Human Restoration Project

"Appalachia has a history and culture worth preserving, and a future worth pursuing," reads The Big Idea on AFP's homepage. The Appalachian Futurism Project's mission is to leverage educational, cultural, and economic resources to develop an ecosystem across the region where young people are part of imagining and co-designing the Appalachia of the future. And joining me to talk about are two of the people doing this work, Dustin Hensley and Hannah Askew of the Appalachian Futurism Project, based out of Elizabethton High School in Elizabethton, Tennessee. Appalachianfuturismproject.org [https://www.appalachianfuturismproject.org/] AFP on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61593192997464] AFP on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/appalachianfuturismproject/]

In case you're not familiar at all with the Katamari video game series. As the player, you navigate this ball that starts off small at first until everything in the environment sticks to you, and by the end of a level you have entire buildings, trees, cars, and all manner of flora and fauna stuck to you.  I have the sense that my guest today is a human katamari. Every experience and interaction sticks, and she's made it the mission of her life to make sense of it all. Dr. Jane Shore is an author, artist, former education researcher, co-founder of Revolution School, and founder of School of Thought. But before any of those titles, Jane is first and foremost a meaning-maker, and her most recent book, People Based Learning: The Future of Learning is Human, braids together decades of experience, conversations, models, and research to bear on a new way of organizing learning and schooling: "People-Based Learning is all about the interplay between connecting, reflecting, and affecting, a dynamic spiral or open-end loop that helps us engage meaningfully with new people, ideas, and experiences," she writes, "At its core, this approach encourages both exploration and introspection, ultimately leading to deeper understanding, deeper personal meaning, deeper memory, and collective growth." peoplebasedlearning.com [http://peoplebasedlearning.com/] People Based Learning [https://www.routledge.com/People-Based-Learning-The-Future-of-Learning-is-Human/Shore/p/book/9781041089858] by Jane Shore

At some point every exasperated teacher has thrown up their hands and repeated some version of "these kids just aren't motivated." Yet schools respond to unmotivated kids with the same toolkit every single time — carrots and sticks, points and prizes, lunch detentions, indoor recess, and on and on. Viewed through the lens of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, we start to see how the daily experience of school conspires to frustrate and thwart almost everything we understand about motivation. And when that results in disengagement, we tend to blame the student instead of the environment. However, when these needs are met, achievement and well-being improves, and behavioral and emotional disengagement decreases. And it's not just for students, teachers whose needs for autonomy are supported report greater self-efficacy, job satisfaction, vitality, and less exhaustion. It seems like a no-brainer: if you want your students to do better, feel better, and be more engaged, and if you want to be less exhausted, you'll want to hear what my guest today has to say about self-determination theory and agentic engagement. Dr. Erika Patall is an award-winning researcher and Professor of Education and Psychology and Associate Dean of Research in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Her areas of expertise include the nature and determinants and development of motivation, education practices that support motivation and achievement, and research synthesis methods. I had the privilege of attending a workshop led by Dr. Patall at the Student Power Summit this past spring on Student Motivation and Engagement in Culturally Diverse Classrooms, and I immediately knew we would need to bring that conversation to our listeners. Dr. Erika Patall @ USC [https://rossier.usc.edu/faculty-research/directory/erika-patall/]

On Friday, July 31st, we hosted Dr. Ginie Servant-Miklos for a Q&A about her book Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World As We Know It [https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350400528]. This was the conclusion of our Pedagogies of Collapse book club, where we met biweekly to discuss the book and its implication for education. Here is the full unedited Q&A. I wanted to give you a heads up that this conversation gets heavy pretty quickly, includes explicit language, and remind you that HRP is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3), and the views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute an endorsement.

We all grew up playing games — I fondly remember playing Go Fish with my grandma and her next door neighbor, as a 90s kid who grew up with an NES, it felt like every console generation was a leap forward in graphics and game quality, and, regardless of who you're cheering for, tomorrow's World Cup final  will be watched by an estimated 2 billion people. But even though at some point many of us stop playing games—even if we don't stop paying attention to them—we hold onto the experiences, the feelings, and the lessons: what they taught us about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. And it's because games play an important role in human development and tell us so much about societies and cultures at large, the relationship between play, games, and learning has always been a focus of our work. It's also been the lifelong interest of my guest today, game designer, artist, author, and researcher, Dr. Mary Flanagan. Mary Flanagan is the founder of Tiltfactor game studio, whose tabletop and digital games intentionally tackle a number of social issues. The tagline on the Tiltfactor homepage reads "Game design for social change" with the challenge, "Can you make a more just and equitable world with games? At Tiltfactor, we believe we can." Mary has also authored several incredible books, including the pivotal Critical Play about radical game design, and coauthored, Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. Given Mary Flanagan's unique and consequential focus, I wanted to sit down with her to see what we can learn at the intersection of play and critical pedagogy. Playing Oppression : The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games [https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047913/playing-oppression/] Critical Play: Radical Game Design [https://maryflanagan.com/writing/critical-play/] Critical.play [https://www.instagram.com/critical.play/?hl=en] on Instagram http://tiltfactor.org/ https://resonym.com/