S11E15 – Unearthing Joy: Gholdy Muhammad on Teaching with Love

S11E15 - Unearthing Joy: Gholdy Muhammad on Teaching with Love

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools podcast. I'm Andrew, a White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is Unearthing Joy: Gholdy Muhammad on Teaching with Love.

Dr. Val: So love has come up for us again, my friend.

Andrew: Here we are. It's like the theme of the second half of this season seems to be love.

Dr. Val: That's right. And it's not even something that we would've, brought up ourselves but the theme has come organically from our guests recently.

Andrew: Yeah. Eve Ewing, Noliwe Rooks, our guest today, Dr. Gholdy Muhammed, all have talked about the importance of love. It seems like we are in a place where we need to be reminded of how important love is.

Dr. Val: Tell us a little bit more about Dr. Gholdy Muhammad.

Andrew: Dr. Muhammed is, I think, at her core, an educator. She's been deeply committed to teaching since she was a little kid, used to study her teachers for their teaching styles. Um, has been a teacher herself and a literacy specialist and a school board member, now she's a college professor. And wrote a couple of books. Um, the first one that I came across was a couple of years ago. It was called Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. And her most recent book, which is called Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Critically and Historically Responsive Curriculum and Instruction.

Dr. Val: And this feels important to say like in our current moment where social emotional learning is accused of being anti-intellectual, or anti-skill, right? As if we cannot have a curriculum or a space where students can connect to their identity, to others in a humanistic way and learn skills. And be intellectuals. Right?

Andrew: Absolutely and one of the other things that I really appreciate about the conversation today, her books are really, you know, written for teachers, are certainly geared towards people who are in education. And I am not a teacher and I've gotten so much out of her work just thinking about my own parenting, about how I engage with my own kids in conversations. And I think the conversation that we're gonna share today really highlights how you can think about these ideas that she comes to through the lens of education, really in broad ways when we're thinking about just how we spend time with our kids, what sorts of lessons we want our kids to learn in everyday situations.

Dr. Val: That's right. I think we should take a listen.

Andrew: Alright, let's listen to Dr. Gholdy Muhammad.

[THEME MUSIC]

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Hi, I am Gholdy Muhammad. I am a professor of literacy, language and culture at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Andrew: And you have a new book out that's a follow up to another book, both of which are amazing. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, came out a few years ago, and then Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Curriculum and Instruction just recently came out. We're excited to talk about those, but before we get in, why do you care? How did you find yourself immersed in this work around culturally and historically responsive education and curriculum?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Well, I mean, the work really begins with my love, my passion, my joy and desire to be in education. I cared deeply about learning, about teaching from an early age, from all the different positions I held in education. I knew I cared 'cause I knew how it made my body feel.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I felt an immense amount of movement and joy and concern. All the things that you know, that your heart is in it. I'm always trying to sort of analyze how my body is feeling when I'm engaged in something. So when I started the journey of historical research, which ultimately became this historical literacy model, I felt my body just come alive in the same way…

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …as it did when I became a teacher, as it did when I would teach children how to read as a literacy specialist. Or working as like a school board member.

You know, looking at history and reading the archives, it almost feels like you're having a conversation with the ancestors. It's just you and history and like all of this imagination that swirls around your head. And as a researcher, I started to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and it sort of became what is now the historically responsive model for education.

Andrew: Yeah. Can you go back a step further? Like growing up, I know you grew up in Gary, Indiana.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Can you talk a little bit about like your own educational experience and how that shaped your desire to, you know, maybe provide something different for students?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Most of my schooling was in the community. Was at like the Boys and Girls Club, the library, the church with my grandmother, the masjid with my mom, my siblings, like that was my school.

But yeah, I grew up in Gary, Indiana. And then later we moved outside of Illinois in the suburbs. So, I had some contrasting experiences. Like in Gary, all the teachers said my full name Gholnecsar. It was something that felt so little at the time, but I see the significance of it now. And in the suburbs of Chicago, like nobody wanted to say my name. Everybody wanted…

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …a nickname. They felt uncomfortable with me. I didn't really see myself in the student body, in the teacher body. I don't think I had one teacher of color in high school. So while the resources were a bit more at these schools. The depth of cultural knowledge, understanding, even academic achievement, I would argue wasn't there. A lot of folks think that, oh, we move children out of certain communities and move them to others that may have more resources or less children of color, that it may be a better school.

And it was funny because we were looking at one point for just places to live and this one district said we are the top district in the state. And I had trained the teachers and read their curriculum and I said to the sales person, I said, “I don't think you should, uh, promote that, because it's not true.” [Gholdy laughs a little]

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And you have to be very careful when you especially say that to Black people and people of color. 'Cause it's especially, especially not true for them.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And I also had experiences at a Muslim private school.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Um, growing up, so I have had a few different types of schooling experiences and I would study the teachers' methods, like I wanted to be a teacher and so I studied teachers. While some people kind of look at singers or athletes and they study them, I…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …studied teachers in that way and I study teachers in all these contexts, and that's why I bring a lot of those experiences into what I do today.

Dr. Val: You talked about your relationship between yourself, history and imagination, and yet everyone's relationship with history is not the same as we see now. That desire to feel connected and to learn from the ancestors is not something that everyone feels or experiences. And so we wanna stop history.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Can you speak a little bit about that and why that relationship might feel different and how we can encourage people to want to go into conversation with history?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah. That's tough because you really gotta get to people's hearts. And the openness of their mind. And it's, that's hard to teach and change sometimes. You know, like when you grow older and you hear yourself saying the things…

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: … that your parents or elders said to you, or you’re listening to a song and you're like, what are they saying? [all three laugh]

Dr. Val: Yes.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And it's like, sometimes you just hit a point where you're like, yes, they actually have something to tell us.

Dr. Val: Mm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And so, having an open mind and heart to listen to ancestral voice. That comes with a certain kind of humility.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And a pure, purity of the heart. And they have given us so much. I mean, I read things from the 13th century and I'm like, wow, they could be speaking to me today.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And we have to think about what ancestor we wanna become as well.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: So I think there has to be just some basic understanding of what knowledge is, who can provide knowledge, and the belief that the ancestors have done significant work and have a genius to carry on and give to us. You have to just believe that.

I ask people, how do you define ancestry? Who's your ancestor? 'Cause a woman said to me, she happened to be a White woman. And she says, well, you know, you do a lot of work with Black ancestors, who are your ancestors. They're not mine. And I said, you know, Harriet Tubman can be yours if you want her to be.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: She didn’t just help Black people.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And she says, well, you know, I feel bad. I feel like doing this work as a White woman in doing all that da da. And I, I asked her the question, let's put up two ancestors. Do you see yourself more in Christopher Columbus or Harriet Tubman?

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Now one person hurt a lot of people. One person went back for people to help them when she didn't have to. And I said, are you a helper? Are you one who takes and hurts it? It's that simple to me. It can, love…

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …and connection to humanity can be that simple. And I said…

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: “While you're just seeing race, you are missing the heart.”

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: So I always start this work with asking people, how's their heart? Because this is where this work must begin. It's not about just the race and a lot of Black folks are biracial, who are the ancestors?

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Because race is so socially constructed and if you have a drop of Black, we know all the history about the…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: … one drop rule and all of that. So, you know, I try to convince people that you do not have to see yourself in hurt and harm.

Dr. Val: Mmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: There are certainly some Black folks back in the day that did not do right by other Black people or themselves.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I don't see myself in them.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Nor do I raise, lift their voices, their ancestral voice.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And I wish other people did the same thing.

Andrew: Mm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Because we would see Sister Harriet Tubman as ours. No matter who you are. But, you know, a lot of people got a lot of unlearning to do.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Because they see me as a Black woman. Even though I'm bicultural. They see me as a Black woman, which I identify as, they see me doing Black history work and they're like, this is just for Black people.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And I'm like, Black people are not selfish. [Val and Andrew laugh]

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I would not keep something so extraordinary of the ancestral voice just for Black children. This is for all children.

Dr. Val: Right. Thank you.

Andrew: I mean, yeah, I've thought a lot about the ways that race is socially constructed, that race is, you know, designed to create barriers between people now, but had not until you just said that thought about the ways that, that is also true with ancestral knowledge.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: That those barriers are also put up to keep us from those things to make us feel separate in, in that history. That's really powerful. Thank you for that. Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It’s a design, yeah.

Dr. Val: So in this moment, our federal government is in the process of dismantling the Department of Education. Public school continues to be under attack and has been under attack for quite some time. You mentioned that your schooling didn't just happen in the school building, obviously, but also in the community. What are some ways that community can continue to fill in that gap?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I think communities have always been filling in the gap. I don't think education has been excellent ever.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: In the country.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It could be. We definitely have the genius. We have the minds, we have the theories, we have the research.

Andrew: And the resources.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah, and the leaders.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It could be and it is excellent in many places. I'm speaking widely.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: So I feel like we have been filling in the gaps. That's how we've been able to survive and thrive and have children who will succeed despite of. I like to think I was a despite of child. I achieve, despite not having teachers tell me I'm a good writer.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Like nobody told me I was a good writer.

Dr. Val: Mm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And I loved to write, and all my teachers knew that. I achieved despite not having any education about Islam, about culture, about Black women, about Black history. I achieved despite not having joy…

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …taught in the class. So we don't want despite of children, and how did I achieve? Because of the community. And we are up against it, you all, it's not just not getting certain things in schools. And while they're getting information everywhere and they're also getting misinformation everywhere.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: They're, we're, we're up against social media, AI, there's a lot of other forces that are, not necessarily all negative, but it means that we might have to do more community work just to make sure children know who they are.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Whose they are, that they’re genius, that they're smart, that they have intelligence, that they can have joy. And the ways we do that is the ways we have been doing it right. These afterschool programs, Saturday programs, community clubs, book clubs, the religious institutions, the programming, all that these nonprofits are doing. That's how we keep doing it. And we have to create spaces for all our parents to empower themselves to know that they can elevate their children at home. It's like those informal things that we teach children that will help build them. And it's not just having books at home, but it's reading with them.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: ‘Cause if a child struggles to read and they read by themselves, they might keep the struggle.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: That’s just like telling me to cook by myself [all start laughing] and, and not, and not doing it with me a few times.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Until I'm more fluent.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It’s not gonna make me a better chef.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: So, if we love and care for our children and we see them and we have an opportunity to spend time with them. We are responsible. Even if you do not have children of your own, you are responsible. Show up at that board meeting. Say what you feel matters. Say, this is what you want for the children in your community. You pay taxes. So I want it to feel like a collective community responsibility for our schools and our children.

Andrew: Um, do you garden?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I started gardening. A year or two ago I started planting.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: My mom says I'm entering into that stage of life.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Same. I just got my first garden, y'all.

Andrew: Transition lenses and planting a garden. [all laughing]

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: She says, oh, it's time. I said, oh, okay. So I'm still learning. I recently started reading The Secret Life of Plants and writing a piece about like how genius plants are. You know, like I read that they can detect lies. Trees when they grow the roots underneath they don't grow in a solitary kind of way. They wait for others so that they can build together. So they’re very communal. So it's like all of these sort of genius ways of plants and how they grow. I've been reading at the same time as I'm learning to garden.

Andrew: I asked about gardening because so many of the metaphors that you use throughout your work have to do with gardening, with planting, with growing, Cultivating Genius, and Unearthing Joy are your books. There's so much of this, tapping into what feels like a natural process that needs to be supported, that needs to be facilitated.

But you are not creating, we don't create genius. We uncover genius. We cultivate genius. We don't create joy. We unearth joy. We let joy come out because the natural state of kids, the natural state of people is to be genius and is to be joyful. I wanna start with the four pursuits that you laid out in cultivating genius, identity skills, intellectualism, criticality and then you added joy for this most recent book. Can you just help understand what those five pursuits are?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Sure. So I'm in grad school and I'm studying the history of organized book clubs and writing groups. And I found that Black people had book clubs in around the 1820s and they called themselves literary societies, which was a beautiful term.

Dr. Val: It is. Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: They studied about race and racism, but also about Chinese fashion.

Dr. Val: Nice.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: They debated about religion and women's rights. It was just really varied and cool. And I wanted to study within these literary societies and the surrounding schools and the other educational outlets like Black newspapers, church, schools.

So we had these literary societies, but the members had these other jobs in the community that were very educational. So I also studied those. And I wanted to know what did they read and write? How did they study? Literacy. What were some of their literacy goals? What were some of their educational goals? And I found that they always named their goals as pursuits. They never called them standards and it's a better word, a pursuit is more self-motivated. Self-driven. There's no stopping point. See, when you study the education of many communities of color, you actually have pursuits. You don't have, let me learn this to pass a test and get into college and then stop.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Like what happens when I get into college?

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: How would I learn to navigate myself, my community? How can I still thrive and have joy and be successful? So it wasn't just a stopping point. So all that to say, they called their goals, pursuits, and they had five.

Identity. They said, as we are learning, we wanna know more about who we are, whose we are, who we are not. Because the newspapers at the time were saying that Black people are not genius or not smart or not good enough. They said, Uh-uh, not who we are. And they said, we wanna learn about other cultures. That's why they were studying different African nations, Chinese cultures and other people.

Skills. These are the proficiencies. They wanted to learn how to read, write, and think, and do math, and learn how to ask questions. The things we call standards today.

The third was intellectualism. They wanted to become smarter about something. They wanted to get new knowledge, but use that knowledge into action. They didn't want knowledge to just sit in their heads. They wanted to do something with it. And most of the time, what they did with it was speaking and writing, and so their knowledge was in action in that way, spreading truth to and knowledge to other people. There was this quote I read in 1828, and William Whimper, he said, “we wish to see the flame of improvements spreading amongst each other.” See, now it…

Andrew: Mm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …was like a flame to keep information, knowledge, learning skills to yourself was very selfish.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: If you knew a brother, a sister over here needed it.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And the fourth goal or pursuit is criticality. Teaching and learning ways to discern between truth and falsehood, teaching and learning, to understand and disrupt oppression and hurt and harm. Now that criticality can be environmental justice. It could be racism, homophobia, antisemitism. And it can also be the hurt that we do to ourselves.

I’m not beautiful. I'm not smart. How do you teach a child to make the world a better place and to interrupt any form of harm to another group of people or to yourself or to the environment?

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And then the fifth pursuit is joy, which I added. Y'all know we need joy more than ever. We can say that pretty much every year of life.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Joy is about teaching children and adults, the beauty within themselves, the beauty within each other, the environment, wonder, imagination, laughter, creativity. And the five pursuits are not just for teaching and learning, but they're for life.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You can say, how am I going to choose a friend or a partner? Do they have these five things?

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You can turn on the news and you can say, do I see myself in this news story? Right? Identity. What speaking skills are they using to be persuasive? What new knowledge or intellect am I learning?

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Criticality… are they speaking the truth? Who are they not interviewing for this story?

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And then for joy, you can even say, is there some kind of hope at the end of this news story?

Dr. Val: I'm working on being very present and recognizing and, and being in a place of wonder around all things natural for sure, but certainly things that I would not have paid attention to before. So yesterday I was driving, I was parallel to a train track and the train track had a train on it and I was driving next to it and we were both moving.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Okay.

Dr. Val: And I just found that so enjoyable because I imagined myself as an old Western outlaw. Right. You know, I'm, I'm like watching, you know, in my mind The Harder They Fall. I'm like,

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah. I love that movie.

Dr. Val: That was such a great movie. And so I'm riding next to the train and it was just such a youthful, joyful experience for me.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Listen.

Dr. Val: But it’s one that I'm trying to like capture those as much as possible right now because that's what we have. That's what we can actually touch and feel.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And be reminded that there is beauty and wonder in the world.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It is.

Dr. Val: As often as we choose to see it.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And we need to center that joy. That's why a lot of teachers attach themselves to my work. That joy pursuit is everything. And it's everything to the teacher.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Because if I teach it, I get to experience it.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andrew: The past actually, handful of episodes. Love has come up a number of times…

Dr. Val: Yep.

Andrew: …um, in a way that it hasn't really in I don't know, 140 some odd episodes, it does seem to be kind of in the air. Can you talk a little bit about the link between, between joy and love? I know you wrote, “If we're not centering children’s humanity through love, there's no strategy, no professional book or instructional method in the world that can…

Dr. Val: Preach.

Andrew: prepare the teacher to elevate the child.”

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You know, love is the foundation. Underneath all these five pursuits is love. You cannot teach somebody to know themselves, to to love themselves, to have intellect skills and joy, criticality if you don't love them. You cannot teach who you don't love. You think you can, but you won't make much progress. And when children don't make the progress, which we see in this country…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …we think, oh, the child, the parents. We don't say it's love. It is.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And children know when they are not loved. They…

Dr. Val: Yep.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …know when you’re faking the funk, they know when you might just care for them and for children who have such a deep love in their community and home, if they don't get it in school, they might still be okay. But if they're not getting it enough here and they're not getting enough here, you see how that can just… is such a need. That's what they're at risk for. The lack of love.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And so love. You have to love yourself to have this job of educator, you have to love children because when you love them, you see the best in them. You bring out the best in them. When you love them, you're more patient with them.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: When you love them, you give them the world.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I used to ask some teachers to tell me about the students they struggle to educate the most. And they said that these were they're Black and Brown students. They're students with IEPs. I said, so tell me about them. I didn't start with the strategies. I started with their humanity.

And they said they're struggling. They're at risk. They're confrontational. I went to New York. There was a school that you had to test in as a college level to get into this high school. I said, tell me about your 2% of Black students here. He says, I'm just gonna tell you they're confrontational. And I said, well, tell me about your own sons and daughters. Nobody called their child a tier three child. A confrontational, they found something pleasant to say. That was love. That over here wasn't love.

That wasn’t humanity. So centering a child's humanity, you know, they're not even fully developed. Their brain isn't, and we put so much pressure on them, we don't even give them the benefit of the doubt. We just punish them severely, that we wouldn't even want people to do to us as adults. Where’s the humanity and love with that? Those words come hand in hand. And if you don't have it in you any at all or anymore, then go do something else.

Dr. Val: Right,

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: ‘Cause you don't love your job.

Dr. Val: Right.

Andrew: Right. That shift in language feels really powerful. I mean, we've talked about deficit language before, but I feel like you have such a clear way of articulating this. You wrote, “Do we have 17% reading proficiency of Black children, or do we have an educational system and literacy curriculum that responds to only 17% of Black children? Which one needs the remediation?”

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yes. And do we have 15% of love? You see what I'm saying?

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: See as Stevie Wonder said, “Love's in need of love today.”

Dr. Val: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It is the answer to everything.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I love love. I love telling people I love them. I, my husband laughs at me 'cause he says, I'll tell complete strangers. I love them like the waitress. Love you at the, when we leave, don't know why I do it. So I'm glad it's showing up more in the podcast.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Because it shows that we are normalizing it.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: I told my graduate students, my PhD students, I love them. And somebody like, looked like this because they had never heard a professor tell them that before.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: So we are disrupting these spaces. We are disrupting language. We are disrupting norms, and we're making our agendas different. Our meetings different.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Our PhD programs different.

Dr. Val: That's right. I'm, I'm looking at Andrew because I have told you I love, loved you before, and you'd be like, crickets. I'll be like, love you, bye. [all start laughing]

Andrew: What? That's not true.

Dr. Val: That is absolutely true. The first time I told you I loved you, you froze.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Well, well, but you know, but that's that conditioning sis.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: We're all unlearning, right?

Dr. Val: Yeah. Yeah. Um, you brought up how your love and care for education, how you felt it in your body.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Can you talk a little bit about when people are unaligned, how it might feel in their body so they can start to recognize that, and make maybe different choices?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Well, I think of times where I feel nervous, afraid, unsure of myself. Not confident. That's probably what they feel in their body.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: All growth happens in discomfort. You come out of it, you actually come away from it higher, possibly better, more elevated, stronger, wiser, all the things. So you have to embrace it. You have to maybe go through a form of therapy. You have to start to develop yourself, learn yourself, learn how to grow from it so you can come up higher. But the beauty of all of it is that that's where you can grow.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: We don't really grow, in like just the best, easiest conditions.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: But when you ask most humans, where did your progress and growth occur the most? They're gonna name some struggle.

Andrew: Right. It's like grapes for wine, right? Like the, the harder the environment is, the better the wine tastes. Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: It goes back to gardening…

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …and to the plants, the secret life of plants. So give yourself grace.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Open up your heart. It's okay. You may have been conditioned to be racist. You may have been conditioned to be homophobic. You may have been conditioned not to say, I love you back all so quickly because the world has made us that way. It's not your fault. It was in the cartoons, it was in…

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: …the books. You do not have to feel guilty or bad for something you didn't do. Now if you did something harmful, you should, that's a good trait to feel bad when you did something harmful. If you don't feel anything, that's the problem.

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: There are a lot of leaders doing harm, feel nothing 'cause they don't see those children as human and they don't love them. So you see how all this comes…

Dr. Val: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: … as a circle and it comes back around.

(30:07) Andrew: I'm not a teacher. It feels easy to see to me that these five pursuits are really important to actually teach kids the things that matter that we want them to come out of education with. Can you help us make the leap to parenting, raising kids outside of the traditional school setting? How do these pursuits show up and how do they enrich our parenting and caregiving approaches?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: The pursuits are everywhere. And sometimes educators, they play a game with me. They just name something in the world, and they say, Gholdy connect the pursuits to it, toothpaste. And, I do it every time. And one, because I've sat with them, I've loved them for so long, and I think about them. I write curriculum almost every day. I write lesson plans almost every day. But they're everywhere. Like my daughter, she loves splashing in the pool, being in the water, and I said, girl, you need to learn how to swim.

Dr. Val: Right, right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You cannot love going to the pool this much without knowing how to swim.

Dr. Val: Correct.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Alright. So, we went through the five pursuits of swimming. When we started swim class I said, how are you feeling? Are you nervous? This is identity.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: She really wanted to start these classes. Why is swimming important to you? Why do you like to be in the water? These are just questions I asked her on the way. All identity. After the class I said, what skills did you learn today? So she said, breathing. How to go underwater. Swimming requires skills. Right?

Dr. Val: Yep.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Intellect and knowledge is, how did swimming become like a popular hobby? How is this a sport? You can talk about how some pools were segregated. What's the history of swimming pools and leisure, outdoor amusement parks? I mean, go there. Um for criticality, there’s criticality in everything.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You know, she noticed right away that the teacher was, I don’t know, 16, which was just a couple years older than her. And she said, should she be teaching this class? I said, does she know how to swim? [all start laughing] You know, she looks at representation, diversity, who's here, who's not? How much time the teacher spends one-on-one.

Andrew: Mmmmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You know, all of that is criticality. Does she feel safe?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Is it inclusive? All of that is criticality. And then joy. Okay. How did it make you feel? Do you have that same wonderment and joyful experience now that you're learning the skill of it?

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: And then after the, after each class, I said, what did you learn about yourself today? Going back to identity. So we are engaged in these kind of conversations all the time. It doesn't matter what it is. Parents, once they get the language down and know the meaning, they don't have to say, tell me about your criticality today.

Andrew: Right,

[Val laughs]

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: But they can say. Did you notice anything that was fair and unfair?

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: You know, so I have questions in Unearthing Joy that are just check-in questions for parents and teachers. What did you learn about yourself? Did you learn about how to make the world a better place? Did you learn anything about humanity and difference and how we embrace one another? Did you laugh today? Did you experience wonder? So you can ask your child general questions, but then you can also attach it to swimming or a type of fruit or something at the grocery store. A tree, you know, you can look outside. There's, the five pursuits are in that tree.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Help, help us dream a little bit of what could be possible. It's sometimes hard to find hope in dark times, but, you know, a world in which we fully embrace these five pursuits, we have an education system, but even beyond that, just sort of broadly as a society, what does that world look like?

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: This is where the ancestors come in. This is where we are for each other, like our community, our village today, we have to remind each other of the hope. I, like so many people, I feel hopeless sometimes, and. I'm like, wow, we made all this progress and now we're going back. But history, we've done this before. I always remind others, I remind myself, do the things that you know feel good and are good for humanity.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Love will win. Hope will win. So when you need to take a nap or rest, rest your body. When you need to work, advocate, engage in activism, do it. When you need to escape and read about how plants are out here lying on each other. [all start laughing] But this is where we need each other more than ever. We have to say, okay, it will get better. Think about what the ancestors came through. They, they came through it too, and keep doing the work.

I remember somebody, I was interviewed the day after the election. By PBS and I'm like, why would I set that up, number one, not knowing. Not knowing for sure.

Dr. Val: Right. Correct.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Just, you know, she had all these beautiful questions about libraries and literary societies and the ancestors. And she met with me and she said, well now I wanna ask you about Trump and how your work is gonna be impacted. And I'm still like feeling a lot of feelings. And she asked me about my research and I went into the beauty and the hope of the ancestors and she did not ask me anything else.

And I asked her, I said, what happened to your list of questions? She said, you know what? Your responses were so beautiful.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: We could not let anything else come in. That's what she said. So I use that as what I should do in life. Allow your presence, your words, to be so beautiful and breathtaking that you don't allow anything else to come in while you're still doing the fight.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Yep. Yep.

Andrew: That's beautiful. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for all of your work.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Thank you for having me.

Andrew: Bringing us a little joy. This has been beautiful.

Dr. Val: This has been. Thank you.

Dr. Gholdy Muhammad: Thank you.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

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Andrew: So, Val, what'd you think?

Dr. Val: What I was thinking at the end of that episode is the emphasis on joy. And I was trying to recall what brought me joy today. And so, I was in a meeting, a virtual meeting and I found joy in being goofy in the chat box. There's lots of opportunities to take ourselves seriously. And they needed smiling faces in the group. And so I played my role, you know, as the smiling face and the encouragers of smiles. So I'm gonna ask you what, what little tiny thing brought you joy today?

Andrew: Yeah, I, I love that. It's like the power of like a gratitude journal.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Taking a moment just to think about moments of joy. But I was working on a project earlier and I finished and I needed to leave to pick up a kid from school, like in seven minutes. I was like, well, I'm not gonna start something new. And so I just sat on the back patio in the sun and put my feet up and didn't do anything else. I didn't listen to anything. I didn't read anything. I just sat outside for five minutes and it was lovely.

Dr. Val: Nice.

Andrew: Think I’m gonna try to do that more.

Dr. Val: Nice and simple. Right. That's the power of recognizing these, these moments of joy and creating these moments of joy for ourselves and for the people in our lives. And that was something that I really took away from the episode. You know, joy and love are ideas and actions that you have to be intentional about creating and then seeing. I just started gardening a little bit. It's a, you know, just a little garden. And so I was able to understand some of these analogies in terms of like cultivating.

Andrew: Yeah, one thing I, I appreciate. so much about the framing. You know, she says like, these five pursuits, she just kind of collected them, put them into buckets, but they weren't her ideas. These are things that she found from, you know, looking at the literary societies of the 1820’s…

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: …of looking at, you know, pursuits for education, for literacy over many, many, many, many years. And I think the idea that genius is everywhere is so much at the heart of her work, and that is that we don't give people genius. We don't just sit around and wait for a particular genius to show up, but everyone has genius and the job of education, but I would also argue the job of raising kids, the job of society is to find ways to cultivate the genius that exists in everybody. To unearth the joy that is our natural state, that people are naturally genius and naturally joyful, and if we can build systems and structures and find ways in our daily lives to unearth those things, to cultivate them, that they will come to the surface naturally, and what we really need to do is get out of their way a little bit and create the space for them to exist. Not, you know, either wait around for them to show up or try to instill them into somebody.

Dr. Val: That's right. What you just described really connects to what I actually love about. Education. Right? And so as an educator you get to meet these wonderful people and through your relationship building and teaching 'em some things, you get to see them bloom in ways that you yourself couldn't create, but you had to believe it was there in them, right?

And, and that's what I love about education is that, when you love your students, when you see in them their genius, there's so much possibility. Right. How about you? What do you love about education?

Andrew: Yeah. I've never been in front of a classroom. But I do see the role that education plays in unearthing the genius, and the joy in my kids when they come home. And, you know, my oldest is like, oh my, we did this thing in math today. And like, I couldn't get it. I couldn't. And all of a sudden, like, all the pieces came together, it was so exciting.

She's got a teacher who clearly knows what he's doing and is able to find this little bit of genius around math in her and unearth it and, you know, we talk a lot about how valuable teachers are, but how could you ever put a price tag on that? Like to spark joy in my kids, to unearth some genius that they have about some topic that they didn't know they were genius about, that they didn't know they could find joy in, that gets them excited about learning something new. Like, that's why teaching is such a magical profession, I think when it's done well and why it should be supported.

Dr. Val: That's right. You mentioned about your daughter, and I know a little bit about your young people. I know that they are also involved in extracurricular activities. Right. And so they have an opportunity to learn in non-traditional classroom spaces and have joy that way. And I, and that makes me think about what she mentioned about these third spaces, these community spaces…

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: …that have a power and responsibility to help fill in these gaps and how, you know, if we want, if we wanna get into it, you know how black folks, and I'm sure other marginalized communities had created systems of that support already, um, because they recognized they weren't going to get all they need from formal educational systems.

Andrew: Yeah, the power and the responsibility. I really appreciate you. She was like, if you are aware that there are kids, you have a responsibility here. It is not just the responsibility of parents and teachers and school administrators but like as a community, we have a responsibility to our kids.

And that responsibility means that we need to take seriously these five pursuits. I thought it was really powerful that she brought up the idea that like the Black community has been filling in the gaps. Everybody feels that inclination to support. Obviously, you know, we send our kids off to school. They're there for a good chunk of the day. I don't think anybody thinks that that's the entirety of what we want our kids to learn, but when I think about predominantly White spaces, the ways that that kind of supplementing shows up, the ways that, that filling in of whatever gaps we perceive shows up, feels like it's so often tied to resources. Feels like it's so often tied to material things. It's donating money to the PTA, it's bringing the firetruck into the school because you've got a friend who can do that. It's about these kind of, material investments in, maybe the skills pursuit of these five pursuits, but it's not like coming together as a community engaged in this project. It's like, here's what I'm bringing to help hopefully supplement my kid. And it doesn't feel like that's the same way it shows up in other communities.

Dr. Val: I have one example from when my son went to daycare. We, uh, learned about this daycare from our neighbor. It was a home-based daycare, Black run, been in the community for many years. And so we are like, great, this is great. Someone in the community. A neighbor even, where our child will be safe and loved and we're feeling good about that. And so he started his schooling there.

We had some other friends though who told us about a different daycare. And it was closer to where I was teaching in a predominantly White neighborhood and we were like, well, we're happy with our daycare. And they said, you know, you should come check this one out. And so one of the days that they had that just really impressed me was, uh, transportation day.

At my son's Black daycare, they talked about transportation and, you know, they would, you know, see images and read stories about it. At this daycare transportation day was live and in color. The parents pulled together their resources to have every single type of transportation you could imagine. Whether it was an RV, a boat, um, and even one parent, was a pilot and was able to fly like a two-seater plane over the school so that the kids could see the plane. And I really struggled with that. Right. Because when I think about the five pursuits, my child at the Black daycare could get all of them. And it was something that I knew he was safe and loved and his identity would be intact and that he would learn the skills that he needed and have joy. Right? I knew, I knew that was possible and yet at this other daycare, I saw other things that were, were possible. And it's a real, it's a real place of tension that I wanna name.

The experience of transportation day, at the predominantly White daycare. Like invaluable. Right? How great is it for your kid in preschool to like be able to, to go sit on a boat that just yeah. Right? Yeah.

Andrew: Sit in an RV, sit in a boat. Yeah.

Dr. Val: And the experience that he was having at the Black daycare was so important to me for his future. And they were both important for his future, right? And so I felt equipped as a Black woman to be able to supplement or to engage with him on some pursuits at home, right? Because I had to make a decision.

The identity pursuit, because I know I come from a strong family of educators, and historically I know, like who my community is and whose I am.

Andrew: Who you are and whose you are.

Dr. Val: That's right. I felt strong there. Criticality, I knew I could do that, right? Like I would enjoy doing that. Joy, of course, we will make sure these are joyful experiences. Intellectualism around things that I think matter that are value based. Like, I got you. Like we can do this together.

But when it came to the resourced opportunities for skill development, that's when I was like. I don't want him to miss out. Right?

And so I understand the perceived tension of privileged White families looking at an under-resourced Black school versus the one with the 17 different types of transportation day for the two year olds, like, I get it. And because our schools are so deeply segregated, it's hard to find one that has all of it. And if White folks are missing their own identity pursuits, their own joy pursuits, then I think what they're gonna try to make up for it with is those resources. To make sure your kid has the best of all the other stuff.

Andrew: But you didn't, you didn't keep making that choice.

Dr. Val: No. We changed that choice by second grade because I wanted my children to grow up in diverse learning environments, to meet kids who were not like them, who were like them, to be exposed to different cultures like that, that became the resource that I did not want them to miss out on.

And I felt better equipped to fill in the other gaps. Right? So we had gotten to a place in middle–class hood where I could have different experiences, expose my kids to different things. Right. We could pay for our summer camp.

Andrew: The individual places where we supplement, you were able to then access in a different way. That put the priority back on the kind of community. What is the community pouring in both, you know, the school community, but then also your community outside of that, and what are the places where you need, again, like your kid to feel whole?

Dr. Val: Yeah. I, I don't know, White folks. Y'all got that?

Andrew: I think one of the things that the five pursuits highlights to me, I think is that there is so much more to education than just the skills pursuit. You know, the skills are what we measure when we think about, you know, what is the school doing, those are the things that are probably the most, like receptive to having resources poured into them to augment skills. Like that's the place where we think about education.

So when we start to feel like, oh, there's something my kid's not getting, I think it's easy to turn to that place and say, okay, I'm gonna put more resources and I'm gonna do more tutoring. I'm gonna turn my resources to bear on that skills problem. And I think that often ignores these other pieces that are equally important and in some ways even more important for kids who have resources poured into them from the time they're little, like the things that you can't get with just more resources are these other pieces about who you are, whose you are, your identity, what community do you do you belong to? You know, what is your sense of criticality around fairness in the world? Where are you finding joy? These things are, are things I think are often missing when we just focus our resources on the kind of skills pursuit in an individual way, rather than, you know, turning to our community and saying, okay, like, I feel like there's something missing here. I'm gonna turn to my whole community and say, are you also missing this? Or how do we as a community come together to, to fill in all these gaps to make our kids the well-rounded whole kids that we want them to be, rather than just the, you know, exceptionally good at math kids, or really good at taking standardized test kids.

Dr. Val: Yeah. Tough question. Is there another pursuit that has equal value to skills for White folks?

Andrew: Uh, I mean in, in broad gross generalizations, I think that that is less common.

Dr. Val: Okay.

Andrew: You know, skills is the things that we think at least, it's not actually even true, but it's the thing we think is what's gonna get our kids the best job that's gonna set them up to have the best career that's gonna set them up to buy the nicest house, to get their kids into the best college, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We think that that's all about skills. I mean, of course, like the number one reason people get fired is for lack of ability to get along not for skills.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm. Right. That emotional intelligence.

Andrew: The other pursuits are actually much more important. But, I do think that there is a way in which the system that White folks have built that has in general, worked for White folks puts an emphasis on skills that I think if the system has never felt like it really worked for you, it's not surprising to me that other communities have found ways to, to tap into these other skills in different ways that feel like nurturing and supporting. Because I think the system is set up to say, get more skills, which gets you more money, which is like winning the game.

Dr. Val: I started thinking about the parents who were paying for athletic scholarships. I thought about the ways in which, um, the wealthy of us in our current community, that the relationship they have with wealth over the relationship they have with like community, you know. And so there's a lot there I think to unpack with the pursuits and what they mean and where we should place them in terms of value and how we show up for our communities. And if we're just showing up for one community versus our entire community. Right?

Andrew: Or ourselves versus the collective.

Dr. Val: Right, and so I go back to having a clear understanding of who I am and whose I am…

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: …and who my ancestors are.

Andrew: Yeah, ancestors have come up a, a few times on the podcast as well, and it's something I definitely have grappled with is, you know, like, what is my relationship to my ancestors?

And I always thought about that in terms of, the importance of trying to find white ancestors, who I can look up to. You know, Michelle Adams talked about we need heroes. Like there are plenty of White ancestors who have done bad things, and like Dr. Mohammad said, like there are some ancestors who you just don't want to elevate their voice. You don't wanna identify with them.

And I've thought a lot about, you know, the ways that that race is designed to separate us from each other. It's socially constructed as a, as a tool to divide us. Right? And I've thought a lot about that here and now, but had not actually thought about the ways that that divides us from our ancestral past. Like there is no reason that I cannot

Dr. Val: Mm.

Andrew: feel an emotional ancestral connection to Harriet Tubman. There is no reason I cannot feel an emotional, ancestral connection to Martin Luther King Jr.

In, in the same way that there are other folks who I don't want to identify with. Race is a socially constructed barrier between that in the past, just the way it is today.

Dr. Val: Hmm. Welcome to the world of the play cousin.

Andrew: That's right. Yeah. [Laughter]

Dr. Val: Black folks have been claiming ancestors for a long time. And, and I hadn't thought about it that way as intentionally as you just shared, but for sure there are folks, throughout history, and across racial difference, where I'm like, that's my person right there. Right? That's who I'm a descendant of.

And even contemporary folks like Lin Manuel Miranda, my cousin, right? Most people last name Brown, come on over, you know? [laughter]

And identity for me, the “whose I am” is rooted in community. And so when I think about like how we can have the best school. It's not the best school for my one kid.And, I don't know how you get that without intentionality, right?

We know of folks who might have to have a chosen family, Right? That's not a, that's not a foreign idea. You do that with your friend circle, right? Right. You choose. And so you get to choose.

Andrew: Right, we are constantly choosing whose voice we want to elevate and whose voice we don't, who we want to identify with. Do you want, like Dr. Muhammad said, do you want to identify as a helper? Do you wanna identify as someone who is, who is harmful and, yeah, I mean, I just had this very like, palpable sense of relief…

Dr. Val: I saw it in your face.

Andrew: at this idea that anybody can be an ancestor.

And you know, the DNA isn't, is not gonna like call me out on it. Like, genetic differences are as, as stark between people of the same race, as between different races. There is no reason that I cannot feel a connection to anybody from the past as an ancestor who I think is worthy of elevating, who I think is worthy of telling a story that is worth me being in conversation with, who has something to teach me that I can, I can take and grow from. And plenty of people who are not worthy of that, that are not, that I'm not gonna elevate their voices.

Yeah, there's a sense of, of relief in that.

Dr. Val: Good. I'm thankful for, for another episode with you

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: to, to deepen my thinking and to stretch it in ways that I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about. So, thank you.

Andrew: That was great. Very grateful for Dr. Mohammad coming on, for her books. I know that there are a number of teachers who have been influenced . . .

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: to engage in these five pursuits in their classrooms, which I think like every kid who gets exposed to that is better for it. And so she has just like created so many positive ripples in the world.

But also when I think about my own conversations with my own kids, my own parenting, the way I think about what's important in community and when I'm showing up at a parent teacher conference or whatever, and thinking about these pursuits has really enriched my own life as well. So super grateful for her and for her coming on the show.

Dr. Val: Absolutely. And if you are a fan, we got a little sneak peek about what's coming from Dr. Gholdy Mohammad. So keep an eye out for any resources that she continues to share with the world, as she's serious about education and helping us cultivate genius and joy.

Andrew: Absolutely

Dr. Val: Speaking of resources, we need some. All right. So if you go to integratedschools.org, there is a red button that says Donate, hit that button. We are appreciative of whatever you can donate to help keep this podcast going.

Andrew: You can also join us on Patreon, patreon.com/integratedschools, and let us know what you thought. How are you thinking about these five pursuits showing up in your life?

All of our listeners. have some responsibility to kids because you are all familiar with the fact that there are kids. And so, how are you taking these five pursuits and bringing them into your interactions with kids, bringing them into your life? We want to hear about it. Speakpipe.com/integratedschools. Send us a voice memo or just email us podcast@integratedschools.org. We want to hear from you.

Dr. Val: That's right. And you might be talking about these ideas in our very own literary society. So keep that up too, right? Uh, join the book clubs, get engaged, connect with your local community or the national community. Right now, uh, connection and community is more important than ever. And we need to make sure we're intentional about that

Andrew: Absolutely Val, it is an honor for me as always to be in this with you as I try to know better. and do better, and I love you.

Dr. Val: No you didn't. No, you didn't. I love you, too. Until next time.

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