How do you lead with courage and love for every child when the culture around you is demanding you do the opposite?

Jennifer D. Klein is an educator, author, and global learning advocate with over 30 years in student-centered, project-based education. A product of the very pedagogies she champions, Jennifer has taught and led in diverse contexts—from all-girls education in the U.S. to heading an innovative school in Colombia. She has worked with educators in over 20 countries, helping them design equitable, inquiry-driven learning that amplifies student voice, embraces cultural inclusion, and transforms school culture.

The author of The Global Education Guidebook, The Landscape Model of Learning, and the forthcoming Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership, Jennifer blends classroom experience, leadership insight, and a passion for equity to inspire meaningful change. She partners with schools to tackle equity, engage in brave conversations, and empower young people as agents of change in their communities and beyond. Based in Denver, she continues to connect educators worldwide through workshops, coaching, and keynote talks.

We discuss:

🥥 Having a North Star and knowing what we are willing to to stand up for, in the face of risk;

🥥 How no one can give you the gift of liberation, we have to strive for it (Freire). This is true in leadership of all sorts;

🥥 Students as protagonists of their own stories and these of others.

You can purchase Jennifer's book here: https://www.principledlearning.org/taming-the-turbulence-in-educational-leadership.

Check out Coconut Thinking on www.coconut-thinking. com.

How might our relationships other-than-human animals help us consider sustainability and regenerative education in more life-centered ways?

In this episode, I speak with Charlotte Hankin. Charlotte is an educator, sustainability consultant, and PhD researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her doctoral work explores how relationships between children and animals in international schools can help shift education away from human-exceptionalism toward more regenerative, relational ways of learning. Guided by posthumanist and feminist materialist theory, Charlotte uses arts-based, post-qualitative methods, including poetry, photography, sound, and craft, to attend to spontaneous, everyday encounters between human and other-than-human beings. These ‘multispecies moments’ offer insight into power, care, and co-existence, inviting schools to reimagine pedagogy as something co-created in the spaces between species. And, of course, Charlotte is the co-founder of Coconut Thinking. We discuss:

🥥 How schools often portray animals in ways that separate us from the natural world and contribute to extractive practices;

🥥 How school curricula might embrace an ethic of care, beyond what serves humans;

🥥 The importance of cultivating relationality in schools over content mastery.

Check us out, www.coconut-thinking.com

How can learning&doing help us become good participants in the web of life?

In this special episode, I speak about how systems change won’t happen if we replace names and labels but continue to do the same old thing. I propose that we move beyond assessing learning, competencies, soft skills for their own sake. Rather, what if we collected the voices of the community (human and other-than-human) and had that be the measure of quality of learning? Emphasis placed on testimonials of how the learning and specifically the application of the learning contributed to a more positive world. And if we really want to go nuts, we can answer the question at the top of these show notes.

This takes us beyond the individualization of student achievement because it becomes about how we use our learning for good. It de-centers the student and centers life.

This episode is inspired by a post I put up a couple weeks ago, that you can find below. Please listen to this one-take, uncut episode, with a guest appearance by Clementine the cat.

To access the post, click here.