Yeah. Me too.

Everything is a lot. Everything… keeps getting to be even more of a lot, and somehow we expect to throw a smile on our faces and, whenever someone asks us if we’re fine, to pretend we are, instead of saying:

‘I’m sad. I’m struggling. I’m overwhelmed. Please just let me lie here facedown in a carton of chocolate ice cream until next spring.’

Listeners, in all these things you are not remotely alone. I am frequently not okay. I am exhausted. And I just watched my audio engineer projectile-vomit feelings of overwhelm at our colleagues. And I realized we are all in it together; we are all feeling the over-the-topness of this moment .

And it’s not even swimsuit season. And we’re no longer 13! (Thank goodness.)

Today on the show, I’m joined by one of the kindest people I know: young adult author Jo Knowles, to talk about her book Where The Heart Is. It’s a book about love, loss, one-piece swimsuits, and trying to reconcile those feelings of what we think we’re supposed to be for other people, with who and how we really are.

Thanks for joining me again, listeners. I’m Jeanie Phillips, this is #vted Reads, a podcast about books by, for, and with Vermont educators. Let’s chat.

(Unless you don’t feel like it, in which case that’s okay too…)

Jeanie: Thank you so much for joining me Jo. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jo: Hi, thanks so much for having me. It’s really an honor to be here and just talk with you today. So! My name is Jo Knowles, I write young adult and middle-grade fiction — or what we often call Tween fiction, these days. And I also have a picture book and picture book coming out next fall, my first one called Ear Worm and it’s about a little worm who gets a song stuck in his head. And he needs to try to figure out who put it there.

I also teach writing for Southern New Hampshire University and their MFA program. It’s called Mountainview MFA and it’s a Low-Residency program. And so, teaching and writing those were my two things.

Jeanie: So a) I can’t wait to get a copy of Ear Worm. That sounds like a great book, congratulations on that. It sounds like a great book to read aloud to our Tween readers even though we think of picture books for younger folks.

Jo: I am so excited. The whole idea is such a silly story, but I had a dream that I had this great idea for a picture book. And then I, you know I got up in the middle of the night and I wrote it all down because I was so excited because I thought it was such a great concept.

And I woke up in the morning and I went to find my notes and I said to my husband, “What happened to the notes I took about the picture book idea I had in the middle of the night?”

And he said, what are you talking about?

…I said: “Didn’t I get up in the middle of the night and write down the story?”

And he said no.

Then I thought: oh my gosh. Did I dream that I had this idea? I was all upset. Anyway, I took the dog for a walk later that day. I was walking in the woods and it all came back to me. So I came home and I wrote it.

Jeanie: I’ve met you several times because you’ve come to my former school library and done amazing work with students around writing and talking to them about your books. And I wonder what it’s like to be a Teen and Tween author — and now picture book author — in a COVID world, where you don’t have some sort of ready access to readers?

Jo: Yeah, it’s very heartbreaking. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. One of the biggest joys about writing for kids is meeting kids and just being able to share, not just my stories but my own personal story. Because I think when I’m doing school visits, when I talk about my own journey to becoming a published author and getting over my own shyness and things about public speaking. That’s when I really feel that connection to kids.

And, you know, sometimes afterwards there’s always at least one kid who comes up and they’re shy like me, and they got brave somehow. They’ll indicate some special thing about them that made them feel close to me.  For me, those are the moments that I just cling to. Especially when I’m struggling with my own work and thinking I can’t do this anymore, why do I do this.

I think of those kids that I’ve touched and I miss that already.

You know, I can still do Zoom visits with kids and that’s fine. But, there’s just something about being able to recognize a kid in the audience with whom you’re making a special connection. Face-to-face or in-person visits allow you to take it to the next step. Allow that kid to come over to you privately and sort of say something that they didn’t feel comfortable saying in front of their entire school or their class.

But you know, we’ll just make up for it when it’s safe again to travel.

Jeanie: One of the things I just heard from you — I heard so many things, but one of the things I want to follow up on is like: writing is hard, even when you’re a writer.

And I remember you talking to my former students about that: that writing is a labor no matter what. And I think there’s this mistaken notion that for writers it’s really easy for them. But, could you talk a little bit about writing being hard and how you approach such a challenging work?

Jo: Well, it’s hard for different reasons, right?

Sometimes it’s hard because the words just aren’t flowing for whatever reason.

And then, sometimes it’s hard because you’re writing a difficult scene. Or you’re writing something that comes from a really personal place and you might feel nervous about sharing that in a story. Or there just might be something where you’re putting your character in harm’s way. You know that that’s part of the story arc, but that’s really difficult to do for anybody who has read, See You at Harry’s, that was certainly the hardest book I ever.

So and I do tend to write about sort of sad or difficult things that happened.

I write realistic fiction. And so naturally most of my stories are about overcoming some kind of obstacle and it’s usually physical and personal. (Most often, it’s also happens to be something I, myself, have experienced and survived.) And so, those moments are usually the hardest part for me.

But then there’s also other times where it’s just getting through the murky middle of a book where you had this great idea or concept and then you’re just sort of,

“How do I get to the end? I thought this book was going one place and now it seems to want to go another place? How do I reign it in and make this a story that’s going to actually be publishable?”

So that’s a challenge.

And then like with my most recent book that I’m still working on right now, Where the Heart Is. There’s a little sister in that book named Ivy. She’s a secondary character. But, I’ve been working on a novel about Ivy, for the past couple of years now. It’s a younger middle-grade, so Ivy is nine years old and just the voice originally kind of came to me as third person.

I wrote it and then, my editor gave me comments. And I revised it.

Then she gave: “Still not there yet. I’m not connecting with Ivy.”

Finally, I had done big revisions. Like, maybe three really big revisions with my editor. And we had a heart-to-heart phone call. And I knew it was bad.

I knew it was something wasn’t working still.

And she very gently suggested that maybe I should try first person instead of third person.

(For any writers listening, you know that that doesn’t mean doing a find and replace. It means starting over. All over again, with a blank page.)

And so I rewrote the entire book again.

But that was it! As soon as I started it, her voice just flowed out of me and it was fun and enjoyable.

And I had come to really dread working on the book! Butthen once I had her voice, it was such a joy to sit down and write again.

That’s another example of when it’s really hard to write. But then I think advice for any writers listening is just allowing yourself to acknowledge that sometimes a book takes more than one try. Nothing is ever a waste of time.

I couldn’t have written that book in first person without having done all the work that led up to it. Because I needed to understand Ivy’s story so fully before I could step into her shoes. I had to write those drafts to really understand what the book was that I was trying to write. Once I did that? Then it was easy. It just flew out of me and it was fun and I loved it.

So there’s a lot of work to writing.

I know some writers can, you know, write a book in a month and I’m so jealous of them. But for me, it’s a much longer process. Someday maybe I’ll get a little bit faster, I don’t know. I’ve written 10 books now and it’s not getting any easier.

Jeanie: Well and so first off, Ivy is just such a likable character in Where the Heart Is that I can’t wait to read her story. She’s a hoot in this book. So I’m looking forward to that one.

The other thing is the reason I loved having you come to Green Mountain Union High School all those years ago — and why I kept inviting you — is because having you and writers like you come and share their story of writing? I think it helps kids see not just in terms of writing, but in terms of other things. Like the way to utilize feedback, to make something better. We think that people like writers for example, are just really good at things, but really it’s all labor, it’s all effort.

And you always told such interesting stories about that effort to my students. And you brought revisions to show them!

Anyway, one more question before we get to Where the Heart Is. Where you as a reader Jo Knowles, what are you reading right now?

Jo: Oh, I am almost finished, I’m actually reading an adult nonfiction book, which I normally I’m just constantly reading middle-grade and young adult books. But I decided to sort of just take a little break and I’m reading this fascinating book called The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen. He’s a colleague of mine, we both teach in the MFA program at SNHU and oh my gosh, it’s just this fascinating story of a man who decided to give up money and how it’s really about his life, how he came to that decision, but then also how he pulls it off.

Jeanie: I can’t wait. So, let’s get to Where the Heart Is. Could you introduce us to our main character Rachel, either through her voice reading maybe a little bit or just tell us about her and who she is to you?

Jo: Yeah, I mean 13: it’s so hard. And there are so many expectations from your friends, from your parents, from teachers, everybody.

You know like, “Oh, who’s her first crush going to be?” And then they tease, you know, tease each other and all these things. But, we just kind of make assumptions about that, right?

And there’s some kids who are just not ready to have those feelings yet. And I think sometimes they just feel like so confused or like outsiders almost. Because they’re not part of that conversation. Or they don’t want to be part of that conversation yet; they’re not ready to be. Yet for society, it’s just: “You’re this age, so that’s when these things are supposed to be happening.”

That’s really hard.

And then I think it’s especially hard with somebody who has mixed feelings and they don’t even know, you know:

“Do I like girls? Or do I like boys? Do I like anyone?”

It’s such a difficult time for so many kids. We don’t always acknowledge that. We don’t take it seriously. I think we can joke around and be like, “When are the engagement plans?” Not realizing that can actually, you know, be hurtful to a kid who is feeling under pressure for all kinds of reasons.

Jeanie: Right. And friendships are changing. Kids’ brains are changing. Their bodies are changing, right? And in this book, it’s summer time. Rachel’s dealing with like this new pressure around bodies because of bathing suits and swimming, and swimming in the swimming hole. I think it’s easy to forget that kids arrive at all of those changes at different times and in different ways. But they carry a lot of meaning and a lot of stress and strain for kids.

Jo: That’s the other pressure, right? Who’s developing now? Who looks good in a bikini? Or:

“Why are you wearing a one-piece? That’s for babies!”

All these things that people say to each other. They’re not meant to be hurtful, but they can be.

And so poor Rachel, she’s really struggling with so many things because her parents don’t have a lot of money. She can’t really go out and buy a new bathing suit. So she’s got these hand-me-downs and she feels so self-conscious.

I mean that was me, when I was 13, I was so uncomfortable with my identity, my body, like everything. And so I just really wanted to write a character like that because, I think one of the reasons I was so shy as a kid especially at Rachel’s age was, I was so insecure and unsure of myself. And I know I wasn’t the only one. And I wanted to provide a character in a book like that for kids like me, who really wanted to be able to identify with someone who was struggling with all that stuff.

Jeanie: I really see this in the book. Especially at the end of the book this idea of insides and outsides. That’s a phrase I use often, when I need it: don’t compare your insides to somebody else’s outside.

But with Rachel, she presents in one way. Like, all of the adults around her think of her so capable. All of the young people around her think if you have a best friend, everything’s going right for you. And all she can see is the inadequacy of her clothes and how insecure she feels. How uncertain she is about who she is. But the people outside don’t see that about her.

This is from page 254. Her father says,

“You’ve been a wonderful big sister this summer. And you’ve taken on a big responsibility with all those animals. You don’t complain when your mom and I can’t buy you things. And you’re just a good kid, Rachel. And you’re teaching Ivy to be a good kid, too.”

I think about all my internal griping about my bathing suit and hand-me-downs. Maybe on the outside I seem good, but I’m not always so great on the inside.

I guess I love that.

I often feel that about myself like people are like, oh you’re doing fine. And I’m like, oh if you only you could peer inside of my head a little bit or inside my heart a little bit, and so I feel like that’s just part of the human condition. And you really give kids I think somebody to identify with, who seems fine! But who’s really struggling.

Jo: Thank you so much. I may be a little teary just listening to you say that! Yeah… I think social media is another example of that where, I can present myself any way I want on social media. I can show pictures of myself having the best of times. But, you know, I might be really struggling. No one would know that.

And I think that’s the way with so many kids. It harkens back to what I was saying earlier about connecting with a kid in an audience, because when I go and speak at schools, I try really hard to be as honest as possible about my own insecurities. And with what I struggled with as a kid.

Then I always see a little nod, you know, by one of the kids.

I just try to nod back, but not be obvious.

But I want to be like I see you, I see you; I know. We’re connecting. Like, I want them to know that they’re not alone. And that’s why books are so great for kids, right? Because when they see themselves in a book, it’s this moment of recognition where they know… they’re not alone anymore.

So I think the more that authors can write as honestly as possible about what kids worry about — and not trying to create these wholesome perfect characters — but really characters who are trying their best, but aren’t perfect.

Those are the examples I think that our readers need.

And especially with Rachel’s family, just… the financial hardships that they have. The number of kids who have written to me to tell me that they know what that’s like. I was telling a group of middle schoolers where the idea of Where the Heart Is came from which is.. it’s probably the most autobiographical of all of my books.

When I was in — I was older than Rachel and this happened. But. My family’s house was foreclosed on. We had to move out of our childhood, my childhood home, my beloved home.

And I told the whole story of that.

Afterwards, a little boy came up to me and he said, “I am so sorry for the hard time you went through. May I give you a hug?”

Those are the hugs I’m talking about, right? Like that’s — that’s the connection. Because then, I looked to his teacher and asked is it okay if I give him a hug. And she said yes.

But while I was hugging him, he said: “I’ve been through those hard times too”.

It was this moment where I felt like he needed to be closer to me to tell me that secret, and a hug was the way.

Yeah. That’s when I know writing about the tough things in an honest way is the connection that you make with kids. When you’ve done it honestly, they appreciate it,and they can learn from it.

They can — they can see hope.

One of the things that, even though I write about sad things or hard things, I always try to offer hope — realistic hope — in my books. And I think that that too is a responsibility of an author when you’re writing for younger kids. They appreciate it and it gives them hope for their own situation. They’re connecting with you. I felt like even though he was giving me hope by giving me that hug, I was giving it back to him as well.

Jeanie: Oh, I just love that story. Everything about it.

One of the real opportunities of this book is to be shared with kids as a read-aloud. It’s about a family who is struggling economically, financially and dealing with economic pressures. The reality of what that looks like that the parents aren’t getting along all the time. The kids are eating makeshift meals, right? That struggle is real for this family.

And that was already a reality for many Vermont families — and many families nationwide — but it’s a growing reality with the economic pressures we’re under right now because of COVID. Families out of work.

This book feels like a really important thing; a thing where we can talk about these pressures without talking about our own personal experiences …necessarily. That’s really important.

But, I heard from a librarian last year, that their faculty did *not* want to do a class read on The Benefits of Being An Octopus, Ann Brayden’s book because what if it was too close to home for some kids.

Now, having grown up poor myself, all I could think was that I felt seen when I read that book. I would have *loved* to have felt seen in that way as a young person without ever having to confess that my family was struggling. Does that make sense?

Jo: Yes. Yes it does.

Oh that.

Okay. So… when I was a teenager, I didn’t really like to read very much. And one of the reasons I think now, looking back on that, is because books did not reflect my reality. They made me feel bad about myself.

I never had the perfect lives that these kids so often had. You know I love Judy Blume, for example. But I always felt like even though the characters were flawed and they had challenges, they were so safe. Not even just Judy Blume but, many of Beverly Cleary’s books, too.

I never felt like the character was in danger. I knew it was going to be fine, and nothing felt really, really serious, right?

And then when I got older I read The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.

Now, that is a very difficult read. Horrible things happened in the book; the characters are not nice people. But for me, it was the first book that felt honest about what life was really like. It was the first book that reflected my reality. I grew up watching my brother, who’s older than me, get beat up all the time. I saw teachers bullying my brother because he was gay.

That was my reality. That good people “could do bad things”, and that wasn’t present in my, in the books that I had read yet. And that was the first book that moved me to tears. That made me feel real, and that I wasn’t alone. It wasn’t just me who was having these experiences. It was A Thing. Bullying was really a thing, and it wasn’t something that was just, oh someone’s teasing you. But the real depths of what it’s like to be severely bullied.

And so that book just confirmed everything for me. It helped me feel like a real person.

And I, I remember thinking whoever this Robert Cormier is, he tells the truth. I want to do that.

I want to be like that. I want to disturb the universe, you know like famous line in that book.

And so, when I hear that someone might be concerned about sharing a book with a kid, with a story that that might reflect their difficult reality because it would be too hard to read another story about somebody like them? I can’t… I can’t quite fathom how you would come to that conclusion.

Because kids need to know that they’re not alone.

And in books — like Ann’s book — there is hope and they need to know that too.

So, it seems very sad to me that somebody might keep a book from a child for that reason because those are the kinds of books that can really — and I don’t mean to be overdramatic —  but they can save kids’ lives.

I mean, I honestly feel like The Chocolate War got me in a moment of real vulnerability. If I hadn’t had that book and then all of his other books that I read after that one, to remind me that I wasn’t alone? I’m not sure like, what I would have done. Or how I would have felt.

Or even how I would have survived that really, really rough time in my life.

So, no!

If anyone is listening and hesitating to share a book, you could ask a kid for one thing.

For example, See You At Harry’s has a death in it, right?

Now, I was doing a school visit and it was for a middle school. And I was going to talk about all of my middle-grade books.

So, I was going to talk about See You at Harry’s and how I got the idea for that, and Still a Work in Progress, and Where the Heart is.

And one of the teachers, when they saw the slide before the big assembly, they saw the slide of See You at Harry’s and she came rushing over and said, “Are you planning to talk about that book?”

I said yes.

And she said “Well, what are you going to say?”

I told her I was going to talk about my brother, and why I wrote the book. It was inspired by my own experience with grief.

So she said before you do that let me go, talk with someone.

Meanwhile, I am about to speak to 450 kids. I’ve got my speech ready, and I’m not sure what’s happening.

She comes back with one of the assistant principals and they say:

“Well, we have a student and she’s in the audience and she lost her brother last year. We haven’t shared the book with her, even though many of the other kids have read it because we think it will be too disturbing for her to read this book. So, please don’t talk about that book for the first presentation because she will be in the audience.”

Okay! I’m trying my best to sort of figure out how do I respond to this.

Meanwhile, other teachers could see that there was an issue coming up, and so more teachers came over to find out what’s going on.

And then, someone luckily said let’s talk to the guidance person, who’s like a therapist or something. So they went and got the therapist.

Meanwhile, time is running out; I have no idea what I’m going to do for my presentation.

I’m trying to be sensitive and think oh my gosh, you know? But now we’ve gone from teacher, vice principal, principal, therapist.

And the therapist says, “Why don’t we ask her?”

So! Somebody ran down the hall, found the student, told her about my book and what I was going to talk about and she said–

“Oh! I would love to hear what happened to her!”

Because it was a connection.

Somebody finally had also experienced that same kind of pain was in the building. And was going to talk about it.

It was great. It turned out to be exactly what this kid needed.

And well I, I share this story because I understand that the first reaction of these teachers, it wasn’t censorship. It was that they were trying to protect this student mwho had clearly gone through something that was very traumatic and they didn’t want her to be in any pain.

But in doing that they almost lost this opportunity for this kid to meet somebody who had a shared experience with her, who could really help her feel seen.

Thank goodness the therapist went and asked her directly what did she want, what do you think is best for you. You know, she knew the answer to that!

I think we need to trust kids more.

So, yes, if you know that you’re about to share a book with somebody who might have a shared experience and say this might be sad for you to read, or it might be helpful, what do you think?

Let them decide.

We have got to give more power to our kids. Especially when it comes to what they’re ready to read. Because those stories, they help kids grow. They help kids have more empathy for others.

I think that so many of the students in that school then, knowing that their friend had been through something similar, then read the book. Then they really had a better understanding, what it might have been like for their friend. So, we’ve got to keep sharing these stories and not be afraid of them.

These things happen, you know? And for anyone who hadn’t experienced any kind of tragedy yet in their lives, now they know what it could be like. They’re prepared. What better way to experience something difficult than in a book first before in real life? Books help prepare us for all of these things.

And so, yes, it’s hard.

You don’t want your child to read a book and cry, but I don’t know, maybe we do. Maybe we do want them to have those feelings and really under, have feelings of intense caring for others.

Goodness knows, we really need that right now, so.

Jeanie: I just love that whole story and your analysis of it. It just really rings true for me. And I think about if we don’t share stories about a family like Rachel’s family in this book, it’s also an active eraser, right?

We pretend like this doesn’t happen but we know that a large percentage of our students in schools, all over the country and in Vermont are facing economic hardship.

Jo: Yes. And I and, and to kids who are *not* having that experience understand what it’s like. So that the next time they might be tempted to make fun of somebody for whatever they wear to school, maybe they’ll think twice about it and understand that this kid might be going through a hard time. And maybe what they really need is a friend, you know?

Jeanie: Yeah. Well and you brought up See You at Harry’s, and I have to admit that I am a person who reads books to cry. I find that cathartic experience to be an important part.

I think about reading a lot to my son when he was younger — or any children — as less an educational experience and more a shared relational, emotional experience. Because for me, and the books that I read? I put down books that don’t tug at my heart in some way. Or don’t wake me up emotionally, right?

That’s what’s really important to me is that I, is that I’m feeling while I’m reading.

When I read See You at Harry’s, I sobbed *so* gutturally, that my family thought I was hurt or injured, right?

It’s really like one of those books that wrenched me more than any other.

So, thank you for that experience.

You know that sounds crazy, but I was so attached to those characters.

And one of the things I find about your books, Jo, is you write family so well. And as an educator right, it just seems to be we can learn a lot just from how in you write families. So, thank you for the families you share with us.

Jo: …Thank you.

Jeanie: But one of the challenges then, as a reader and I imagine even more as a writer is that I found myself in Where the Heart Is. I could probably say the same about See You at Harry’s in wanting a happy ending, but knowing also that I would be disappointed with a happy ending. I was *yearning* for things to work out for Rachel and her family.

But I also knew that if the rich neighbors across the street bail them out or they suddenly got an inheritance, I would feel cheated.

So, I’m wondering: how do you balance that? How do you love these people and give them a realistic ending?

Jo: Yeah. That’s a really hard question to answer.

Actually, I think my stories are all about — if I’m going to just sort of simplify it — they’re about survival. Surviving hard things together.

When you talk about family, I think things that happen when you’re 10 are going to affect every member of your family. It’s a group experience and you all have to survive it together.

When I think about family and your comment about that, that’s probably why because it’s not just Rachel’s journey. It’s this thing that happens and affects her sister and her parents and her best friend too.

So you have to sort of explore that as the author. You have to explore how would this affect each of these family members differently. How do they come together to get over this hurdle?

And in See You at Harry’s for a large part of the book, they don’t. The mother really retreats into herself; this is a family adrift in their grief. And I think a lot of this part of that book was how they find one another again and realize that the only way they are going to move forward is by figuring out how to come back together again, and live as a family without this one piece that was there and now has gone.

That’s really difficult.

And in Rachel’s case, the father is telling her she’s such a good big sister in helping Ivy through all of this. But! I think part of Rachel’s success in getting through all of this, was having a little sister to rely on and love, and know that she has to be a good role model for her in a way.

The family is all really connected in all of my books because surviving together requires that.

In Still a Work in Progress, the main character, Noah, his older sister has an eating disorder. And the story is so much about how the family is disconnected *because* none of them really know how to be in this situation: walking on eggshells all the time, wondering if the sister will relapse.

And then when she does, whose fault is it? They just want to blame each other and they’re just so confused and lost and helpless-feeling. A lot of that book is about how the family comes back together; that’s where the hope is. The hope isn’t that Noah’s sister has this miraculous recovery and she’s never going to get sick again and she’s fine. The hope is in the coming together of the family members.

I’m thinking about that now. I’m like, oh wow I just write the same book over and over again. But that’s really how it, how it happens, right? Feeling adrift and then finding one another. That to me is the hope in those books.

That’s something that you can give readers who are going through a difficult time: to understand that it’s each other. If you have each other hold on to, you know you can get through this.

That sounds cliché but so often that’s what we have to remember is that you have each other.

And you may have to live in a different house, it might not be as nice as the one you were used to you, but you’re together and you love each other. And you have other days ahead where maybe things will change again.

But really trying to just find love again, when you’re feeling very alone? I think those are some of the themes that I really try to work on. Those are things that I think we can all attain. Some may be more difficult than others but that’s something I can provide.

Jeanie: Thank you for that answer. One of the things I really notice in your writing is the way in which you write your characters — including families as a character —  through this strengths-based perspective, right? Like you’re always looking for the places they’re capable and strong. It makes me think if there weren’t challenges, those wouldn’t show up this much.

Part of respecting your characters is giving them the challenges that you know that they can handle, because they can do hard things.

Rachel and Ivy are prime examples of that, right? They show up. All of the characters in this book, all of the young people in this book? Are given the opportunity to demonstrate all the ways in which young people are superstars. All the ways in which they’re so capable and more than just at helping you when you can’t figure out your phone. They have lots of other things too.

Jo: We have to give kids so much more credit than we do. Sometimes we forget. Especially right now, when I see kids doing super-creative things. They’re stuck at home and they’re finding ways to make the most of it in such beautiful, admirable ways. And that can travel beyond COVID and throughout life. But we need to remember to acknowledge and celebrate those moments because sometimes, they just seem so small but they’re huge. Any moment that you have when your kid does something cool, just acknowledge that.

Jeanie: Or somebody else’s kid. The girl across the street from me does the most beautiful sidewalk, chalk art. And it brings me so much joy on my dog walks because I don’t have a kid in my home and in my daily life right now. But her art is always uplifting and positive, and it just brings me so much joy.

I finally told her that the other day because I realized I was carrying all this joy from her art inside, but I hadn’t expressed her how much it meant to me the things she chalks on the sidewalk across the street.

Jo: Oh, I’m so glad you had an opportunity to tell her! I bet that meant so much to her. I bet internally that went a really long way and will probably stay there for a long time doing good things. I’m so glad you got to do that.

Jeanie: So, do you have any suggestions about how teachers might use this book in the classroom? Questions they might pose? Problems they might use with students?

Jo: There’s a free teacher’s guide on my website that my publisher put together! (.pdf)

But one of the things that I really had fun doing with kids when I was visiting around, was asking them to write some favorite childhood memories of their own or sharing some special thing about their family. Or a family tradition of some sort that’s unexpected. That only their family does; something like that. Something positive, something that brings them joy.

Jeanie: Like the birthday banner in this book. That seemed like a specific family tradition, they put up a birthday banner for each family member’s birthday in the morning. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about?

Jo: Yeah! It doesn’t have to be something huge but some little thing that maybe only their family does, that they think is special. Even describing their relationship with a sibling. The best day you ever had with your sibling. Focusing on something that’s positive.

I try to give lots of examples so students don’t feel pressure to come up with some big thing. It’s the little things that I can pull out ideas from Where the Heart Is that Rachel and Ivy share.

Jeanie: One of the things I love about reading fiction is I think you get to, to real deep truth through fiction, more than with nonfiction. We think of nonfiction as factual but to me like the deep truths are in fiction, but there’s also often in fiction little snippets that I could imagine pulling out and using with the class.

One of them, from your book is on Page 246. It says,

When you learn vocabulary words in school, you memorize the definition. And you have a good idea of what the words mean. But it’s not until you feel them that you really grasped the definition. I’ve known what the word helpless means for a long time. And desperate. But I’ve never felt them. Feeling them is different. They fill your chest with the horrible sense of dread and guilt and despair. Those are more vocabulary words that you can’t fully understand until you feel them.

And so, I’m thinking about using this around vocabulary or spelling or word use or just like what really makes you feel something and feeling about how powerful that little snippet could be in the classroom.

Jo: I like that.

Jeanie: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about Where the Heart Is for sharing your story as a, as a person, as a human and also as a writer, and for being so vulnerable Jo. I, I, there’s so much strength and vulnerability and I really appreciate that about you as a writer and, and just the way you show up here and with kids to talk about your books and, and your work. Thank you so much.

Jo: Thank you so much. That’s really kind and means a lot to me coming from you. Thank you very much.

I just know that right now, while kids are transitioning from Zoom to classrooms and then back to Zoom as things have been flowing with the virus that, I hope that we can give kids the space to feel like they can just get lost in a story and that that’s enough.

I know we always talk about how do we use the book in the classroom, but sometimes, I think we just need to share these stories and let them, and let that be sometimes enough that we are connecting through feeling, going through a journey all together.

So, sharing books out loud, reading to each, reading to kids no matter what age, I think that that’s one way to feel connected at a time when we feel so disconnected. Stories have always brought us together. And I hope that we try to hold on to that and allow space for that as we are pressured to have all of this education time. Stories are always teaching us so many things, and I think that’s probably enough just to experience them together.

Jeanie: I love it. I’m all for the marketing campaign, stories as self-care and community care.

Jo: Perfect. I will make that T-shirt.

This show is a little different. Listeners, I want you to think of this show… as a pre-show.

Let me explain.

Today I’m joined on the podcast by Aimee Arandia Østensen and we start discussing the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

I say ‘we start’ because once we were underway it quickly became clear that everything Aimee and I wanted to say and feel and share about this amazing book could never fit in one single episode. So I’m going to say this is a beginning of a conversation about outdoor and place-based education, the concept of becoming indigenous to a place, the magic of Superfund sites, and how we are going to encourage ourselves to hold each other *capable*, rather than accountable.

And that means you, listener. I am holding you capable.

I’m Jeanie Phillips, this is Vermont Reads: books for, with and by Vermont educators.

Let’s chat.

Jeanie: Thank you so much for joining me, Aimee, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Aimee:  Hello, I’m so glad to be here with you, Jeanie. Thanks for inviting me. So I am a first generation Filipina-American educator. I grew up in upstate New York, taught for about 20 years in New York City, as well as in the Catskill regions of New York State. And now I work for Shelburne Farms as a facilitator in professional learning and education for sustainability.

Jeanie: Oh, that’s a great introduction. You are so much more than that! To me, you are like one of those wise humans that I look to as a beacon. Thank you so much Aimee, for joining me.

And I have to admit, I’m really nervous about this episode.

Because Braiding Sweetgrass is one of my very favorite books ever, says the person who really loves books. So I’m worried that I won’t be able to do it justice. And the only thing that is setting my mind at ease is that I’m having this conversation with one of my favorite educators ever: you. And so I feel like, since you’re here, we can do this justice.

Aimee: I feel the same way, Jeanie. And the only way that I can approach this work and honoring Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work is to, as a learner to sit in the seat of a learner, but know that I’m always eternally in the process, and digging more into what it means to be in this world.

Jeanie: Yes. For our listeners who may not have encountered the wonder that is Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass, let’s give a little summary or a snapshot of this book. The tagline is: “Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teaching of plants.”  How would you describe this book for folks who are new to it?

Aimee:  I love how Robin Wall Kimmerer does those three things that she put out there and she gives voice to simply being? As well as the value of Indigenous knowledge. And weaving a contemporary perspective into all of that. So that it has meaning for everyone.

The thing that I love about this book is so much of what she writes in this book is simply about how to be human. And how to learn from the world about what it means to be human in its most exemplary form. And so, it’s relevant to everyone, despite your background and your perspective.

Jeanie: You said that beautifully. I think what I would add is that Robin Wall Kimmerer grew up in New York State.  She is an Indigenous person herself. So, she grows up with this wealth of tradition and knowledge from her family. From her tribe, from her people. And she always knew she wanted to be a botanist.

And so she goes to college, and she has to really fight to get the degree that she wants. She’s not immediately like, welcomed into the scientific community, but she becomes a botanist and a lecturer. And so she has these two really deep fonts of wisdom: this scientific knowledge that she gets as a college student, and this embodied wisdom and knowledge that comes from her people. And the way she weaves them together is so beautiful. And so “both and“. She walks the “both and” way of being in the world.

Aimee: I also feel that in her walking the “both and,” it’s a model for all of us who are not self-described as people who are native to this country, or Indigenous here, to see the past, the present and the future of Indigenous peoples in this country. As well as weaving our own stories into the stories that she tells and shares.

Jeanie: That’s delicious. So, I guess approaching this episode has been really challenging for me, because there’s so much in this book. How do we use it as a tool to inform teaching and learning? Specifically: place-based teaching and learning?

I guess I have this overarching question that I don’t think we’re going to be able to answer in a few minutes but maybe can be the frame for our whole discussion. And that is: How might a teacher use this book to understand the world differently, or to expand their understanding of the world? Very specifically going outside the door to the world in order to inform your teaching practice?

Aimee: I think what Robin Wall Kimmerer does throughout her entire book is speak to this relationship between self and land. Really there’s this underlying sentiment that: what is the quality of that relationship we have with the land? And how does that inform our actions, our decisions for the present and for the future, and the world that we want to create?

And so for educators — especially folks that are embracing, perhaps a place-based education approach — the beginning of exploring how place can be the context for our academic content and the action of learning and teaching? That is the seed of how we design for curriculum. I want to pause there because I’m not sure what I said actually made sense. *laughs*

Jeanie:  So Aimee, I have two questions. And the one I want to start with is: how do we define “land”?

Because there is this idealist inside of me that when you say that? Sees some rolling meadow but maybe not my own backyard, or the space between the sidewalk and the street, out front of my school. Will you just give us a definition of what you mean when you say a relationship with land?

Aimee:  Yes. As an educator who worked in urban settings for a really, really long time, I think of one end of the continuum of what I mean by “land” at this point, could be the neighborhood. Could be stepping outside the door of the school to explore the sidewalk. And what we can discover there on the block that the school is on, looking at the buildings across the street, looking at the buildings we inhabit, from the outside of the school building view.

It can start with just stepping outside and exploring our neighborhood. Maybe walking around the block seeing:

• what business is there
• who’s living there
• who’s walking by

Getting to know the people in the neighborhood and in the area, not just as figures whom we pass by but individuals with stories to tell, and gifts to share.

A relationship with the land starts with opening the door and stepping outside.

I’ve entered into numerous discussions with a shared friend of ours, Judy Dow, who’s an Indigenous educator and scientist — and for me, mentor. And she’s also been a guest on #vted Reads.

We’ve had many conversations, she and I, around the use of the term, “land” or “landscape.” And often in our shared teaching, I would encourage people to get outside and look at the landscape and do a survey of what’s available to you in the landscape that you see. What questions are there? What are the things that we could find out more about?

Jeanie:  I could ask you about the rooster in your landscape whose making a little bit of a racket. He wants his voice heard on the podcast.

Aimee: Yes! *laughs* He is part of my landscape and part of my relationship with this plot of land right here. And he is persistent in his intention to be known, and part of my daily rhythm. I’m welcoming my friend —  I think his name is Fuzzball — to this podcast as well as to this conversation.

So, Judy and I had entered in these conversations about “landscape” as a term versus “land.”

And the difference that I’ve come to understand is: “landscape” is the environment and the way that we experience a natural or built place that has been intentionally shaped by humans.

At Shelburne Farms, where I work, their landscape architect was brought in to create an experience that we have with that specific place. The natural geographic forms and the topography still exist, but they have been intentionally altered so that our experience is with a built landscape that appears natural.

The term “land” as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Judy Dow refer to it, is more all-encompassing. And goes beyond the human formation of our environment to include all of what has been given to us by the natural world. And… all of the relationships that are possible within that site.

I’m hesitating here because I think that there’s a bigger definition that I’m not quite grasping. So Jeanie, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we might be determining what we’re talking about with land in this discussion.

Jeanie: What I love about this book is that Robin brings us essays from all different sorts of land sites and learnings and teachings. She talks about her relationships with all sorts of land features, right? Or specific places on the land.

For example, a pecan grove becomes a place of story, for learning. The field where she grew up, where wild strawberries grow, becomes this really significant place for learning. The maple trees around her house in upstate New York, and the sugaring that happens there, which we can very much see as a place that many Vermont educators think about when they think about land, right?  And a garden.

But there are also these sorts of unconventional places, I guess I would say. And one of them that really struck me — and I was trying to find which chapter it’s in. But she visits a place where the land is reclaiming what was that like a Superfund site alongside a lake. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Aimee:  I absolutely know what you’re talking about. And that chapter, “The Sacred and the Superfund,” describes the site of my childhood.

I grew up alongside Onondaga Lake and experienced it as a Superfund site. And did not understand that it’s also a sacred site until I had left the area and came into the moment where I needed to start teaching about the native people of New York State, and started learning about the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and that that sacred lake was the site in which the Confederacy was formed, and indeed the seed of democracy in this country.

So it’s particularly interesting to me to explore this concept of relationship to land and place-based education through that lens of *my* relationship to that particular site, and how it is, in some ways, quite symbolic of all of our relationships to specific sites and to land in this contemporary era.

Jeanie: It just makes me think that there’s this part of me that sort of interprets, if we’re going to do place-based learning, the place has to be perfect, or the place has to be beautiful. Right? But recently, there was a story about a landfill on Staten Island that they just let go for 20 years. And the Earth has taken it back.  Right? And so, that’s a place we can learn a lot from. Landfills are a place we can investigate, right? And so just because they’re not pretty, or we’re not proud of those places, doesn’t mean they’re not places that help us learn about our relationship to the Earth and to each other. And that we can’t learn from the Earth and its place and what’s happening there.

Aimee: I think you’re absolutely right, Jeanie, and that with anything that we endeavor to be in relationship with, we can only begin when the conditions are perfect.

We just have to begin now, in whatever situation we’re in, in whatever conditions around us because that’s the only way that we can begin creating a future that’s more sustainable and more equitable and creates thriving conditions for all. And that brings me full circle back to why place-based education is so important.

If we begin to build relationship with the places that we inhabit, from the earliest ages, and as a kind of centering action and education, and that’s how we can start developing the future that we need as a global community and in our local communities, because without being in relationship to the places we inhabit, then we’re creating a parallel, uprooted, disconnected future and pathway for ourselves, which is not a pathway that will be successful in the long-term for all of us.

Jeanie: I think what I’m hearing you say, Aimee, and correct me if I’m not hearing you accurately is that just like, in schools, we work with kids to build community and relationship with each other, and with us as educators because that’s a life skill they’re going to need. That, building a relationship with place is something that’s transferable no matter where they go.

But learning those skills of how you develop a relationship with place is an essential skill for good living.

Aimee:  Yes, absolutely. And I think that is one of the outcomes of place-based education. That the ways that we build relationship and the places that we’re in and with the people whom we share spaces with? And our understandings of the systems that play within that smaller scope? Should be and can be transferable, wherever we find ourselves in the world, as we move through our lives.

Jeanie: I think what really relates to the first essay in this collection. This is a collection of essays and I suspect that you and I can spend days talking about each one. But I want us to highlight a few of those essays. And the first essay in the book right after the introduction is called, “Skywoman Falling” and it’s an origin story from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s people. She’s Potawatomi, is that right?

Aimee:  Yes, I believe that’s correct.

Jeanie: And so in this story, Skywoman falls. And all of the animals are sort of helping create a place for her because she needs the land. It’s really how the land is formed itself, speaking of land, which we were just talking about.

I’m not going to tell the whole story, but when Kimmerer shares it, she says, “Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between humans and the Earth.”

And she continues by saying that the story provides a compass. And that the work of living is creating a map for yourself. This seems to me like the rationale we were just discussing about why place-based learning.  And I’m wondering what you think about that Skywoman story and about this idea that we need, stories about place and relationships with Earth in order to create a map of living for ourselves.

Aimee:  I find the tool of map-making and map-reading to be so essential in bridging the gap between self and place.

*Fuzzball crows in the background*

Aimee: I believe my rooster agrees with me.

It’s a tool that can be used from the earliest ages in school all the way through post-graduate level. With the youngest students that I’ve worked with, we often use map-making as a way of just exploring our immediate space. It might be 3D map-building with blocks and different items and arranging them and understanding that we, as individuals move through a space and are in relationship to other things. It’s not just me in this world.

Then as students get older, they start to see the relationships between things that are beyond themselves, and how they’re interconnected.

And then older students begin looking at the multiple layers of systems that are happening within a certain place and understanding how those systems operate independently, but also in connection with one another. With other systems.

If we can orient ourselves and who we are and how we are within all of those systems and the relationships that exist? Then I think that would be an amazing outcome of our education system. Because that would then give us a compass for decision-making in the future, in thinking about what the vision is a collective vision of the places that we want to create.

Jeanie:  That was really beautiful.  And it makes me think that in this case, she’s talking about a story from her people? But that there are all kinds of stories we can tell about place, right?

I’m thinking of our mutual friend, Walter Poleman, and the story he tells about the geology of Burlington, or the thrust fault on Lake Champlain. Right? And that helps us better understand the relationships between — in that case I’m thinking about the rock, the soil and the cedar trees, that grow there along Rock Point in Burlington.

Similarly, we have all these stories, the stories of the people in the place, the story of the animals in the place, all these origin stories that come from different cultures, geological sources. There’s like, so many layers of story that can help us find this compass for how to live in a place.

Aimee:  There are! And I think one of the things that Robin Wall Kimmerer keeps coming back to is the multiple roles that land takes on.

She’s talking about land as teacher.

Land as mother.

Land as healer, land as gift-giver — there’s so many different ways in which the land behaves in relationship to us.

She also talks about this reciprocity piece in that relationship. I would extend the understanding of land in this context, to go beyond what we’re typically used to talking about as land as an it? But welcome the thinking to expand to land being a she; what if land was a family member? I think that’s something that Robin Wall Kimmerer has put out to us to consider.  If we think of being in relationship to the land as if it were a family member, how would that change how we behave in that relationship?

Jeanie:  That takes me right to another essay, which is “The Gift of Strawberries.” Because of your reference to reciprocity and gifts and that deeper change that happens.

Robin Wall Kimmerer grew up near wild strawberries and harvested wild strawberries every year for her father’s birthday to make strawberry shortcake. This essay is one of my very favorites.

She talks about how a gift economy is different than our traditional economy, than a money economy. Than a capitalist economy. I love this from page 25:

“Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to get back to the strawberries. When the berry season was done, the plants would send out slender red runners to make new plants. Because I was fascinated by the way they would travel over the ground looking for good places to take root, I would weed out little patches of bare ground where the runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season, there were even more plants, ready to bloom under the next Strawberry Moon.”

She talks to you about how much more we value something that is a gift than if we just purchased it.

Aimee:  Absolutely.  And this notion of the land as a gift, or the gifts of the land, as opposed to… “ecosystem services,” I think is the term? It shifts the way in which we receive.

So, strawberries being the example. If we receive strawberries as a gift, we value it in a certain way. We consume it with a certain reverence.

If we think of it as something that we buy in the store — and she goes into this in her essay — then it’s an exchange of goods. It’s an economic exchange, where we assume that the relationship is concluded. Once we’ve exchanged strawberries for cash. And that is an incredibly narrow understanding of the reciprocity that is potentially there if we bring this sense of gratitude and gift-giving to what the world has to offer.

Jeanie:  It’s so important right now when we’re thinking a lot about sustainability and the sustainability of the planet. I think one of the things she says is that if it’s strawberries I’m purchasing, I want more for my dollar. Right? Like, I want as much as I can get.  But if something is a gift, I might be able to say, “Oh, this is just enough.”  Right? “Look, I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t want to take it all.” You know? “I want to be able to share.”

As opposed to that exchange economy that she’s talking about. Like, I want as much as I can get for my, you know, my money.

I think that this idea of reciprocity and enough? Are important lessons from this book.

Aimee: They are absolutely important lessons and also have applications to all of us in this extremely capitalist culture that we live in. That is centered on consumerism. “The more you have the better!” Which is extremely problematic.

The fact is that the nation that we live in, the United States, has an abundance. And it’s incredibly upsetting that there are so many that live within this country that don’t have enough when we’re living in a time of such great abundance.

It really puts into question the value system that needs to be paired with our capitalist system in order to recalibrate and rebalance how we live in terms of our economy so that more people can thrive and not just people, but also our more-than-human community members.

Jeanie:  That brings to me this other quote again from the Sky Woman story:

“Our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear it’s stories.”

And it makes me think our relationship with each other and with the more than human can’t heal until we know each other’s story.

Aimee:  This notion of storytelling is so engaging in that it’s a gift. That we each bring to each relationship that we enter into. We may come empty-handed, depending on the privileges that we enjoy, or do not enjoy.  But we all come with a body full of stories that we’ve gathered from our own experience as we walk through life? But also through our ancestor’s stories and the people that came before us whether they’re in direct lineage in our family or from the places that we have lived and the people we’ve met along the way.

Jeanie:  That feels like to me – and Kimmerer’s book really sings to me in this way of, what would it be like for us to ask students and students families about their stories on their lands, in this place. And thinking about rural Vermont, but also Winooski, and Burlington, right? Bennington. What is it for those families who sugar each year? Or what is it for families who hunt, or fish, or forage? What is it for families who have a little plot in the community garden because they live in urban places? What are their stories of places? Even concrete spaces, which are places?  And what would it be like to center those in our curriculum?

Aimee: I think that’s a lovely way of inviting in that element of youth voice into what we do in the classroom.  Because even if a child is five years old, they have their own stories and their own ways of seeing a place.

And let’s say that that’s the same place that I as the teacher experience? That child’s view, and their whole collection of stories are going to be entirely different than my collection of stories. And I think that’s endlessly fascinating, to make that personal connection to what we’re learning and sharing in the classroom.

Jeanie:  So I wonder if, given all of that, if you might define for us, for the listeners, what education for sustainability is? And specifically, if you might — I don’t know, I’m going to ask a lot of you, Aimee, but — I wonder if you might imagine out loud for us. An EFS unit, an Education for Sustainability, lesson or period of time in the classroom, that centers students’ stories.

Aimee:  So, Education for Sustainability is an approach to teaching and learning, which holds the improvement of our community and our relationships central, right?  The goal of education for sustainability is creating a more just and sustainable future for all.

*Fuzzball crows loudly in the background*

Aimee: *laughs* If we think of sustainability as being a goal that we’re continually moving towards, that we’re never fully sustainable, but we’re moving towards this idea of being in balance, such that the way that we live today enables many generations into the future to have a sustainable lifestyle as well. To live in a way that’s just. And allows people to continue their cultures in the future so that all beings human and more-than-human can thrive? Then education for sustainability is teaching in such a way that enables kids to have the knowledge and the skills to understand the multiple systems that they live in to make decisions so that we can have that just and sustainable future as well as a more just and sustainable now.

So, your second question!

Thinking about a time that centered student stories in my teaching.

As a second grade teacher, we conducted a family study every year. And there are many elements of that.  But one of my favorite things, was asking students to bring in an artifact from their family, and then share the story of that artifact.

Often the artifact would be something from a person’s father or mother.  Or maybe it would be a kind of an object that the family used in ritual, or in their weekly or monthly or annual celebrations.

One of my favorite artifacts that a student brought in was a wooden spoon. And he shared the story that cooking is a very important tradition in their family, and that cooking certain foods was a passed down tradition.

This wooden spoon was passed down from his grandmother to his mother and now down to him.

And with the use of this wooden spoon, they would cook traditional foods together and share them. And so, this child brought this specific artifact to the class, told the stories that he had learned from his mother and grandmother as a way of weaving the past into the future, but also amplifying his own voice at the same time.

In reciprocity, the other students would then share back, after hearing his story. They’d talk about the connections that their family and they experience in relationship to his story and his sharing of this artifact.

Other stories and artifacts that children shared might have been a story in which a father battled a snake and was threatened, but then managed to overcome that situation. Then the artifact that the child shared was a snakeskin.

Another were letters from people that were important to his grandmother. And then he had the time to sit and read the letters with us and talk about his relationship with his grandmother.

This is a way that was intentionally designed to bring those stories in from individual students about their families so that we could collectively build a broader, deeper understanding of what family meant. What we then could do to encourage others other ways within our small class community that people experience their life.

This is absolutely something that I could not design on my own. I could not create a collection of stories to share with students that I would presume would reflect their experience of what it’s like to be in family.

And in addition to building our understanding of concept of family, we’re also building on literacy skills.  They’re engaging with their family and other relatives in interesting conversations that go well beyond the classroom and indeed take them to places well beyond the address of the school.

Jeanie: That leads me to that chapter on, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho.” Seems like you know that well, it’s the story of plantain, a plant we could find just about anywhere in Vermont. Any grassy space in Vermont.  And the reason I’ve been thinking about this story is because I just bought a house in Burlington on Abenaki land.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking about colonization and grappling with my own identity as a settler colonist, right, in this land. So buying this home was fraught for me, right? And so, this chapter, I think, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place,” I think offers some gentle advice for me and I wondered if you would talk a little bit about that.

Aimee:  I also love this chapter and the title of “Becoming Indigenous to Place.”

As a person that is a first-generation American, I am someone who feels uprooted from her place and throughout my childhood did not feel as though I belonged in the places that I was living. I’ve now come to understand that: we are all indigenous to someplace. It may just not be the place that we’re living in currently. And that this idea of indigeneity is not just an idea for brown-skinned people. It’s for everyone.

And I love that Robin Wall Kimmerer offers up this model of the plantain and a story of how we can each become indigenous to the places in which we live or the places that we choose. I think that limitation on our understanding of becoming indigenous is often a reflection of our limitation on time, and how we can see the time.

So she talks about the plantain as becoming indigenous over a 500-year timespan. And that’s just something that’s beyond our comprehension as people who might live 75 years. But that’s the timeline that we’re talking about in terms of “becoming indigenous”.

No, it does not mean that I won’t be able to become a Vermonter. It doesn’t mean that I have to wait the seven generations that I’ve been told that I need to wait.

I think the lesson of the plantain is that through conscientious awareness-building, I can learn how to become into meaningful relationship with the community in which I live, the natural and the human community. That there are ways of becoming indigenous within my lifetime. And it’s not an issue of nationality, or necessarily the culture that I embody. But it’s about how I’m being in relationship with the place and the people that I’m living with.

Jeanie: Oh, I love that. I hear so much of that and I’m reading about maintaining this idea of being of service. Plantain can be food, it can be medicine, it’s good for insect bites and cuts and burns.

And Robin Wall Kimmerer says, every part of the plant is useful even the seeds are good for digestion. And I’m just going to read a little bit. Because for me, this is really good advice. This is from page 214.

Writing about plaintain Robin Wall Kimmerer says,

“Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so the native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others’ homes and growing without regards to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but “naturalized.” This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country.”

Who knew that I was going to seek to be like a plant that I’ve known since my earliest memories like plantain, I grew up with plantain everywhere in Pennsylvania. It’s a plant I’ve known forever, and that it could be such a humble teacher.

Aimee:  I love that passage as well Jeanie, it’s one of the ones that I highlighted because I think it offers insight to all of us whether we are descendants of the European settlers, or we’re new to this country, or if we are Indigenous roots here in this country. There’s so much to be learned from this single plant.

Jeanie: It makes me think too in my conversation that you referenced earlier with Judy Dow.

I’ve been thinking a lot since I’ve become friends with Judy, about stories and place.

And thinking about, if we’re going to be educating students in Vermont’s Abenaki land.  How might we learn by centering their stories of this place? And I know Judy has a beautiful collection of stories that she has on CD.

I know she uses them in classrooms to tell the geologic story of place, right? They reference specific places in Vermont? But also how to be in relationship with this place.  Since we can learn a lot from the Abenaki, how to be in good, in right relationship with this Vermont place, these Vermont places. This land here.  And so, I’m curious about that and how that might play a role in place-based learning here. Do you have any models that you might share or how to do that one?

Aimee:  Well, I think the main lesson in all of that is to question:

• What stories are we hearing?
• Whose voices are they amplifying?
• And whose voices are missing?

So much of my education as a child — and what I see still happening in many places in schools — is that the stories of the European settlers are the ones that were told and that are repeated. And that are passed down.

And that is a valid story. It is a valid perspective. And it’s important.

But it’s not the full story.

And it’s not inclusive enough to really build a deep understanding of our places.

There are so many voices that we’ve abandoned and dropped and extinguished and ignored for so long.  And it’s an incredible time right now that there’s so much interest and energy around amplifying other voices that we haven’t heard from in a long time, or perhaps not ever.

So I think the Abenaki voices in Vermont are something that should definitely be leaned on as we develop more of a place-based learning focus. As well as amplifying all the other voices in Vermont that we don’t always hear about.

Jeanie: Yes. Thank you for that.  It makes me think of a class I just took on other ways of knowing, where we looked at indigenous science.  And I’ll put a link, and I’m not even going to remember the name of the person who delivered this talk.

But this beautiful talk about the way in which science was conducted in Indigenous communities in this country and what is now the Americas, right? And the way their understanding of the world and around them showed up in architecture, and in story, and in tapestry …and in art.

It makes me think about, you’ve been using the R word of “reciprocity” and I know our friend Judy Dow uses the R’s in her article on the Narrows, right, she talks about responsibility and the relationship and reciprocity and a couple other R’s in there.

But the one that really emerged in this look at native science was resonance.

How does, what’s happening in place, in land resonate for us?

And so, we see that sometimes in the way, I think, in stories about Indigenous medicines, right? In the resonance. I think we see a lot about resonance in this book where Robin Wall Kimmerer is talking about how the land resonates for her and her family.

Aimee:  I love the R of resonance being brought up in this conversation because I think it really speaks to a sense of being present in the moment that is so often rushed away. Because we have these time pressures. If we have these 45-minute classes that we have to move through content. In that there’s just so much for us to do on our to do list and shopping and laundry and whatever it is that we have to do, that we don’t take the time? To tune in to the resonance that may exist for us in any given situation.

And the resonance I’m thinking of is in terms of our relationship to the natural spaces we’re in, but also in the social fields that we inhabit. The resonance that we feel between the people that we’re sharing spaces with. And if we just took that moment to take a deep breath, and notice and be present, it might help us to understand all those dynamics better?

But also to see the situation we’re in a little more clearly.

Jeanie:  The way my heart is hearing it is relationship takes time, relationships between people, but also between humans and more than humans in the land, right, if that takes time, too.  And we often don’t give it the time it takes.

Aimee:  Yes time, and time is such an interesting notion. That it can be just a moment; just a breath. Or it could be about the long-term view and going back and looking at how my relationship for example, in this place that I’m in right now has changed over the past seven years. How I’ve impacted the land and how the land has changed me, and how I perceive of myself, and how I experienced the world.

And then there’s this idea of time in relationships. Time in the development of a community, and the movement of a community, and the changing and understanding of a culture.

Jeanie:  I just said goodbye to a home of 20 years, and there was a lot of… I had to find ways to express gratitude to that place to specific places, especially that changed and shaped me. I was a new mom when I moved to there and raised my son, who’s now twenty. And the mountain that I lived sort of in the shadow of, this lake that I spent so much time running around it, swimming in it, boating on it.

And I had to take offerings to these places. Around the West River Trail that I spent so much time on. These places are still so significant to me even though it’s been several weeks since I’ve been in them.

And now forging new relationships, I can really feel that sense of changing character of how we are in relation with place. This book, really re-reading this book, in preparation for this conversation brought up a lot of those feelings I’ve been having as I let go of my habitual, my day to day these places that nurtured me so regularly.

The time piece also brings up for me my very favorite chapter, the chapter that when I listened to the audiobook I just sobbed through, and that reading now just still brings tears to my eyes. Not in the sob way but just like… It was like a complicated mix of joy and sorrow,  grief and joy and love and admiration. All of the things. And that’s “Allegiance to Gratitude.”

So this chapter is where Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the entire, I think the entire Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, but she commentates on it as well.

She explains that she digs into what’s the meaning of this story that’s told through the Thanksgiving address. And the way that this timely — long, it takes time — address that they use in this community school, the way it helps to forge that deeper relationship with the land and all of the inhabitants of land. How does that chapter strike you in?

Aimee:  I also am incredibly moved by this chapter and the beautiful way in which she weaves the original text or the original address with this view of how kids today are experienced.

And it’s not all beautiful.

It’s kids fidgeting and kids being impatient, but at the same time, learning how to listen. And especially she says, in the time when we’re accustomed to sound bites and immediate gratification.

So there’s this relevance of the now, and the past, all sharing the same space.

And there’s also this other component of it, in which she compares it to the Pledge of Allegiance, which is what I grew up saying.  Which I could repeat right now, because I did it so many times, but is actually quite meaningless to me. Like that I never attributed any meaning to it. It was never a process for me and with me in terms of how it might relate to my daily existence.

So, I deeply appreciate this chapter as she goes through the Thanksgiving address.  And it describes how young people are creating meaning, through this process of experiencing the Thanksgiving address.

This is part of the relationship of myself to the world because Onondaga Lake was such a big piece of my childhood and my upbringing. And at the time, as a Superfund site, I was given the messaging about how the water from this lake could kill me.  It’s laden with mercury, don’t eat the fish.  Don’t swim in it, don’t go boating on it, you can collect stones and shells off the shore, but don’t touch the water.

So it became this kind of antithesis to relationship, to environmental features to water, which can be so purifying.

And now that I have a more full understanding of the significance of that sacred lake, beyond it being a Superfund site, I am understanding that that is part of my story of who I am and how I’ve come to do what I do today.  But also about my relationship with that lake is not finished. And that I have a responsibility to engage with the healing of that lake and the restoration of it as a part of my pathway as well.

Because it is in me, it’s under my nails and it’s in my cells and I need to accept that and honor my relationship with that lake.

Jeanie:  That’s really beautiful.  I’ve been putting forth all my favorite essays, there are more that I adore. Is there one you want to pull forward?

Aimee:  I’ll give you my short list of the ones that I have been rereading.  So clearly, “The Sacred and the Superfund” is definitely one that I’ve been rereading. The idea of, “In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous to Place” has been important to me lately.  And also the idea of “Putting Down Roots,” which is another essay in that section.  And lastly, this section on a “Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide” has been kind of pulling at me, especially as we head into the November elections this fall.

Jeanie:  I need to reread that one. I did reread the maple moon one, “Maple Sugar Moon”, which really touched me deeply. This whole process of sap-making with her daughters, and their way of going about it in the wild.

And it’s one of the chapters like “The Three Sisters” chapter that I feel will have direct relevance already to what teachers are doing in the classroom and how they might approach it from a place-based lens.  Or an EFS standpoint.

This whole book is delicious.

Thank you for sharing your highlights because the ones I haven’t read recently, I’m going to go back and reread.

I’m going to go back to that first guiding question we had. That overarching question about how might a teacher-educator use this book to expand their understanding of place in order to inform their teaching practice or inform place-based learning with their students.

I think for me, one of the answers that has emerged from this conversation with you is about learning with, learning alongside. And that doing our own short of workaround place and how our relationship with place with students is really powerful instead of knowing the answer? About going out and exploring together.

Aimee: Yes, I do think that this book amplifies the idea that there’s so much to learn from and with outside the school walls. And that place, land, community: they are all teachers. We as teachers sometimes feel so isolated and feel like we have too much on our shoulders, too much to carry forward.

The times when I felt most supported as a teacher are the times when I thought, well, I’m not in this by myself, I don’t need to have all the answers. Robin Wall Kimmerer offers that this answer in terms of place-based learning that the answers are out there in the world, but we need to learn how to listen. And we need to learn how to see.

So, if those are the skills that we teach students through place-based learning, all we need to do is give them the opportunities to build that relationship.

Jeanie:  That was not your rooster, what was that?

Aimee: That was my hen! Her name is Brownie, she’s one of our third generations.  And she is announcing that she just laid an egg. She’s very happy about it.  And now, she’s trying to find where the rest of the flock is so she can reunite with them.

Jeanie:  Okay.  So, I think what you just said about, I was really inspired by what you said before Brownie led me astray, which is that the teachers are out there.

And I think for me right now, in this moment, the chapter that’s like, I feel the need — I’ve read a couple times — that feels really informative to me as an educator.  And what I do is “Asters and Goldenrod,” where Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about what she wants to do, how she has this really beautiful question.

That question is: why do asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together?

And she’s told that’s a question for artists and not for scientists.

And then she goes and becomes the botanist that she most wants to be.

This book really warns me about how do I keep my heart and my mind open to the potentials in our students, and the questions that give them life and that call them to be their true selves to their purpose in the world?

Aimee:  I think the answer to that beautiful question is partly gratitude, right?  Keeping our hearts and minds open to the gifts that are right in front of us, the gifts that we’ve already received and the gifts that those future students, or the students of today can offer us as learners and humans sharing this space. One of our friends from Hawaii Kamu, I recently had an opportunity to co-facilitate with him.  And he offered up this phrase from one of his teachers, which is: “to hold one another capable.”

And that has been sitting with me these past couple of weeks of thinking about when I engage with students or colleagues, how can I hold them capable?

Part of that is thinking about what the gifts that they bring.  And part of that is about, okay, what space am I creating so that they can develop their gifts and use them in ways that can generate positivity and growth and restoration and space for the emergent. The wonderful emergent that we don’t know can happen.

Jeanie:  That’s beautiful. To hold one another capable. I’m going to sit with that a long time.

I’m Jeanie Phillips, and welcome to Vermont Ed Reads: books by, for and with Vermont educators. Today on the show, we welcome Mike McRaith, who’s here to talk about Nora Samaran’s Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture.

How *do* you hold harm, and harmony together in the same space in a way that protects and honors the needs of all students to feel safe, and loved?

How do you talk about the needs of those students who feel marginalized, even if we’d identify them as coming from wide intersections of privilege?

And how do you talk about the needs of straight, white, male, cis-gendered students without centering their needs, in a culture that marginalizes the needs of, well, absolutely everybody else?

Nora Samaran has some answers. As does Mike McRaith! We here on the show love talking with smart, compassionate people, and if you do too (and we hope you do), this is the episode for you.

Now, let’s chat.

Jeanie: Thank you for joining me, Mike. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Mike: It’s my pleasure to be here. My name is Mike McRaith. I’m the assistant executive director at the Vermont Principals Association. And my job includes all different kinds of things, mostly supporting principals in many different ways: the professional learning side of things, the mentorship and a host of other things at the VPA. And I’m a former high school principal at Montpelier High School. I did the previous four years there. And then I spent six years in Franklin Northeast, in that supervisory union, as a school counselor and a middle school principal.

Jeanie: You bring a ton of expertise and really relevant expertise to this book, Turn This World Inside Out. Which you suggested to me and I was really excited to read. But before we jump into that, I wonder if you might share what you’re reading right now. What’s on your bedside table? I suspect there might be some books for little ones, on that stack.

Mike:  Yeah, thanks. This book was recommended to me by my dear friend, confidant and soul leader, Sylvia Fagin, who is a teacher in the Montpelier School District, among many other things. And when she recommends something to me, I pay close attention. So, I want to thank Sylvia for this recommendation and her continued support through some really hard things, working together and just being a great person for me to turn to and to bounce things off of. And to learn with. So, thank you, Sylvia.

The books that I’ve been reading aside from this are connected to four-year-olds and six-year-olds. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and being at home so much we started reading chapter books.

And so the books that I’ve read most recently are Gary Paulsen books.

My boys were super, super interested in reading Hatchet and then Brian’s Winter. And we also read Dogsong which is a very interesting and sort of, poetic book. And they hung in there. Gary Paulsen does a great job of engaging kids — even four-year-olds (soon to be five) — and they have tons of questions, and it comes up all the time in their language. Just last night they were talking about the size of a moose and whether or not the moose would charge them and all different kinds of things. Those books have been great for shaping their connection to nature.

Jeanie:  This brings me so much joy! You have no idea what I would give to have a four-year-old sit on my lap and let me read to them, like I’d give a lot. Yeah.

Mike:  It’s real good. And we try not to take it for granted. We do a lot of it: every single day and every single night. We read and we soak that up. And you know, my wife has been great about bringing books, and our South Burlington Public Library does a fantastic job.

Jeanie:  Okay, you know, I’m not going to be able to resist and I’m going to send you some titles to be read to four- and six-year-olds later.

Mike:  Please do. *laughs*

Jeanie:  So, let’s get to this book.

This book opens in a really interesting way with a description of a school. A Canadian school. And I wonder if we could set the stage for our listeners by reading pages one, two, and into the top of three just to give them a sense of the idea this book is shooting towards.

Mike:  Sure, glad to. (And I’ll try not to make any extra noise turning the pages.)

So, the title of this first chapter is “Introduction: Nurturance Culture Means Holding the Circle”.

“At Windsor House, a free school in Coastal Salish territories (also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), every child has an internal map of how harm is handled in their school community. In this school, the only public democratic school in North America and one of the longest running brick-and-mortar free schools in the world, any student who experiences harm can “write up” the other person who they feel harmed them. When someone is written up, they’re required to go to what the school calls justice council, which is a circle of their peers who then help repair the harm.

Going to that circle is not an option. It is a requirement for anyone who wants to be a member of the school community. This is especially notable because it is one of the only concrete requirements at a public, accessible, democratic school that has almost no coercion or compelling of anything other kind. In the free school system, deeply invested in beliefs about autonomy and keeping kids whole, if a student wants to skateboard or paint all day that is what they do.

In a community so steeped in an ethic of consent and self-determination, with so few kids of ordinary, everyday compelling in place compared to regular schools, I was curious about how this requirement worked. What is the relationship, I wondered, between the commitment to the individual autonomy that is such a dearly held value of the school, and this justice council that can compel students to repair harm?

At the beach one day, while watching kids pull up seaweed and pile it into stacks, I asked my close friend’s twelve-year-old son, who goes to this school, “What happens if a kid who gets written up doesn’t come to council?” He barely skipped a beat before he answered, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, “If someone doesn’t go to council, council goes to them.”

A day later, I asked my friend’s nine-year-old daughter, who had not heard my earlier conversation the same question. She too is a student in the school.

I got the same answer. She barely paused in her playing, glanced up, and said, “council goes to them,” as though this was the obvious answer to a silly adult question, and then immediately resumed her game.

What their answers say to me is that these kids experience justice council as self-evident and ordinary: when you hurt someone, you get called to counsel and you have to go. You are expected to make it right. This concrete, practical structure, and the kids’ regular use of it for handling harms large and small has, it seems to me, hard-wired an ethical framing for a functioning, everyday model of interdependence into their assumptions about how the world “just is,” how reality works, and how human beings “obviously” get along.”

Jeanie:  Thanks for that. That was beautiful. Something that struck me in your reading was this notion, this quote, “a map of how harm is handled.” And I wonder: do you think the schools that you’ve worked in have had a clear map of how harm is handled?

Mike:  Yeah, it’s really deep question. It’s hard to know where to begin.

I think the short answer is no.

It fell to me as a school counselor more than you might expect. And certainly as middle school principal — and definitely as high school principal as well — to sort of be the judge and jury of harm.

And anyone who’s ever worked with middle schoolers or high schoolers or people knows that harm happens all the time. It’s part of growth. It’s part of relational challenges. And it’s part of friendship. It’s part of everything that we do.

And I think that there is a real legal framework around it for schools. Which is well-intentioned, and certainly better than when I was in high school or middle school. Where, you know, the only kind of solution to harm that happened was

• “Suck it up!” or
• “Deal with it yourself” or
• “Ignore that kid,” or

duck and cover, right? Kind of like: school of hard knocks.

I mean, nobody would have ever even dreamed of saying to anyone, “Hey, that kid slammed me up against the locker!” We had a kid that kept throwing kids down the stairs. And no one would have ever dreamed of bringing that up to an adult.

So I think it’s better than that? And we have the HHB, as the school folks know it: Hazing and Harassment and Bullying Law, which is really dense. It’s really cumbersome for administrators to navigate. And quite restrictive in its nature. It comes with very specific procedures, which can be helpful to:

• not rush to judgment;
• get a full picture as best you can;
• interview everybody involved.

Then it goes along with very kind of stodgy form letters that end up going out to parents of the potential victims and the potential perpetrators.

And the whole thing, you know, oftentimes takes like a whole week for somebody who called somebody a name at lunch.

So, that feels pretty unnatural a lot of times.

And it can be very high stakes. Because depending on the students and families involved, they could really sort of want justice: the hammer to fall.

Or they might really think that this is a total waste of time and like kids need to just get over it, schools treat kids with kid gloves now…

Or most often my experience was: “You know, my sweet angel didn’t do it. The school is wrong. You’ve got this wrong. You don’t understand.”

Jeanie:  Yeah. What I’m hearing from you and what I’m wondering about, is that not only is the map maybe unclear, but in this account of this school in Canada, the author sort of infers that it’s a part of a larger community that also has these beliefs. And so I’m thinking about how, since Trump has become president (and maybe even slightly before) the numbers of racial harassments happening in schools have increased, right? Southern Poverty Law Center has done some studies on that, and found that racial slurs are up, and racial bullying is up at schools.

And so it makes me think about how even if you have a really clear map of how harm is handled in your school, if the broader culture has a very different map or a conflicting map, that’s problematic, right? Like, that undermines the goals of the school.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. I’ve been part of systems that worked really hard to be very explicit about what was acceptable and what was unacceptable. And then not only do kids know where those boundaries were, they knew what we were going to do when those boundaries were crossed. So I think that that clarity *can* be established in a school and I think that most of our schools work really hard to establish those things.

The question is whether or not the school’s boundaries and way of handling it, matches on the victim’s side and on the perpetrator side of the harms, family ethic and the broader culture.

And if it doesn’t, which oftentimes I think it doesn’t, then that internal map that the author is talking about here in this book is different for people or really unexplored. Sometimes it feels like polar opposites. And so I think, your question is, you know, do we have that internal map of how harm is handled? People might have them, but they don’t have the same one.

Most often I think that we really don’t even have an articulated one in most of our home systems or schools that are inclusive.

Jeanie: Yeah. This text seems to be driving us toward an idea of what a map of how harm is handled, how to — in your language  — face the challenge of holding victim and perpetrator in the same community. This is what this whole book is about.

The other piece that I really noticed in listening to you read the opening, was this idea of interconnectedness.

And I’m going to read from page seven, because this really struck me.

“The reason that this structure works is because it recognizes that each person is already inherently part of a larger unbreakable web of connectedness, and gives every member of the community the knowledge of how to mend that web on which human independence so fundamentally depends, and the obligation to engage in that mending when call to do so.”

Mike: Right. And you know, for me, hearing that, it’s like a worldview, right?

It’s a worldview that *your* health and wellbeing is connected to *mine*, and vice versa. That is a physiological reality as well as a lens in which to see the world and make decisions. It runs against what I think much of what our dominant culture — the patriarchy, white supremacy culture — says to us, in so, so many ways, right?

This is a worldview that is sending a message that we don’t often get in all those subtle ways as we move through what it would be a typical experience for a young American.

Jeanie:  I think we’re right now at this moment where we’re really facing this with COVID-19. We have been anyway, when I think about some work I’m doing with schools around the sustainable development goals and climate change and there are so many ways in which we’re facing this moment of realizing like, being out for number one? Isn’t going to make the world better for any of us, let alone number one. The way we need to face big issues is as a collective.

And so this really spoke to me. I wondered, I don’t know. I guess one of the things I think about all the time is how do we, is either about transitioning towards a culture that’s more about interconnectedness and interdependence or: how do we hold the tension of connection and community *and* focus on personalization and the individual?

Mike: Yeah, I think you can see that in those first couple of pages. Their example is somebody that skateboards or paints all day. So, there’s a celebration of the individual’s passions, contributions, uniqueness — while also knowing that that is part of a bigger system. Not just human, I would propose, but Earth. That all of those things need to be in a symbiotic relationship.

To me, and this is just my opinion, America might be sort of like the apex of like some people win, some people lose. Like everybody’s just out for themselves and that’s how it is.

I think our culture sends that, I don’t have to show that our people always act that way. I think that America also sort of has a reputation of having really generous people and really caring communities.

So, there’s some interesting complexity there.

But my question would be, and I think we’re sort of at this moment in history where it’s like: where does the collective stop?

• Does it stop in your town?
• Does it stop in your school?
• Or does it stop at your state?
• Does it stop in your country?

And then like ultimately maybe we can sort of zoom all the way out and be like, “Oh, it’s one thing. We’re just all one thing.”

Jeanie:  It’s the mycelium. We’re all like linked by fungus [chuckling]. Sorry.

Mike:  Yeah, that’s right.

Jeanie:  Yeah.

Mike:  Yeah, exactly! I think you can really do a lot with the collective. We’ve seen a lot like with nationalism: you can really sort of get people together and united. It feels good to have an identity, and this is who we are — we’re the tigers! we’re the lions! Or whatever. And that’s great for community, but a shortcut way of doing that is by having a common enemy. How healthy is that?

Jeanie:  Yeah. Creating belonging at the expense of somebody else’s belonging.

Mike: Exactly.

Jeanie: So, one of the things I really want to dive into with you, is this idea of relationships. And relationality. And how do we work in schools to help kids build better relationships? To learn the skills they need to build better relationships?

And I think that a lot of folks would call this “soft skills” and doesn’t belong in schools. And yet I think this book and many things in our world right now are telling us that more than ever, kids need to know how to build strong relationships. So that they are more resilient, so that they can collaborate with each other, so that they can have better self-esteem which leads to better academic scores.

And so I’m wondering about this tension between academics and soft skills or social emotional learning.

Mike: Yeah, I mean folks that have been around me in the last decade, I guess, know that one of the things that I feel like is true about education right now, in this time and space in the world, is that we’re not — meaning schools — are not the holders of information. We’re just not.

The internet has given everyone as much information as possible. We never even could have dreamed at how much information would be at our fingertips, literally.

And so if we’re not the holders of content, then what are we?

And I would say that we need to help people make meaning of content.

We need to help them be critical consumers of content.

We need to help them be producers, right? Not just consumers. And we need to help them develop interpersonal skills and soft skills. Because if we don’t they won’t develop otherwise.

And it’s more important than ever because you’re able to get so much content in so many other ways, and because we are more isolated than ever.

The echo chamber of the internet, and the school refusal rates going way, way up. Anxiety rates, way, way up for our youth. And I think part of that is because they don’t have as much practice navigating social dynamics, and it is easier than ever to just ignore them when something doesn’t go well. It’s like,

“Oh well, I’m just going to go into my phone and listen to people who agree with me or I’m going to just stay in my room and live a pretty isolated life.”

And we know tha,t while that might ping all kinds of dopamine in the brain, it actually leads to depression and anxiety and unhappiness. It isn’t fair to let young people grow up that way, and not experience serotonin, a much healthier release of endorphins into the brain, with:

• long-term relationships;
• the satisfaction of a job well done;
• with pushing through hard things and hard moments and difficult conversations to come out the other side stronger and healthier.

Jeanie:  That was really powerful. I really appreciate that.

I’m thinking many people who know your name will know you worked at Montpelier High School to push through hard things. That seems really related to a lot of the content on this book, which is that you were the first high school in the country, I believe, to fly the Black Lives Matter flag.

I wonder if you could talk about that and in relation to: what did your kids push through? And how did you and your faculty help support them? Maybe how did the kids help support the faculty, I’m not sure, and the community in order to push through, do really hard things in that way.

Mike:  I mean, first and foremost, like that was students. It continues to be students.

Their strength and bravery is something that has changed my life forever, and is one of the most important things that I have ever gone through and likely ever will.

I am so grateful to those young people — as individuals and collectively– for being a teachers to me, and to having a real connection that I think will probably last a lifetime. And for the adults in that community, being willing to take that risk — and I mean an emotional risk, a vulnerability risk. They did so, almost without hesitation.

And 100% of the faculty — I’m sure some people had some misgivings, we all probably did — but in faculty meetings, nobody stood up and said, “Don’t do this. We’re not doing this.”

Every single person, which to me is just incredible.

It felt like maybe a moment in time, you know? Like, sometimes you can sort of feel like [you’re] living through a moment in history.

The whole time I was thinking like,

“Don’t mess this up. Don’t mess it up.”

You know, like for whatever reason, I was part of that. And had voice in that moment. And it felt like it just needed to happen for this country, and for our local community.

The students were absolutely just thinking about our high school and our town. I had the sense that, “Okay, this might be a big deal.”

It turned into a pretty big deal.

So for me, it brings up all kinds of layers and complexity and feelings.

…I’ve already lost the thread on your question. *laughs* Can you give it to me again? I’d love to try again.

Jeanie:  No, it’s great. I love your answer. But I was thinking about how that work that students did, resulted in serotonin, not a dopamine rush.

But that’s the authentic work that leads you to feel good and efficacious in the long run. As opposed to sort of… I’m not even going to do this well: winning a round of Fortnite, right?

So that big rush of serotonin that your whole *community* got to feel, and that sense of collective efficacy feels really powerful, and feels like what you were saying about the importance of the social emotional learning and the soft skills. The relational piece that you were highlighting — that kids need in addition to being able to navigate content.

Mike: Right. Yeah, thank you for the redirect. Yeah, it was super difficult. And messy. And uncomfortable.

A lot of times when those feelings come up, people feel like,

“This must be the wrong way because I don’t feel good, I don’t feel happy, I don’t feel safe even.”

And when those feelings come up, a lot of times it can be like: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Just like:

“Maintain the status quo, because this feels this is yucky or disruptive!

I think that there were moments where, particularly for those students that had taken such a massive risk, and had worked so hard, and gone so deep into their psyches and their cultures to help guide us, they were walking on air in some moments, right?

That day when the flag was up and the state police were there supporting us, and our city police were there, and the legislators were there, and the news was there, and our community was there and every, almost every single kid came out around that flagpole that February morning?

The kids who had made that happen were absolutely experiencing the serotonin that comes with doing something that is meaningful.

That is connected to their values and their ethics. That they worked really hard for. That they pushed through difficult moments and frustrations and fear for, and sort of came out the other side.

It’s not to say it was like: flag up, no problems!

It was really just the beginning.

And we said that as it was happening. It wasn’t as if that was our first step. It also certainly was not our last step.

I would say like if you had to say there were 10 steps somehow to building an equitable school system that’s anti-racist? That was probably like step three.

And it was a symbol of a commitment to continue to work on that.

Jeanie:  I love everything you just said about that. I think about both the ongoing nature of anti-racist work of community-building work. of equity work. Right?

Like we’re not going to see the end of it. It’s an ongoing journey. I love that you said that.

And then you also just made me think about like, some of my most joyful experiences were not necessarily joyful in the moment, right?

Like camping trips where the tent gets soaking wet, and the story is great later.

Really long backpacking trips where you’re having to ford a river because the bridge washed out.

Or I think about people who run marathons, right?

Around this house we use the phrase, “We can do hard things”.

But sometimes what I forget is not only can we do hard things? But like, hard things are the things that end up being our joys. Our biggest joys, and our biggest, most satisfying life moments.

So, this is a really good reminder because this book is asking us to do really hard things by confronting our own bias and privilege, and sort of owning when we’ve caused harm, right?

And so… thanks for that.

Another part of this book that I think is really relevant to schools — although it doesn’t talk about schools at all — is this whole section on attachment theory. It’s pages 22- 27.

And really, our author Nora Samaran is talking about attachment theory to talk a little bit about sexual violence.

But I found myself really reading and re-reading this section on attachment, because she said it’s basically that only 50% of the population has a secure attachment style. Then she goes into some other attachment styles.

And she talks about the brain science of it. How did those years, birth to three create our limbic system, that that’s where our limbic system is developed and she talks on and on about this. I just really want to look more into attachment theory.

You probably know a lot more than I do about attachment theory, but she says whatever your attachment style, she says, limbic responses happen very, very fast. Below the conscious level and often outside of language.

So, these instantaneous responses we have when we feel threatened or when we feel like closeness is offered or going to be withheld that we can’t even put words to.

And I’m thinking about how often those limbic responses happen in schools. And how we as adults respond to them.

I don’t know, it really struck me that: some of my worst moments as an educator were misinterpreting limbic responses from students.

Mike:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the experience that maybe all educators have on a regular basis is a student that’s displaying a lot of anger. Calling Mr. McRaith the f-word — definitely at least something that I’ve experienced.

And how that can be seen as disrespectful. It can be seen as somebody that doesn’t belong in the community and needs to go away. Somebody who is the problem.

Or, you can see that as someone that is really scared.

Somebody that is just doing what they know to do to protect themselves. Or to find agency. Or to find some semblance of power, in an experience that might be stripping them of all power.

So yeah, I mean: I think that we are learning that as systems?

And it’s a lot of work.

It’s sort of faster and cheaper probably, to just be like, “Yeah, you don’t have executive functioning built” or “You’re not sort of fitting in with the cultural norms here, so goodbye.”

And to just push them out of the community in whatever way, shape or form that that happens.That happens in lots of different ways depending on what developmental level you’re at. And where you are.

It’s more work to earn a student’s respect. To build a relationship. To push through years of poor attachment.

I always think about it as like a scale, right? Like an old-timey scale. You’ve got weights on one side and weights on the other. And somebody that has a really poor attachment? Their scale of negative attachment is so far down on one side. It’s so much weight on that side, that how many instances of positive attachment, positive relationships is it going to take before that scale comes to even, or tips the other way?

And so it can feel hopeless or like a waste of time for educators sometimes to be dropping things on the positive side of that relationship because they don’t see a change. Or they don’t see the difference sort of happen instantly. I had to use that a lot for myself, and encouraged my colleagues to think about it that way too: you just don’t know when that scale is going to tip. And we want to put as much on that side of the positive attachment and positive relationship as possible, in really difficult situations.

Jeanie:  I love that scale analogy.

Often, when I teach collaborative practices, we spend a lot of time thinking about belonging. And how we need to build belonging. Build a culture of belonging amongst teachers as a community of learners, in order to create the kind of spaces we need in order to be brave. Right? And in order to confront our own biases, our own assumptions about learners, about each other, about who can learn and who can’t.

And I think about how the same is true in classrooms, right?

We have to build strong cultures of belonging.

And the kids who least feel like they belong? Need belonging the most. And they’re often the hardest ones to reach. We as adults,  we want shortcuts; we want it to be easy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the classrooms I know that are working really well remotely. It’s hard, right? But the classrooms where I see teachers and students holding on, and doing pretty well, are classes that have really strong relationships. Have really well developed sense of classroom belonging, and community.

And so I’ve been thinking a lot about how this book is really about belonging. And how do we create belonging, so we can do those hard things. So we can have those hard conversations. And so we can disrupt systems of power and prejudice and privilege.

Mike: Yeah. And I think there is a tension there that is named towards the end of the book: how difficult it is to hold harm and harmony in tension with one another in community.

One of the things I think is different with public school than would be in cases of private school or a community where you get to pick and choose who stays and who goes, is that the public school is for everyone, not just students that are easy to get along with, or might agree with your worldview.

I experienced several times as an administrator and as a school counselor, where deep harm had been done. And maybe the person who had done the harm was a repeat offender. And was not all that remorseful.

The victim or the person who had experienced the harm, wants to be protected and they have the right to be protected. They have the right to come to school and not feel scared or not feel like they’re going to be attacked, verbally or otherwise.

So what do you do with that perpetrator, with the person who’s carrying around toxic energy and it splashes up on all kinds of people?

Do you ostracize them?

Do you come down really hard on them?Scare them into following the rules?

Or do you try to work with that person to help them understand the damage that they’re doing to their community, to their peers, and ultimately to themselves, right?

I mean that’s what the book’s title is about it. It’s Turn This World Inside Out. And I think what the author, Nora Samaran, is saying is it’s turning yourself inside out, right?

We swim around in a culture of toxic masculinity that expects people to be individualistic, to not have a full range of emotions. To have young men be unemotional. To be loud, to be tough, to take what’s theirs, to compete.

And when we ask them not to, it makes them feel like either the school is out of touch with reality like, “That’s not my reality. I am going to have to fight. I am going to have to compete.”

Or causes this sort of deep questioning about everything they know.

And brings up all of that those feelings of shame and embarrassment — which are such big feelings that there’s no surprise that they would move away from them.

So, to try to put a point on it is: I am not interested in centering sort of cis-gendered, white, male narratives at school. I mean that’s one of our biggest challenges and problems, right? We have done that forever and we need to have more voices centered.

At the same time, those students need some of the most attention.

They have the most unpacking to do.

They have the most layers to work through.

And they need the most connections, they need the most relationships.

I had many students who come from marginalized communities say to me, “How can you be friends with them?” Like, “Why are you friendly to them in the hallway?”

And I felt like I had to be, I spent twice as much as time with them.

But also, there’s this tension of like, “Okay, then am I centering their story?”

So, that’s something that came up for a lot, a lot for me in this book.

Jeanie:  I saw that paradox everywhere in this book. And I think you’re right.

For me, it really showed up in the masculinity chapter, about how this woman, Nora Samaran, is like, “I can’t do this work with men because of the power and the relationships I’ve had with them in the past.”

It reminded me that often in the past few years — and it’s starting to shift — when we would in collaborative practices classes, when we would talk about race, people would say, “Oh, but our school is mostly white so we don’t really need to deal with race.” And then I would have them read Ali Michael’s What White Children Need to Know About Race.

But this book really gives me new language of it’s actually white people; a) being white is a race, and b) like, it’s actually white people that need to do the work with white people to better understand our role as oppressors, and to be able to digest that.

I think that’s a hard sense for people. They’re like, “I’m not an oppressor.” But we are. I am, as a white person.

So to be able to digest that and see what that means?

And the same for around toxic masculinity and rape culture in this book is that it’s men that need to work with each other to talk about a new, or a re-birthed notion, of masculinity that can sort of be tender and that can be attuned to the needs of others, so that they’re not doing harm.

And I feel like we could say the same thing with cis-gendered folks, right? Like that *we* need to be doing the work.

There is this tension about is that then centering those who already have power?

So I think that’s definitely something I found myself noodling a lot in this book. How do you do that… and not center privilege? Dominance?

The question I’m going to follow up with is: so often what I’ll hear from folks is, but what about class? Class is the real determinant.

I can see this playing out in my own background, in my own childhood and also in schools, that class that there is this intersection of power being white or male and class that is nuanced. So, I’m wondering about your thoughts on that.

Mike:  You know, one of the things that I have seen since the pandemic in Vermont, is I’ve seen people that champion equity, continue to champion it and point to it. But I’ve also seen the concern about our students of lower economic status of limited means championed at the center of people with the most power.

It’s interesting to me because I think it’s more accessible for our dominant culture in Vermont — which is predominantly white, and if you look at our governors history predominantly cis-gendered white males.

So, if you just look at it from that lens, why are we able to talk about financial inequities, so comfortably right now? It’s on everyone’s mind and everybody is taking action on it as best they can. And certainly raising it as something that has been in focus and sharpened. That focus has sharpened through this pandemic experience.

Why? Why can we do that?

And I think it’s because it’s accessible.

I think that it’s closer to people’s life. Either they have themselves experienced poverty at some point in their lives, or know a lot of people around that.

And I think that it asks people to do less internal work when you start to realize how racist our society is, you *really* start to see it. The rose-colored glasses come off and you realize everything, everything we’re doing is filled with bias and oppression. That’s really overwhelming. And then you start to realize like, “I’m a part of that, right?” Like, “I’m part of that oppression. I am that oppression.” That’s asking people to do some really challenging work.

I think the same thing happens when we talk about misogyny. And when we talk about sexuality, right? There’s a lot of internal work.

And there’s something that it seems to me is more accessible about classism. I’m sure that I’m oversimplifying it and I apologize if I am, but I see that.

So how does that play out? I think it can’t be overlooked. Take a cis-gendered white male who’s grown up in poverty and tell them,

“Look, you don’t realize the privilege you’re living with.”

There’s a natural reaction that they’re going to say,

“Are you kidding, privilege? You know how hard my life is? I don’t have any privilege here. You know, the people around me will cut me down instantly. I’m fighting out, I’m scrapping and nobody’s given me a thing. How can you say that I have privilege?”

And that is true.

I mean their lived experience is true and they are oppressed financially. They don’t have the healthcare that should be a human right. All kinds of other things.

Those things don’t have to be opposed to one another. They both can be true.

And I think there’s something about our climate and culture that wants things to be one way or another and we’re not able to hold polarities in tension with one another, without some practice and with some intentionality of like, oh, maybe it’s “both and”.

Jeanie:  Thank you for that. You’re making me think about Rebecca Holcombe a few years back, at a Rowland Conference was talking about curb cuts. Do you remember that? And she’s talking about how before there were curb cuts that allowed wheelchairs to have access to sidewalks, and make it easy for folks to get around, that a group of disabled activists went out and poured the first curb cut. And what they found over time is that curb cuts aren’t just good for disabled people, but they’re also good for people with strollers and people who maybe have vision problems and can’t see where it goes. For all of us. All of us benefit from curb cuts.

There’s a section on page 53 that really made sense to me and make sense for that young man you were just talking about.

It says, at the top of page 53 says, “Cis people perform their gender as much as trans folks do. Putting transness at the center of our understanding of gender makes apparent that cisness has also always been complicated.”

And I’ve known for a long time and thought a lot for a long time about how fighting homophobia and transphobia actually makes all of us safer. Because we can all more safely be ourselves in our bodies and in our skin, right? Like we don’t feel the need to conform to gender binaries as much. We can be more of who we essentially are.

And yet why do we find that so threatening? And that’s sort of one of the paradoxes: something that would be good for all of us sometimes we can’t act on, because of fear of the other.

Mike:  Yeah, I had that same line underlined. And just to circle back to my personal experience with sort of extreme hate with the raising of the Black Lives Matter flag where the white nationalists had my name circled there for a minute. I was getting a lot of very serious hate email and mail. And phone calls and trolls online, that kind of thing.

It’s so naive of me because people without as much privilege as me, people who are putting themselves out there in their daily lives just in their natural existence and folks that are fighting for justice, experience this every single day. Their whole lives.

But for me, I was struck by how often the hate overlapped really quickly? That I wasn’t just somebody that was supporting my young students of color and was anti-racist (hopefully).

But immediately I was weak, right? I was lots of other slurs that implied that I was gay, right? And then there’s even like leaps to like, “Oh, he’s Jewish, right?” It just started to sort of morph into all of these things that were not cis-gendered white male. That were used as a way to scare me, I guess? Or to insult me.

And the gender piece of it and the sexuality piece of it was very strong. Very strong.

In almost all of the comments, they were explicitly sexual in nature and would be sort of expressing that that was weakness.

And you’re right:  as a cis-gender white male experiencing the apex of privilege in America, with citizenship and everything, it’s also true that performing my expressed gender is *absolutely* part of the deal.

And I couldn’t tell you how many times as a somewhat more emotional young man than some of my peers, that I would have to  like, pull back from that because it seemed too soft. Did my voice just break a little bit or did that sound gay?

Immediately, immediately being policed by my peers in a very toxic way.

And I think most young white men that I know have grown up that way. Why is it that that is just so unacceptable?

I think that there’s been some evolution in that amongst our young people? I think it’s better than when I was a kid? And I’m sure it depends on the community and I’m sure we still have a long, long ways to go. But if we could center, as she writes on page 52, center transness, that’s going to be a freeing for everybody.

Jeanie:  It was really a paradigm shift for me is to put that at the center and not just to sort of give it a nod. Right?

And so there’s so much more to talk about in this book, Mike! But I sort of want to go to this hopeful place, if that’s okay.

There are a couple of things in our time left that I really want to get to. So many things.

On page 76, our author, Nora, is in conversation with Ruby Smith Díaz who was born to Chilean and Jamaican parents in Edmonton, and she’s an art-based anti-oppression facilitator, etc.

And Díaz talks about this project she does with kids that just rang my bell. It’s called the Afrofuturism Trading Cards. She has kids create them, and they’re based in joy.

She says, “We do character sketches, and the youth imagine that they are living in a time that is free of racism, homophobia, classism, and all of the other oppressions that exist today. We ask what it would look like if we were truly free, and unafraid to be who we are.”

She goes on a little bit more about that. Like, how wonderful to do that? And I want to connect it. I want to talk about that.

But I also want to talk about what I think is sort of a futurism, idealistic card for schools.

At the top of page 37, I circled this paragraph, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. And it says,

That to me is this: what could schools look like if we were all free?

That to me is like the future card *I* would create for what I want schooling to look like in this country.

Mike:  Yeah, I agree. And I would underscore that that is not where we are.

And so my optimism is paired with concern. That some of the most toxic stuff, is what we need to go towards.

This book does a great job of exploring how that’s possible. To hold the victims, and the people who are experiencing harm, safe. And to center their experience and their story. And to not turn our back on those who are doing the harm. That is difficult. I think it is quite difficult.

I learned from a student this phrase, and I’m not sure where she got it, but she said, “I’m not just interested in calling out, I’m interested in calling in.”

And in public schools, I think that that is an obligation, legally, but also in community.

We don’t get to just say, “You know what? That person is so different than me that I’m just going to go over here. I don’t like the things that they like, so I don’t get them and I’m just going to ignore them. And if they break the rules of our community, then they need to be ostracized, they need to be publicly humiliated and they need to be gone.”

That doesn’t work for me. That would be easier. I sort of I think maybe sometimes we wish that was the case? But to me it’s the opposite.

And the hope for me lies there. That we run towards that pain. We run towards that complexity,, and those feelings of shame and embarrassment and disregard and the tossing away of the attempts of the community to bring to circle. To bring together.

And that is not something it’s easy to get people excited about.

But I think that that’s the truth for me. That that is the work that’s to be done. To do that hard thing. And to know that it’s not always going to go well.

I think that this book sort of concludes that way, right? That we, you sort of put, you put that energy on that side of the scale as she wrote.

“Maybe we laid the foundation for bigger work later on. I started thinking about these as messy successes -in a context where so many of us are still learning to build and be in community, this stuff can be transformative too.”

Meaning things that don’t go well are part of the transformation. Things that are not without harm, that don’t come to resolution are all part of the work. And that is not going to be sort of tied up neatly. We will sort of somehow arrive in a school in beautiful British Columbia where the kids all know that that might be really far off, but it’s still worth striving for.

Jeanie: I just want to go to that school. *laughs*

Mike:  It’d be nice.

Jeanie:  I’m thinking about two things as you said that.

One of my favorite quotes from this book that I think is kind of a call to action is on page 94.

She says, “To reach a life-sustaining culture and world, we need to live it into being.”

To me that’s really empowering because I can live that into being.

She also uses, on page 88, this phrase that I first heard from Alex Shevrin Venet, which is unconditional positive regard. It seems to me like the least we can do for our students, all of our students, every single student, is to hold them with unconditional positive regard.

And that that could go a long way towards the creating of belonging and relationships that students need and deserve. Regardless of what they’re bringing with them.

Mike:  Exactly. And I think that takes conscious community-building because when you do that, and there are students that will feel like those other students don’t deserve that, if you don’t build that in, to the whole climate and culture, that this is how we do this and we’re not going to push anyone out, then you have to do it that way and you have to make sure everyone understands why. And I think that that takes a lot of work.

To sort of peel back these onions and help your teachers, your staff, your students, understand why you would not push that person out of the community.

That we are interdependent and we are, and there is the opportunity to celebrate one another. And support one another. So, yeah. Thanks for letting me talk about this.

Jeanie:  Oh, it was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on and digging deep and sharing examples from your life and from your school and for introducing me to this book. I have loved it. I’m going to have to re-read it actually.

Mike, thank you for being an example of somebody who’s living this into being. I really appreciate that.

Mike:  Well, not all the time. But I’m doing my best with a lot of help from really great friends and students,  and folks like you. So, thank you.