Breaking Silos

In this episode, Asao and Shane talk with Henry A. Giroux, who holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, about his essay, “Youth and Memories of Hope in the Age of Disposability: Connecting the Personal and the Political.” Their conversation focuses on personal, political, and historical elements shaping identities, empowering young people, corporate power and greed, bearing witness, and more just and sustainable educational futures.

In this episode, Asao and Shane talk with Frank B. Wilderson III, Chancellor’s Professor at UC Irvine where he teaches in the African American Studies Department and the Culture & Theory Doctoral Program, about his book, Afropessimism. Their conversation focuses on Blackness as a lens of interpretation, theories of liberation, Black suffering, violence, and teaching writing.

In this episode, Asao and Shane talk with Dr. Michael Russell, Professor in the Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College, about his book, Systemic Racism and Educational Measurement: Confronting Injustice in Testing, Assessment, and Beyond. Their conversation focuses on Foucault’s “apparatus of oppression,” Feagin’s “white racial frame,” assessment design, teaching biases, and antiracist projects.

In this episode, Asao and Shane talk with Dr. Jennifer Randall, Dunn Family Endowed Professor of Psychometrics and Test Development at the University of Michigan, about her article, ""Color-Neutral" is Not a Thing: Redefining Construct Definition and Representation Through a Justice-Oriented Critical Antiracist Lens." Their conversation focuses on culturally and socially situated assessment practices, antiracist frameworks for assessment design, decentering whiteness, rubrics, and myths about language and writing.

Breaking Silos is a podcast that engages in deep discussions about guests’ scholarship and the ways that scholarship may help teach or assess language and communication in college classrooms. Breaking Silos is hosted by Asao B. Inoue and Shane Wood. Our guests come from a wide range of disciplines and research areas, many not directly about the teaching of writing. The hope is to engage in conversations that break the academic and teaching silos we often work in in the academy.