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before.

[03:25]

[VO]: If you heard episodes of this show from last year featuring Peggy McIntosh and Emily Style, who co-directed the National SEED Project for its first 25 years, you may recall that I’ve been promising to do an episode on SEED for some time now. (SEED is in all caps, by the way. S-E-E-D stands for Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity.) Over the past nine months, as I continued to read about SEED and explore essays by SEED participants, and re-listen to raw tapes of my interviews with fascinating SEED folk, I started to get a little scared about the complexity of the task. Over the past three decades, the National SEED Project has trained nearly 3,000 K-12 and college teachers from 42 U.S. states and 15 other countries, engaging 30,000 teachers in SEED leaders’ schools, who in turn have influenced more than 3 million students through wider and deeper curricula, and more inclusive classrooms. As a podcaster with a staff of just me, I was stuck about how to put this show together. Until I remembered something Emily Style said when she led my SEED group in New Jersey. This was at the end of our yearlong training, and we were developing individual plans to make our classrooms and school more reflective of and inclusive of all students. “Don’t try to do everything,” she advised. “You can’t, and you’ll burn out, anyway. Do the next thing. Take your next step, whatever that is.” Today’s show, then, is my very partial but passionate introduction to the most important program of personal and professional growth that I know about. I’ll include some SEED notes from my conversations with Peggy and Emily, but I’ll also feature interviews with two veteran members of the National SEED staff, Nancy Rucker Livingston and Dr. Willa Cofield. To start us off, I asked them to say how they might respond to someone who says, “SEED. I think I’ve heard of that. What is it?” Here’s Dr. Willa Cofield, who joined SEED when she was already an experienced educator and activist, at age 60. That was 31 years ago! 

WILLA: SEED is a teacher professional development program, and it works with teachers from all over the country and with teachers from outside the country. It prepares them to go back to their home districts or schools and lead seminars with their colleagues to help them look at their classrooms and their school to see how inclusive those classrooms are, how much they include all the children in the school without regard to race or gender or class or whatever. And it has spread. People love SEED. People come to SEED and experience what they call transformation, that their lives are changed, because the training in National SEED, the New Leaders Week is very carefully constructed to help people look at their schools and at themselves and to see things that they hadn’t suspected were there and to begin the process of change.

[VO]: Here’s how Nancy Rucker Livingston describes SEED. Nancy has been facilitating SEED seminars for teachers for over 25 years, in New Jersey as well as for the national training—New Leaders Week—which Willa just mentioned. 

NANCY: I see it as an opportunity for teachers to learn themselves, both about themselves to reflect on their own schooling, to remember and examine what was good and not so good about the way that they were educated. How do we avoid doing the things that were negative in our own situations? How do we avoid doing those same things to our students?

[VO]: Nancy grew up in a family of political activists. She says they didn’t talk politics all the time, but she grew up in a home with plenty of books about civil rights and African American history. A New York native who grew up in California, she had experience teaching in both of these states before landing in leafy Princeton, NJ, where she spent most of her career as an elementary teacher in the public schools.   

NANCY: I didn’t expect to teach in a place like Princeton. I was part of the National Teacher Corps in the 1970s and was trained to teach urban kids, and I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. I think when I landed in Princeton, having had that experience, I think I was already predisposed to thinking a lot about education and justice, and intertwining the two somehow. Landing in a place like Princeton, it’s not as obvious as when you’re in inner-city Los Angeles, where I was, or inner-city Syracuse, where I got trained. So that’s something that I’m not sure I’ve talked too much about.

[VO]: We get back to the assumptions it’s easy to make about a place like Princeton in just a second, but I asked Nancy first to say a little more about the power of SEED as she sees it. 

[09:16]

NANCY: I think a really important component of it for me was the idea that an expert isn’t coming into my school and telling me as a teacher how to meet the needs of the children in front of me. Once I became a trained SEED leader, I was in that building all of the time, and in that district all of the time, so the work wasn’t confined to a workshop once a month where we talked about “Diversity.” It was talking about what was happening with our students every single day. It was examining as a group of teachers who became very close friends through this process about how we can do things better and differently and raise issues in our district. We became change agents in our own district.

[VO]: So here’s one important way that SEED sows change in the schools in which it takes root: honoring the expertise of teachers as professionals who know their kids and families better than anyone who can come in from the outside with a PowerPoint slide deck and a set of prescribed solutions that may not fit the problems a given school is actually facing. SEED leaders undergo intensive training, but then they come back to facilitate real conversations with their own colleagues in their own schools about better teaching and learning for their own students. 

PETER: You mentioned that your SEED cohort functioned as change agents for the district. Can you give an example of that?

NANCY: I think the most common thing was they would start to question decisions in the district and were able to bring real classroom examples and explain to the powers that be why a certain decision might not be best for children. I think very often people who are making decisions are so far removed from what goes on in the classroom, and as teachers we are already overwhelmed just going day to day. But when issues would arise, I found that people in the SEED groups were the ones raising their hands and saying, “Wait a minute. This is what we need to look at before we make that kind of decision.” Or, I have students in class who are kind of the stereotypical—or what people expect a kid from Princeton to be, with all the advantages that money can give you. But in that same classroom—and I had actually had this occur—you have a child whose father is a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and in that same classroom is the child of the person who cleans their house. And so what I found in Princeton that was really interesting, and it was a growth edge for me as well, was recognizing that we need to talk more about class and we need to figure out ways to make it all right for all of the kids to talk about their experiences, not just the ones who went to Paris for spring break—which is what I found when I first got there. There were many opportunities and platforms that celebrated that kind of childhood, but not much publicly that gave an opening or space for children whose lives were very different from that. Every student that walks into that room has a story. I don’t know that I gave enough time to hearing those stories before, and I made it a part of my practice.

[VO]: Nancy gave some props to the learning program called Responsive Classroom, which uses a practice called Morning Meeting to help keep students engaged with a positive sense of their learning community. 

NANCY: Every morning I had a meeting with my students when they first came in the room. We talked, we learned how to listen to one another.

PETER: Was there a standard [discussion] prompt for that?

NANCY: It changed every day. And it involved doing a greeting that was sometimes serious, sometimes silly, whatever, to say, “Okay, our day together is starting.” There would be a day where kids had time to share news from their own lives. There were games that we played. It just made for—it was kind of a sacred place to say, “This is how I’m doing today and what’s going on in my life today.” And it was maybe 15, 20 minutes—not long. But I learned so much!

PETER: It paid huge dividends.

NANCY: Absolutely.

PETER: For the other kids to learn about each other, too.

NANCY: Absolutely. One of the kids in the class was an amazing basketball player, a young woman, and she had some struggles too, and we had an assembly once where one of the Harlem Globetrotter-type people came, and when he wanted a volunteer, my whole class said, “Pick her! Pick her!” because they knew that about her and they really wanted her to be the one to get picked. So that kind of thing happened because of their closeness to each other, I think.

PETER: That’s great. When you said SEED folks in your school—people who were in your group—were particularly apt to tell the truth about what’s going on, and sometimes that involved speaking truth to power, do you think that part of what SEED does is enable people to practice that? I mean, it’s like a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, that the people who might be drawn to SEED are more inclined to want to do that as well. But it seems that, you know, part of what you do in SEED sessions with each other is practice saying the truth. “This is what’s really going on in my classroom. This is what I’m really struggling with. This is how I really feel about how the stuff that goes on in this school.”

NANCY: I think it also helped people who may have had their own thoughts about a social justice issue, for example, but hadn’t felt … So, say a White teacher who had always cared about these things but didn’t feel empowered, or felt they weren’t the person who should bring it up. One of the things that I hold really most dear about our interactions with each other was that I felt like as one of the very few people of color in my building on the staff, that I didn’t always have to be the one to raise issues about race—because of SEED. It gave White colleagues not only the permission, but they knew it was their responsibility. You know, I think when there are maybe three people of color in a building, whenever there’s a race issue, everybody turns to you. And that didn’t happen as much because there were other people who were stepping forward and saying, “This matters to me too.”

PETER: Just another reason to feel exhausted at the end of the teaching day.

NANCY: Yes. I have a friend who used to call it a “cultural tax.” And it’s true.

PETER: Yeah, makes sense.

[17:33]

[VO]: Nancy’s experience of what took root in her elementary school in Princeton provides some examples of the difference SEED can make for teachers, students, administrators, and families. Let’s take a minute to consider some of the philosophy baked into SEED practices. 

PEGGY: In SEED there are rules about not arguing with other people in the course of SEED seminar, and instead testifying to your own experience.

[VO]: Once again, that’s SEED Founder Dr. Peggy McIntosh, the feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar and speaker with whom I had the opportunity in episode 021 to unpack the notion of White Privilege. That is the subject with which McIntosh is most commonly identified, and while her White Privilege papers are staples of SEED curriculum, she is also widely known for her exploration of fraudulence and the complexity of our plural minds and souls, as well as Interactive Phase Theory, which she has posited as one model for change in bringing women into the liberal arts curriculum. I hasten to note that all these ideas are well worth your time, and beautifully introduced with fresh letters to the reader in the volume that was published by Routledge just after our episode dropped last year: the essay collection is called On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning. Buy a copy for yourself and one for a school near you, if you can. Aight. I became convinced I wanted to devote an episode to the National SEED Project when I attended a speech by an education professor and activist I admire so much I’ve gone to hear him speak three times. My point is he’s good, and always more than a little inspiring. However, in the Q and A following a speech last spring, someone asked him what could be done to help teachers feel less isolated in their classrooms, to have meaningful opportunities to engage with and encourage colleagues. The professor didn’t have a great answer for that. I found the questioner afterwards, and suggested he check out the National SEED Project website. So here I am trying out a theory about teacher isolation with Peggy, who gently disabuses me of my assumption.

PETER: You’ve said you believe virtually all the teachers you’ve met have felt isolated, except perhaps in a SEED seminar, because there’s almost no place you can go to talk about your feelings on your teaching, your thoughts about what’s really working. Is this one of the things that inspired you to want to create something like SEED, and what SEED has become?

PEGGY: I didn’t start with the understanding that that teachers feel isolated until I found that sharing of time, when you talked about your own experience, had a magical effect on a whole group. Making our lives parallel like that, one after another, and all equally worthy. It felt wonderful, and it wasn’t until I did it in groups that I began to ask, “Why didn’t we do it before?”

PETER: You’re talking about an example of Serial Testimony when you say that?

PEGGY: Yes.

[VO]: Serial Testimony is a disciplined mode in which each participant has the opportunity to respond in turn, and be listened to, uninterrupted, for a fixed amount of time, maybe 60 seconds. A timer is important for this procedure, but more about that later.  

PEGGY: And it wasn’t until I felt how wonderful it was to be in a group where you could talk about your teaching without feeling judged and without judging other people that I knew then that we had been working in isolation, just having to imagine what it was like in other people’s classrooms but not knowing and probably often thinking they were doing better than I in their classroom. I taught as a teaching assistant at Harvard when I was in graduate school and the strain of teaching was such that I had to go and lie down after each class. You don’t know what other people are doing. You’re not sure you’re doing it “right.” You think they’re probably doing it better, whatever it is. You’re not thinking about the students. You’re wondering, “How am I doing?” That’s very tiring—neglecting the students. It’s very exhausting because they are there but you’re probably at some level afraid of them, or mystified by them. But in any case, it’s not a community. It’s not a community.

[VO]: She stresses that the traditional model of schooling, where the teacher transmits curriculum to the students, does not just isolate teachers from colleagues in other rooms … 

PEGGY: But about the isolation of teachers: they’re isolated from the students as well as from each other. So, you might think it’s a highly sociable job, that every teacher is seeing dozens of people every day, maybe even hundreds, but the teacher is isolated from the students through not having created any interactivities among them, nor any relationship with him or her. And the teacher is isolated from other teachers.

[24:05]

[VO]: So part of what SEED cultivates is relationships between teachers by means of interactivities such as Serial Testimony, that can then be employed by teachers with their own students, reflecting those teachers’ understanding that, as Nancy said, every student has a story. That story isn’t to be debated or argued with or dismissed. It’s to be heard and valued alongside everybody else’s. Peggy notes that several of her assumptions about teachers from the 1980s have proved to be durable as the National SEED Project flowers into its fourth decade. The following paraphrase is based on p. 170 of her book [On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning], if you’re following along at home: 1.) Teachers, like all citizens, have been wounded by inequitable systems, hierarchical structures that prize certain kinds of experience over others. 2.) Understanding these wounds and these systems can help to create teaching and learning spaces where all students feel they belong and can learn. 3.) Teachers are capable of addressing power dynamics explicitly as they appear in the curriculum and in ourselves. If we can recall and examine inequitable experiences in our lives, especially in our school years, any of us can lessen inequalities within our practices of education. 4.) Teachers can lead this work on educational equity and diversity, provided they have the experience of sharing discussion time quite consciously. Teachers can become their own counselors and equity leaders, if they can be immersed for a time in a carefully designed, multicultural, residential program with other educators. In SEED, this is called New Leaders Week, and for over 30 years, it has been held each summer in California. (This summer, there will also be two sessions in Seattle.)

[26:16] 

EMILY: I trust the model. The model feels very sound, very organic in terms of both the scholarship in our selves, the textbooks of our lives, and classic and contemporary academic scholarship [which Emily often calls “the scholarship on the shelves”] so that, you know, this is a sound way to do adult development, to do human development, to do leadership.

[VO]: That’s relational scholar, educator, and writer Emily Style, who co-directed National SEED for its first 25 years. Here’s her overview of New Leaders Week and the way it fits with what then can germinate in a SEED leader’s own school:  

EMILY: To bring people together for a week in the summer to be with others, some of which are others with a capital ‘O’, and engage in the kind of baptism of conversation that that week-long immersion is, with regard to intersectionality, the different dimensions of identity that we explore.

[VO]: Such intersectional dimensions of identity include, as you know, race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religious affiliation, physical ability, and so on.  

EMILY: They have come knowing that that’s just the prelude to going back to create a self-selected group of volunteers, 10 to 20 colleagues who will meet once a month so that wherever the conversational edges are in their workplace, in their local school, they will extend them organically, not because they go home with a big manual that says “Meeting 1,” “Meeting 2,”  “Meeting 3,” but because the week-long training further builds their capacity and authorizes them to use their very own creativity as a teacher, as a colleague, to gather with a sense of pacing and artistry once a month for three hours over food. Not for shame, blame or guilt, but because it’s the nature of human of community-building and alas! ordinarily in institutional community life like school life, there have not traditionally been these spaces. Because people are human beings and they’re together around the water cooler, and when someone dies or someone is born—some of these moments happen inadvertently where people are bonded, but there’s not designated space that says, “This matters to us. This is fundamental to our mission as an educational institution: to be in as hearty relationship to each other and to our students as we can.” And so designating space to work on that is really fundamental, and it’s a matter of rigor and excellence way beyond test scores and an understanding of “standards.”

[30:17]

[VO]: SIDEBAR: The Timer. One characteristic of SEED seminars that some SEED folk find disquieting, especially at first, is the regular use of a timer to keep speakers from exceeding a designated period in which to share their experience. It’s one way that equity is baked in not only to the project of SEED, but also the process. You might be recalling messages from your childhood about how to be a girl or a boy, for example. Sometimes you have one minute, sometimes three, but when you hear the chirp of the timer, it’s no longer your turn. Peggy likes to call this “the Autocratic Administration of Time in the Service of Democratic Distribution of Time.” [On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning, p. 35] The timer provides a conversational harness responding to the reality that some people feel more comfortable speaking first, speaking longer, speaking without raising their hand, and so on. This is a dominance trait, so certain groups of people tend to exhibit these behaviors with greater frequency. When I’m observing classes in a new school—not SEED leaders’ classes, it’s important to note here—if I don’t have a specific set of questions that otherwise preoccupies me, my default exercise with my notebook is to track surreptitiously which students speak, and for how long, and how often. Will you be shocked if I report that the most frequent and lengthy speakers are most often males, most often White ones, and usually the ones wearing the most expensive clothes? In this light, the timer used in many SEED exercises makes perfect sense. Every teacher knows that certain students in any class take up more than their share of shared time, so here’s a straightforward, unassailable digital referee to keep things moving along equitably. However, I mentioned that for many SEED participants, this takes some getting used to. In fact, there’s an infamous anecdote involving a summer training session years ago that Emily was leading—

EMILY: So we’re in Southern California, and we’re outside meeting and this person was just so angry, and they just come at me and grab my timer and they just threw it right over the edge!

[VO]: Right into the trees below. Some months later, the angry participant did come around, Emily takes care to note. 

EMILY: And then like in February, when I’m doing newsletter collecting, when I’m talking to that person on the phone, reminding them, they say to me, “I don’t know if you remember, but I was so angry about that timer. I grabbed it out of your hand and threw it over the edge.” And I say, “Yes, I do remember!” They said, “Well, now I understand—”  

PETER: —because this person had begun to lead seminars of their own!

EMILY: Oh yeah. So by February—and here’s where time is a character in the drama—by February, that person—it was a woman—had begun to understand the importance of the timer as a way to manage dominance. And so she said, “Now I understand why the timer is so fundamental.” She said, “But I hated the timer. That’s why I just grabbed it out of your hand and threw it over the edge.”

[34:01]

[VO]: Having explored some of the philosophy and mechanics of SEED sessions, let’s check back in with Nancy, who reflected on a few hard, important moments she doesn’t believe would have occurred outside of a SEED setting. 

NANCY: I was co-facilitating a small group with Willa, and there was a White woman, a middle-aged woman in our sessions. And in those years, we would show the entire video of The Color of Fear.

[VO]: The Color of Fear is a 1994 documentary by director Lee Mun Wah featuring eight men—two African Americans, two Latinos, two Asian Americans and two Whites—coming together in a room to discuss race relations in the U.S. You can find clips from it on YouTube. The participants’ frank, unfiltered dialogue makes for a film that hits hard.

NANCY: And in our next small group meeting, this woman came, but she was unable to speak. She physically couldn’t speak, and she kept coming to every small group but she didn’t say anything. You could see that she was physically affected by what she had heard, and when she was finally able to speak, what she said through her tears was, “I can’t believe that I lived this long and I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that there was this kind of pain in the world, in this country.” And that always stayed with me, for couple of reasons. One, what I learned from Willa about facilitating in a moment like that.

PETER: What did she do? This is Dr. Willa Cofield.

NANCY: Yes. What she didn’t do was get angry with the woman and say, “Well, it’s too bad that you’re hurt. You know, people are going through this all the time!”—and I’ve seen people do that in trainings—rather, to welcome her back to the group every single time and to recognize that there was learning going on. Would it have been wonderful if she had been able to speak sooner, so that all of us could hear from her? Absolutely. But to me it meant the difference between that woman deciding to stay for the rest of the training or deciding to get in her car and go home because really there was nothing keeping her there but her own determination to see it through.

[VO]: I asked Willa how she recalled this SEED session from the early ‘90s …

WILLA: I’m not so sure that I was the deciding factor. I think both of us tried to be very supportive to that woman. We tried to understand and not judge, and to be very patient with her and know that, you know, we felt she was being completely honest, and this was her reaction to this film. That she had just never quite encountered that kind of frank display of emotions regarding racism. And you know, she’s not the only experience that I’ve had with people who were pretty shocked by what they saw!

[VO]: Back to Nancy …

NANCY: This past summer in one of the trainings, there was somebody who had a physical, almost a similar reaction. And it didn’t frighten me this time because I knew that we could help him. I knew that we could keep him engaged, and he stuck it out and he was able to—I mean, we had a phenomenal small group who also supported him in a really wonderful way, and he was able to verbalize in some ways what was happening to him, and what he was planning to do going forward. So all these years later, you know, people are still—depending on where they come from, where they’ve grown up—some of these things are still new to some people. And I’ve heard this said in SEED training a lot: We’re all at different places on this journey. And if we really mean that, we have to embrace all of that. I mean, it doesn’t mean letting somebody off the hook, but I think we have to make it possible for them to stay in it. And sometimes it’s easy to get angry and not allow that. We had an interesting situation when the George Zimmerman verdict came down during a training in California and we ended up having a staff meeting well into the night, trying to figure out what we were going to do about it. And I didn’t even remember saying this, but Emily said to me that she would never forget that I said in that small group meeting that I didn’t feel capable of taking care of White people at that moment. I don’t even remember saying it, but it was so painful. It was so painful! So I mean, what a gift to be with a group of colleagues where you can sit in your pain and you can say, “This is what’s happening to me right now,” and still stay there. And they stayed there with me, you know—I wasn’t alone in this—but I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before, where I felt empowered to speak and I also felt held by the people in the room. For me anyway, that’s been a uniquely SEED experience.

[40:33]

[VO]: As you’re hearing, SEED attracts some pretty amazing people. I was honored to talk to everyone I did for the making of this episode, but my conversation with Willa Cofield was especially meaningful to me, as it brought me back to Plainfield, New Jersey, where I lived from 2001 to 2018. Dr. Cofield is well known in town as a social justice warrior, though she’s far too modest to admit that. At the age of 91, she’s currently completing her second documentary about the history of Halifax County, NC, where she grew up. As with all these SEED folk, I could go on and on about Willa, but here’s just one fact you might especially appreciate, especially if you’re a teacher who’s ever protested and not been fired for doing so. After Willa was non-renewed as young teacher working at a segregated high school in 1964, allegedly for some minor disciplinary violations, but in fact because she had supported her students in organizing against the racist forces in their town, she appealed her case to the 4th Circuit, and won a legal battle [Willa Johnson vs. Joseph Branch 364 F.2d 177 (4th Cir. 1966)] cited in at least 125 subsequent cases that I was able to dig up, as well as numerous law review articles dealing with academic freedom, due process, freedom of speech and association, discrimination, and the nature of civil rights protections. 

PETER: Is there something that you like to stress when you’re training, or when you have trained facilitators, something that’s very important for facilitators to keep in mind, especially because you’re dealing with these difficult topics such as race and class?

WILLA: Well, I think the sense of trying to connect to people, trying to make people feel comfortable and safe, and that they’re not expected to know everything when they begin their training; that there are things that we as leaders don’t know; that we try to empathize with them, you know, and try to see the goodness there, and the possibilities for people to learn and to grow. And I always felt that at the beginning of the SEED seminar, having people feel that they are safe and that they can share what they feel, they can be honest and they’re not going to be shot down, that the people who are in charge are going to be protective and to help them at the pace they set. So I guess that’s, you know, that’s always in my mind as a very important piece of the experience: helping people to feel that they can be safe. And the small groups that we have in the training—usually there’s a larger room where people are given new information or they do certain things, and then they retreat to the small group. And the small group would have no more than eight people and two leaders. And there, there was this sense of being intimate and that you could take a chance, that you could say things that you might not say in a large group, and that your leaders were going to be supportive and they were going to see that you were protected.

[VO]: I want to conclude with Emily, my former colleague and good friend from Westfield High School, who first introduced me to SEED, and subsequently to the other guests you’ve heard today. If you heard my episode with her from July 2019, you’ll recall the important formula at the top of this excerpt. 

[44:30]

EMILY: Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students. [See WINDOWS AND MIRRORS WITH EMILY STYLE (022) for a fuller treatment of this concept.] And I come back to the importance of that for students of all stripes and colors and sizes and shapes with regard to the dynamics of domination and oppression. Unless those of us who occupy some of the dominant dimensions, like Whiteness, like being cisgender and heterosexual, claim a fluency with regard to this dimension of identity—not to dominate, but to engage the conversation—the burden of conversing stays on the targeted group. And while they are certainly up to the task, it’s an uneven, it’s an unfair burden.

PETER: It’s exhausting—for one party.

EMILY: Yes. And it diminishes all of us. So: my joy at the wholeness, the goodness of this kind of curriculum understanding for all of us. So this isn’t watering down the curriculum for straight White kids. This is making straight White kids more human, stronger, more fluent about the fish they are in the sea. It’s the nature of fish that there are many types in the sea. So let’s get smarter and wiser, and on we go!

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show! For more on the National SEED Project, explore nationalseedproject.org; that’s nationalseedproject—one word—.org. My great thanks to Willa Cofield, Nancy Rucker Livingston, Peggy McIntosh, and Emily Style for hours of great conversation. I’ve already plugged Peggy’s phenomenal book On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching as Learning, so get that, but while you’re shopping, go ahead and also pick up Strength of Soul by Naomi Raquel Enright. You won’t have to read too long to see the influence SEED has had on her life’s work. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for music; instrumental versions of his songs were featured throughout today’s soundtrack. And thanks to you for listening, sharing, rating, reviewing, and subscribing to Point of Learning. Interviews for today’s show were recorded on location in Massachusetts and New Jersey, but Point of Learning is produced right here in sunny Buffalo, New York. I do the recording, writing, editing, and mixing, and my name is Peter Horn. See you again just as soon as I can with another edition all about what and how and why we learn.