This week, IEN introduces a podcast series from Jordan Corson, a former Managing Editor at IEN. This coming year, IEN will be sharing excerpts of some of the episodes from the podcast’s third season.
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In grad school, I spent a lot of my time studying education systems with International Ed News’s founder and editor, Tom Hatch (I was also the managing editor of this site for four years). We asked big questions about how education systems change, what constrains them, and what kinds of transformations are possible both within the grammar of schooling and beyond it. This work resulted in The Education We Need for a Future We Can’t Predict, Tom’s book on which he invited Sarah Gerth van den Berg and I to collaborate.
While the majority of my own work looks at the abolitionist possibilities of everyday educational life, I remain stuck on those same questions Tom and I were exploring a decade ago, ones which are visible in the new season of my podcast Another Education Is Possible.
The first season focused on the educational trajectories of anti-Zionist Jewish folks. Focusing on biography as an educational method, guests shared complex and winding paths toward and through anti-Zionist education. Across more than two dozen episodes, guests like sports writer Dave Zirin and genocide scholar Raz Segal offered expansive and yet intimate stories.
The second season—part of my graduate seminar Education, Genocide, Liberation—searched through education’s dynamic and competitive purposes in the world. Six students joined me as co-hosts and co-producers to think about how education serves oppressive, reproductive, or emancipatory purposes. As we read and asked questions about education’s purpose, the class invited in a weekly guest to interview and discuss these topics. Our episodes featured everything from TC’s own Haeny Yoon and Nathan Holbert talking about education as a form of play to professor Amanda Tachine talking about education as an indigenous practice of weaving knowledge.
Our new season turns to build a web of radical education projects. Along with my co-host, Eli Meyerhoff, each episode will feature an interview that looks at a radical education project somewhere in the world. We will have episodes on the schools of the autonomous Zapatista communities in Southern Mexico, the anarchist Modern Schools of early 20th century Spain, and much else. We’ll have episodes set in present day New York City and 1960s East Africa. Throughout, this season will see the centrality of education in social movements and building radically different worlds.
We hope listeners will enjoy our biweekly episodes launching this September.
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