Dancing on Desks
37 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 25 ratingsDancing on Desks asks educators what would happen if we were teaching, learning, and living in ways that engage justice-full, liberatory, and abolitionist teaching and learning practices in our schools and beyond. The stories, experiences, and voices of educators and students, school staff and caregivers are centered. Your hosts are monét and Erin. Let's get free, y'all.
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Episodes
Season 3, Episode 7, Pt. 1 | We Remember Each Other
June 14, 2024 16:00 - 1 hour - 67.4 MBThis is the first of our two-part finale to our Season of Pleasure, a season throughout which we have sought to understand our relationship with pleasure while simultaneously witnessing and confronting genocide across our world. With poet and activist June Jordan’s words, “What shall we do, we who did not die?” in our minds and spirits, we hear from Zeina and Fatma, two mothers living in London who organize with Parents for Palestine, a group of parents who organize marches, actions, and tea...
Season 3, Episode 6 | Tap Into Tenderness
May 03, 2024 17:00 - 58 minutes - 54.3 MBWhat pleasure becomes possible when we commune with nature, our bodies, and each other? Educator, activist and organizer, researcher, writer, scholar, Zumba dancer, a very reluctant high school sax player and first-chair, only chair vibraphonist shea wesley martin joins us in this episode where they think with us about all things community. shea contemplates how we story community, learn and write in community, and how we find pleasure in community. Also, they have another special educator...
Lineages of Deviant Caretaking
March 08, 2024 18:23 - 1 hour - 66.2 MBWe call this episode, lovingly, the auntie auntie auntie episode (or the niece niece nibling episode) shouted at the top of our lungs. We scream their names in the key of care, of reclaiming our bodies, lives, and pleasure(s) for ourselves (and our time). In this episode we talk with Anna Almore and Erica or ET, two friends and educators, about their moments of what Anna calls deviant caretaking, the act of choosing pleasure, accountability to one’s deepest self over what work as teachers, t...
Sesason 3, Episode 5 | Lineages of Deviant Caretaking
March 08, 2024 18:23 - 1 hour - 66.2 MBWe call this episode, lovingly, the auntie auntie auntie episode (or the niece niece nibling episode) shouted at the top of our lungs. We scream their names in the key of care, of reclaiming our bodies, lives, and pleasure(s) for ourselves (and our time). In this episode we talk with Anna Almore and Erica or ET, two friends and educators, about their moments of what Anna calls deviant caretaking, the act of choosing pleasure, accountability to one’s deepest self over what work as teachers, t...
Season 3, Episode 4 Bonus Track | A Boycott. A Refusal. A Commitment.
February 27, 2024 17:24 - 9 minutes - 9.23 MBIn a follow-up to our fourth episode, “Gimme My High School Experience,” we share about our process and the way we make decisions about what we include--and what we don’t--when we’re creating our podcast. We’re boycotting companies that are supporting the US-backed genocide in Palestine by Israel. We share ways that you can join us in calling for a free Palestine and we close with a poem by the indomitable Black feminist poet, writer, and scholar-activist June Jordan. Call U.S. Elected Off...
Season 3, Episode 4: Gimme My High School Experience
February 02, 2024 17:50 - 55 minutes - 51.8 MBWe continue our Season of Pleasure with this conversation with high school students Aleya, Kyree and their college instructors Beylul and Jill, who learn and teach at the Early College Academy Program with Coolidge High School and Trinity University in Washington, D.C. They share about the abundant pleasure that emerges when we learn in community, seek to see ourselves and each other in our teaching, and root ourselves in education as the practice of freedom. If pleasure can happen in the cl...
Season 3, Episode 4 | Gimme My High School Experience
February 02, 2024 17:50 - 55 minutes - 51.8 MBWe continue our Season of Pleasure with this conversation with high school students Aleya, Kyree and their college instructors Beylul and Jill, who learn and teach at the Early College Academy Program with Coolidge High School and Trinity University in Washington, D.C. They share about the abundant pleasure that emerges when we learn in community, seek to see ourselves and each other in our teaching, and root ourselves in education as the practice of freedom. If pleasure can happen in the cl...
Season 3, Episode 3 | Habits of Everyday Liberation
December 12, 2023 05:05 - 42 minutes - 39.6 MBOur third episode in our season of pleasure is a conversation between elementary educators and parents, Cesarina Santana Pierre and Tiffany Green. Cesarina and Tiffany share about the learning and unlearning they’ve engaged in as educators, parents, and people—moving from results-oriented classrooms to those that center rest and relationality. Their relationship with pleasure has been a journey of disrupting their relationship with productivity, a relationship that they inherited from their ...
Season 3, Episode 3: Habits of Everyday Liberation
December 12, 2023 05:05 - 42 minutes - 39.6 MBOur third episode in our season of pleasure is a conversation between elementary educators and parents, Cesarina Santana Pierre and Tiffany Green. Cesarina and Tiffany share about the learning and unlearning they’ve engaged in as educators, parents, and people—moving from results-oriented classrooms to those that center rest and relationality. Their relationship with pleasure has been a journey of disrupting their relationship with productivity, a relationship that they inherited from their ...
Season 3, Episode 3: Habits of Everday Liberation
December 08, 2023 18:00 - 42 minutes - 39.6 MBOur third episode in our season of pleasure is a conversation between elementary educators and parents, Cesarina Santana Pierre and Tiffany Green. Cesarina and Tiffany share about the learning and unlearning they’ve engaged in as educators, parents, and people—moving from results-oriented classrooms to those that center rest and relationality. Their relationship with pleasure has been a journey of disrupting their relationship with productivity, a relationship that they inherited from their ...
Bonus Track: Meditation for Educators with Brittney Elyse
November 20, 2023 21:08 - 18 minutes - 16.7 MBFind a soft place to land and meditate with Brittney Elyse. She’s prepared a special meditation for you and encourages us all to make space for rest and the pleasure of the pause. Meditation by Brittney Elyse, @brittneyelyseyoga MUSIC “Wait For You” prod. by Yogic Beats “Tribulations” prod. by Yogic Beats “Alone” prod. by Rémdolla “D'angelo X Lauren Hill Type Beat 2023 Free” prod. by Regg13 “Mercy” prod. by Yogic Beats “Nectarine” Prod By Yogic Beats
Season 3, Episode 2: Wholeness is No Trifling Matter
November 03, 2023 17:15 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBThis episode takes its name from the first pages of Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters, where healer Minnie Ransom tells activist Velma Henry, “wholeness is no trifling matter.” We join mama, yoga instructor, lover, and Kindergarten teacher Brittney Elyse to talk about what it means to find pleasure in what Bambara calls “the weight of wellness,” when she leaves and then returns as her full(er) self to teaching. Brittney shares her migration story from North Carolina to Massachusetts ...
Season 3, Episode 2 | Wholeness is No Trifling Matter
November 03, 2023 17:15 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBThis episode takes its name from the first pages of Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters, where healer Minnie Ransom tells activist Velma Henry, “wholeness is no trifling matter.” We join mama, yoga instructor, lover, and Kindergarten teacher Brittney Elyse to talk about what it means to find pleasure in what Bambara calls “the weight of wellness,” when she leaves and then returns as her full(er) self to teaching. Brittney shares her migration story from North Carolina to Massachusetts ...
Season 3, Episode 1 | Girl, I'm Going to Quit This Job!
September 29, 2023 17:34 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBIn our third season of Dancing on Desks, we are exploring pleasure. We are guided by two questions: How might our personal rest and pleasure practices sustain our collective liberation? And how are our rest and pleasure connected to education as the practice of freedom? In this first episode, Philadelphia-based writer and creator Nicole Young joins us to share her story of what became possible when she quit her job as the executive director of a school in New Orleans to write full-time and t...
Season 3, Episode 1: Girl, I'm Going to Quit This Job!
September 29, 2023 17:34 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBIn our third season of Dancing on Desks, we are exploring pleasure. We are guided by two questions: How might our personal rest and pleasure practices sustain our collective liberation? And how are our rest and pleasure connected to education as the practice of freedom? In this first episode, Philadelphia-based writer and creator Nicole Young joins us to share her story of what became possible when she quit her job as the executive director of a school in New Orleans to write full-time and t...
Season 2, Episode 7 | Until We’re All Free
June 01, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 63.2 MBFor our final episode, we’re joined by prison abolitionists Comrade BIM, from the Vaughn 17, and Fariha and Bee, organizers with DCIWOC, DC Incarcerated Workers Organizing Coalition. BIM is a member of the Vaughn 17, a group of 17 activists charged in the 2017 prison uprising inside the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center. They share about abolitionist ethics of care, showing up as co-conspirators, rupture in community, and moving in accountability. Laquesha Sanders closes our series with he...
Season 2, Episode 6 | Raising an Ancestor
April 07, 2023 17:00 - 1 hour - 75.7 MBBlack queer parents Kristianna and Rose share lessons and blessings from the frontlines of caregiving, discussing parenting as freedom work, unlearning unfreedom, letting their children teach them about liberation, and finding space to seek pleasure. Kweku Abimbola “fabrics the music” in his debut poetry collection Saltwater Demands a Psalm and shares about the beauty of grief. Laquesha Sanders returns to reflect on her mental health journey in part two of our three-part series of her very p...
A giveaway!
March 18, 2023 07:04 - 2 minutes - 2.29 MBWe’re giving away a copy of Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators, which was compiled, edited, and dreamed of by folks in the Education for Liberation Network & Critical Resistance Editorial Collective. And Carla Shalaby, one of the editors and creators and storyteller from our fifth episode of this season, “We Keep Us Safe,” will sign it! Shout out to AK Press for donating a copy of the book. We’re also giving away gorgeous posters from Just Seeds, created by differ...
Season 2, Episode 5 | We Keep Us Safe
March 03, 2023 20:48 - 1 hour - 73.7 MBRead our Retraction & Care Note regarding our removal of the Jenny Sazama reference in the original posting of this episode. LINK In this episode, the second in our series on Undoing Settler Colonialism, we listen with love to Carla Shalaby, author of Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School, a book we discuss often on the podcast. Her current role is one that works with pre-service and inservice teachers in school to ground their work in liberatory teaching and learn...
Season 2, Episode 4 | Every Child Born Full
February 03, 2023 21:54 - 1 hour - 86.8 MBIn this episode, a first in our series on Undoing Settler-Colonialism, we speak with Hi’ilani Shibata and Kiliona, educators at Ka Waihona o ka Na’auao in Nānākuli on the Leeward Coast of O’ahu, Hawai’i. They talk story about their practices of teaching with Indigenous pedagogies, teaching history through multiple perspectives, and learning through story in relationship with the land and each other. Laquesha Sanders shares Part 3 of our student debt series, this time on HBCUs. Capital City P...
Season 2, Episode 3 | Educator Erotic & Fire Ass Refusal
December 02, 2022 18:24 - 1 hour - 67.9 MBAudre Lorde’s “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” shapes our reflections on practicing refusal in community with our colleagues. We speak with Natalia Foreman and Pam Segura of the NYC-based Curriculum Kweens collective, who share stories of disobedience to systems of power and oppression, of loving accountability, and of the fullness felt when, in the words of “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, “we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of ...
Season 2, Episode 2 | Reading Love: Beyond Adult Supremacy
November 04, 2022 17:49 - 51 minutes - 47.8 MBWhat can happen when we invite youth to imagine and create community and learning spaces in their own vision? This summer, Amara and Madison, our inaugural Beyond the Ban youth fellows created Annotation Archives, a Detroit-based pop-up book giveaway and community annotation project. They join monét and Erin to share about their reading lives, the ways they find affirmation in books, their dreams for liberated reading in schools, and their learnings from their summer of creating the Annotati...
Move, Get Out the Way!
September 30, 2022 17:28 - 1 hour - 65 MBAfter a summer of walking with our dogs, listening to the leadership of youth, and saying yes to ourselves, we're back with Season 2 of Dancing on Desks! The season begins with a conversation with Detroit youth organizers Hafiza Khalique, Brittyn Benjamin-Kelley, and adult organizer Julia Cueno. We also chat with Brooklyn elementary school teacher Emily Stutts and three of her former students—Kaide, Greyson, and Kyndle—about their bike to school day. We close with LaQuesha Sanders, a lawyer ...
Season 2, Episode 1 | Move, Get Out the Way!
September 30, 2022 17:28 - 1 hour - 65 MBAfter a summer of walking with our dogs, listening to the leadership of youth, and saying yes to ourselves, we're back with Season 2 of Dancing on Desks! The season begins with a conversation with Detroit youth organizers Hafiza Khalique, Brittyn Benjamin-Kelley, and adult organizer Julia Cueno. We also chat with Brooklyn elementary school teacher Emily Stutts and three of her former students—Kaide, Greyson, and Kyndle—about their bike to school day. We close with LaQuesha Sanders, a lawyer ...
What kind of Dancing on Desks are you doing in Season 2?
September 25, 2022 18:43 - 1 minute - 1.27 MBSeason 2 of Dancing on Desks begins with a conversation with youth organizers in Detroit, the origin story of student debt, and stories of biking to school. Episode 1 drops Friday, September 30 at 1:00 p.m. ET. Find a desk to dance on with us then! Music: “Funky Joint,” Royalty Free Music Produced by Danya Vodovoz Original Theme Music by Mara Johnson, Elliott Wilkes, monét cooper
Episode 9 | Our Love Letter to Education
June 10, 2022 17:07 - 1 hour - 63.4 MBEpisode Description As educators and young folks reflect and engage in end-of-school rituals, we’re closing Season One of Dancing on Desks with our Love Letter to Education. We hear from storytellers, poets, students, and educators who joined us this season to check back and hear about their summer dreams. We have collective dreams of reading books, taking naps, swimming in lakes, oceans, and pools, gardening, swimming, hugging our families and friends, and resting. Erin and monét share the...
Episode 8 | Reclaim This Space and Place
May 13, 2022 16:59 - 1 hour - 79.9 MBIn this episode we talk with Alex Bailey, co-founder of San Antonio-based Black Outside, and Aven, a youth participant in Black Outside’s Bloom Project. They discuss how simply stepping outside and tasting the outdoors has been an exercise in courage, love, and intergenerational exchange. We also hear stories of learning with Abenaki elders Sherry Gould, Madeleine Wright, and Rob Wright of the Abenaki Trails Project in N’dakinna, what is now called New Hampshire. Poet Jennifer Huang leaves u...
Episode 7 | Queerness, Selfhood, and the Blessings of Creativity
April 05, 2022 17:55 - 1 hour - 71.7 MBWe invite you to our conversation with queer Chicanx educator Ale, who teaches English to 9th graders in LA. She shares about the pandemic as a portal to creativity, letting go of perfectionism, co-creating space with her LGBTQ+ students, and what it means to explore her queer identity from a place of joy and ease. We also reflect with J, a college senior on the cusp of graduation, about her exploration of selfhood and sexuality in school. Brooklyn high school teacher and poet Meghan Dunn sh...
Episode 6 | Young People's Pedagogy
March 11, 2022 16:50 - 1 hour - 125 MBIn this episode we talk about what happens when grown folks get out of the way of young people organizing their own learning. In our conversation with Maria Cedillo, Jay Gillen, and Jon Gray of the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP), we learn about ways youth in Baltimore have organized fugitive spaces of learning, organizing, and loving each other. BAP is a youth-led and organized space, meaning that while adults support the space, no one over the age of 25 is making decisions or organizing th...
Episode 5 | Care is the Antidote
February 04, 2022 19:29 - 1 hour - 67.6 MBIn this episode we talk about self-care—how we do it, why we don’t—and the ways grief, caregiving, and rest are all forms of self-care. First, we speak with Massachusetts-based social worker Adya Lindo, whose primary work during COVID has become supporting school-age youth in their grieving journeys and educators who work with grieving students—even as they’re grieving loss themselves. We also speak with high school English educator Christa Calkins and her newborn Wilder in rural New York du...
We're coming back!
January 29, 2022 09:35 - 3 minutes - 2.91 MBAfter a month of rest, we’ll be back with Episode 5 next Friday, February 4! We'll be speaking with educators about how they care for themselves and their communities in a time where educational institutions are doing just the opposite. We’ll also hear about how making space for grief is a form of self-care. We have a full semester of conversations with educators, organizers, and students ahead! Catch you next week! monét & Erin Music “Riviera” by Smith the Mister, [email protected]...
& Now We Rest
December 17, 2021 17:58 - 2 minutes - 4.41 MBWe're signing off to freedom dream, rest, take walks, play spades, ice skate, spend time with beloveds, read, make art, and nap. We'll be back with episode 5 on Friday, February 4, 2022! Until then, wishing you rest and refusal. With love, monét & Erin. Intellectual Inheritance All About Love, bell hooks Teaching Community, bell hooks Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks Yearning, bell hooks Music Chill Jazzy Lofi Hip Hop, Chill Out Records, [email protected] Original Music ...
Episode 4 | Carceral Curriculum | Building Futures: There's No Other Option
December 03, 2021 17:46 - 1 hour - 123 MBIn this final episode of our three-part series on the carceral curriculum, we engage educators with what manifesting freedom dreaming might look like in classrooms and curriculum. Our guests this episode are Ebony and Zani, two early childhood educators who are spending this year designing a small Montessori preschool in Washington, D.C. by engaging community members, families, and students as they create their curriculum. They insist that abolitionist and liberatory education must be done i...
Episode 3 | Carceral Curriculum: It's By Design
November 12, 2021 18:06 - 52 minutes - 48.8 MBDuring our three-part series on the carceral curriculum in our schools, we ask, “How do we abolish carcerality in our schools (and beyond)?” In this second episode, we ask Dr. Rahsaan Mahadeo: “How are schools designed for carcerality?” Rahsaan challenges us to consider how schools become places of racialized disablement for Black and Brown students through curriculum and discipline policies. Mahadeo implores us to consider how educators can refuse to consent to participate in school-based c...
Episode 1 | Teaching for Joy, Liberation, and Abolition
October 26, 2021 20:58 - 51 minutes - 94.6 MBThis episode is about knowing. We introduce ourselves, the podcast, and how we define teaching and learning for justice, liberation, and abolition through conversations with two teachers from our own schooling experiences: Ms. Brenda Fleming and Michelle Cotnoir. In this episode's Resource Room, we hear from Chase-Mitchell about a book that keeps her grounded in her teaching practice and Zoe, a high school student from Virginia, shares a poem about language, identity, and the power to become...
Episode 2 | Carceral Curriculum: Owning What Is Ours
October 22, 2021 16:43 - 46 minutes - 84.9 MBDuring our three-part series on the carceral curriculum in our schools, we’ll be asking, “How do we abolish carcerality in our schools (and beyond)?” In this first episode, we learn about curriculum violence, a manifestation of carcerality, through a conversation with Dr. Stephanie Jones, Assistant Professor of Education at Grinnell College. Dr. Jones defines curriculum violence as “planned activities, planned assessments within the classroom space that are particularly harmful to Black and ...
Episode 1: Teaching for Joy, Liberation, and Abolition
September 17, 2021 19:15 - 51 minutes - 94.6 MBThis episode is about knowing. We introduce ourselves, the podcast, and how we define teaching and learning for justice, liberation, and abolition through conversations with two teachers from our own schooling experiences: Ms. Brenda Fleming and Michelle Cotnoir. In this episode's Resource Room, we hear from Chase-Mitchell about a book that keeps her grounded in her teaching practice and Zoe, a high school student from Virginia, shares a poem about language, identity, and the power to become...