Redefining School Leadership with Ann Ishimaru

Paul Kuttner:

Welcome to Partnership Work, where we explore the art and science of collaboration. I’m Paul Kuttner.

When we think of school leaders, we usually picture principals, superintendents, maybe the school board. My guest today says that that idea of leadership is far too narrow. The leaders we need, if we’re going to make schools work for all students, are not just the ones with formal titles and degrees. They’re also parents and students, teachers and community members.

In this vision of leadership, the role of a school principal or district leader is not to figure things out by themselves, but instead to work with folks from all these groups to create solutions together. In other words, educational leadership is a kind of partnership work.

Today, I’m sharing my interview with Ann Ishimaru. Anne is a professor at the University of Washington College of Education, where she runs the Just Ed Leadership Institute. I’ve known Ann for many years. As she talks about in the interview, we were part of a research project during graduate school, looking at how parents, students, teachers, and other leaders across the country were organizing to improve education for young people. Ann did her dissertation research with one of those organizing groups and has since gone on to become a prominent scholar of educational leadership.

But she is definitely not your typical professor. She spends a lot of her time out in the schools, partnering with principals, collaborating with families. She’s a former science teacher herself, as well as an organizer, a mother, and co-founder of a cultural organization based around the art of traditional Japanese drumming, or taiko.

In the interview you’ll hear in a moment, Ann offers a vision of leadership as a collective effort. She describes what it looks like when families and educators become co-designers of education initiatives. And she dives into her most recent book, which explores how a new crop of district leaders across the country have been working to build equity into our school systems. Well, I won’t take any more of your time. Here’s my conversation with Anne Ishimaru.

Ann, it is so good to see you.

Ann Ishimaru:

It’s terrific to see you, Paul. I’m excited to be with you today.

Paul:

You’ve spent a big part of your career working on improving education systems here in the U.S. What was your own experience like as a student and how did that shape the work that you do now?

Ann:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So if you’d asked me right after I got out of school, I would have said I had a peak education experience. You know, I was able to kind of put my head down, work hard, assimilate. I had really kind of internalized this model minority myth.

And I think it’s through doing the work that I’ve done and the research that I’ve done and also in many being involved in education outside of formal school systems that I began to think a little bit differently about, like Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot always talks about, the difference between schooling and education.

And so I had this kind of crystallizing moment during my dissertation research. I was working in a predominantly Latinx community. We were speaking in Spanish, most of the parent leaders were from Mexico or Central American countries. And one of the parent leaders asked me, “Why are you doing this work? Why are you studying us and the work that we’re trying to do? And I had to really think hard, partly because my Spanish is not very good, but also to really think deeply about who I am and why was I trying to do that?

And I explained to them that what I wanted to know was, how do we improve schools and enable children to succeed in education without forcing them to sacrifice who they are, their language, their culture, their heritage, their sense of being whole human beings and part of communities?

And so that was a really crystallizing moment for me because I do think that our school systems are premised on a whole bunch of assumptions that work great for a small group of students. And for many, many students, they aren’t — I’ll say “yet” — created or realized in ways that enable the flourishing and thriving of all young people.

Paul:

I love that. You study leadership in education. When you say leadership, you’re not talking only about principals or superintendents. You’re taking a much broader view. What does leadership mean in your work?

Ann:

Well, as you know, we first met studying organizing. And before I got to grad school, in addition to being a teacher, I was also part of environmental justice organizing and at the lead of a community cultural arts organization. And so when I got to grad school, I came with this notion that leadership was not something that required a title or a job or a degree.

So I was very puzzled at first when I encountered the study of educational leadership, because they were using this word that had this big, you know, a much bigger, more powerful meaning in a very narrow, constrained way that was only about titles, only about org charts, and missed all the other aspects of what I came to think of as leadership.

And then I started reading the research and the literature and realizing, oh, wait a minute, that’s the dominant notion of leadership, that it corresponds to the person with, you know, the title of boss. And I remember wondering, can I even study leadership? Not only because the kind of approaches to leadership that I had come in with weren’t what the literature was conceptualizing, but also because there weren’t Asian American women in that literature at all. So it was like, can I study something I don’t even exist in?

And so the opportunity to be part of a study on education organizing changed all that. It was an opportunity for me to sort of reclaim a much more expansive notion of leadership.

The group that I studied was in California, and their definition of leadership is “taking responsibility for what matters to you.” And I was like, “Oh, yes, that’s the conception of leadership that I came into this with.”

Paul:

And so that led you to the idea that leadership is coming — in addition to from educators, from principals and superintendents — also coming from families, from students, from community groups. When did you first start to get the idea that families and communities and students needed to have a role in making schools better?

Ann:

That started in the outside of schooling experiences that I had as a young person. I am Yonsei or fourth generation Japanese American. So my father was born in one of the incarceration camps and all of my grandparents and extended family were incarcerated during World War II.

And so when I was a kid that seemed like very distant abstract history. But I knew it was important because when it would come up at school, I was the one who would teach my classmates about some of those histories.

And then as I got older I began to realize how few people, not just young people but adults, knew about those histories – that were American histories – and knew not only so little about the history of Japanese Americans and incarceration, but also the ways that that history intersects with racialized oppression in other communities: land theft, genocide, all of those things that have shaped our country’s history.

So from early on, I started to notice that the things that I was learning from my own family and in the context of my community – I also was learning about the redress movement and forms of resistance, both in terms of the legal struggle for reparations, but also the kind of cultural work that was happening. And that’s where American Taiko comes out of (the Japanese word for drum) the importance of Asian American voice.

And so then I started to think, “Wow, there’s really potent things that I have learned from my own family and community that I never would have learned in school.” And so that’s when I started to really think about the ways that those folks might have some really crucial insights and expertise that could be useful and maybe even essential for improving what happens inside schools.

I think that’s one of the things about thinking about leadership. We know it’s crucial for improving schools – or “transforming” them is the way I like to really think about it now – but educators alone, the professionals alone, don’t have all of the insights, cultural practices, ancestral knowledges, and imagination alone to be able to do that. We really need the young people, families, and communities to be part of that process.

Paul:

In terms of schools, you started out as a science teacher. Is that something that you were trying to do as a science teacher? Are these ideas that came later for you?

Ann:

You know, some of them were happening while I was a science teacher, but frankly, I was really just trying to figure out what was what. There were things that weren’t sitting right with me that I couldn’t figure out within the bounds of the curriculum how to address.

I was teaching in a very white school. It was an alternative school. But we did have a handful of kids of color. And one Black mom in particular had spoken with the leadership of the school about more multicultural curriculum. So this is in the 90s.

And I was like, “Oh, gosh, what would that look like in science? How could I do that?” And I was getting all excited about it. And then I was sitting in this faculty meeting, and the teachers started ridiculing and making fun of this mom. There was some kind of event that was going to happen, and they were going to get parents to sit at different tables to talk about, I don’t know, like their interests or things they wanted to contribute or something. And they started laughing about how she could sit at the table by herself.

And it was this horrible feeling. I was very young and it just made me feel really awful. I’m kind of ashamed to say I didn’t say anything at the time. I was just, like, crumbling inside. And that was when I was like, “All right, I have to get out. I have to get out of this place.” And went from there into environmental justice organizing.

Paul:

So, you mentioned the research that we were both involved in on community organizing. You specifically were studying organizing in California. And as one piece of that work, I remember you interviewed school principals who had been trained in community organizing. And it transformed how they thought about their roles in schools.

You wrote an article about how they shifted “from heroes to organizers.” I was hoping you could talk a bit about what those principles taught you and what really stood out to you from those conversations.

Ann:

Yeah. So these were small schools that were being designed, and this was my first experience and exposure to kind of the power of design work together. And they were being supported by this community organizing group.

These were teacher leaders at the time, and they were in, you know,

university-based leadership programs. And part of what I started to realize is their preparation to become leaders had a parallel with the sort of in-service leadership supports and professional development as part of this process of designing schools with families and other teachers.

And so they kind of shifted from this idea that their role was the person to be out front calling the shots and making the decisions, and kind of shifting from that idea of the principal as the hero or the decider to the idea of the principal as the organizer. Meaning that it’s their job to facilitate the conversation, to help cultivate the leadership of others.

And just a really simple practice as an example of shared leadership is when they were planning for the schools and they were trying to design them, they were rotating who was chairing the meeting.

And then those principals ended up taking that practice into their meetings with parents later, and they would meet ahead of time with different parent leaders. The parent leaders would be the ones setting the agenda with the support and input of the principal. And then those parent leaders would be the ones facilitating the meeting with other parents.

Another example that I was really struck by is they were trying to write a grant application or — I think it was an award application. And instead of just holing up in her office by herself to pound out this application, this one principal, she actually called together all of the parents and a bunch of teachers. And they put up these sessions around the gym and they had the questions from the application and they were rotating around to brainstorm and talk about what they should write in each of the sections.

And so I was sitting in on that. And one of the things that struck me:
one, that you would even try to write a grant like that, but two, that I was in this group with other parents and I’m just listening and they’re like, “Okay, it’s your turn to write.” I was like, “Oh no, no, no, I’m just listening. I’m just here.” And I tried to resist, you know, because I was trying to be like the researcher, right? And one of the parent leaders just drops the pen in my hand and he’s like, “We all contribute.”

And so I got up there and, you know, I wrote down some of the things they were saying. And I realized, okay, this is the culture here. It’s so ingrained that now the principal with these other parent leaders have made it a kind of routine that everybody contributes, even the folks who didn’t know anything yet. But we all had a role to play.

Other things that I remember one of them talking to me about was the challenge of working with teachers and introducing teachers into a context. Another example is, at the beginning of the year, there’s a parent panel. You know, there’ll be like professional development days right before school starts. And the principals would have parents introduce the school and kind of provide guidance about their expectations to the teachers.

And over time I think they developed more expertise in terms of, you know the parents were part of hiring teachers. So that evolved across time. But still, even teachers who said they were very committed to partnering with parents had never done it in the kinds of ways that that they were doing it in these schools and the kinds of expectations that they had.

And so I think that was sometimes challenging for the leaders to navigate between the expectations that the district had of them. Like they would get in trouble because sometimes they were told, like, “get your parents under control.” That kind of thing. And they’re like, “We don’t control them.”

And then also being able to think about their role in relation to teachers, supporting teachers to do their best work, but also having to navigate the very complex power dynamics that can play out as they are entering into a school context where partnership with families is not just “Call home when the kid’s in trouble and talk to them for 20 minutes at the parent-teacher conference.”

Paul:

Yeah, so I’m starting to get a picture of kind of the complexity here. We have taking on a role of a school leader that not only involves all the traditional things that a leader has to do, but you’re talking about building different relationships and building trust with families. You’re talking about building trust and connection between teachers and families, supporting teachers, and then doing this all while navigating this larger power structure in the district that’s not built for this.

That sounds like a bit of a setup for these leaders.

Ann:

Yes. And I think one of the other complexities, of course, is the community organizing group itself and the role that they played in relation to the district. They were definitely putting pressure on the district at the time.

I think this happens a lot to folks in the principal role, that they get kind of squeezed in between. At the same time, though, one of the things that they all shared is that the parents, the organizing group, the organized parents, the community organizers were an amazing source of support and sustenance as they went about their work. That without them, they wouldn’t have been able to create the kind of school and the kinds of amazing — I mean, they ended up winning these statewide awards. They wouldn’t have been able to produce the kinds of successes that they had.

And one of them, the principal was there — I was really kind of surprised — she was at that school for, I think, 11 or 12 years, which is not the typical thing in many school systems. So she really talked about both the complexities and of getting kind of squeezed in that way, but also that those relationships enabled her to sustain in a way that she wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. 

Paul:
I’ll let you off the old project and shift you up to something a little more recent. So for the past eight to ten years, you’ve been helping to run the Lead for Equity project. Could you give us a really quick overview of what that project is?

Ann:

Yeah. So Decoteau Irby and Terrance Green and I started talking. We were having lunch, actually. And we started talking about how many of our friends and colleagues and students were getting into this role of Equity Director. And starting to realize, you know, there’s something happening nationally here. 

We had all actually individually started casting around trying to figure out what was the research literature out there on it. And there really wasn’t any. So we’re like, “Hey, let’s try to find out what’s going on.”

So that was the beginning. And the first part of our work was really trying to understand: what is the work of the folks who are stepping into these roles? And they came under many different titles. And it turns out they were doing all kinds of different things.

But we moved on from there and realized, okay, once we got a sense of the huge range of what they took up, that we needed to understand more about the broader ecosystems of equity work. In the vein of the kind of expansive notion of leadership that I was just talking about, that we can focus on the principals or we can focus on the equity directors or the superintendents. And we’re not saying that they don’t matter. They matter hugely. And in order for them to realize change, there are a huge number of other folks who are leading for equity in these systems.

So then we embarked on, it ended up being more like a three or four year study, a longitudinal study of three school systems and the equity leadership that was playing out within those systems. And in each of those, it looked very different as well.

But they had each, as systems, committed to equitable leadership and change-making. They defined it a little bit differently in each case, but it was ultimately about addressing the racialized disparities and improving educational experiences and outcomes, especially of students of color and other students who’ve been marginalized in the systems.

So that’s the kind of bigger picture. It’s come to be a network, a kind of loose network of other scholars of other practitioners as well. And a subset of them came together and put this new book together that will be coming out this fall.

Paul:

Excellent. Congratulations.

Ann:

Thank you.

Paul:
It’s called Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change. So it’s an edited volume. There’s a lot of authors. There’s a lot of different work in there.

Ann:

I think one of the things that we have is this kind of edited book idea in the, field where it’s sort of like a couple people get together, they put a call together and they’re like, “Hey, speak about this topic.” And then they get all these chapters in, lots of different chapters and they try to make it fit together. But they’re usually from all these different research projects or different contexts.

And so ours is a little different in that sense. It’s a little bit more like the project that you and I were a part of in the sense that all of the chapters are folks that we worked with through this nearly 10-year journey.

And some of them were grad students when we first started working with them. And then now they’re faculty members. Many of them were equity directors at the time, but maybe now they’re superintendents or they are in other kinds of roles.

So they’re all sort of connected in one way or another, and we’ve kind of woven them together across time in a way that speaks to the cycles of equity work, “doing the work.” That’s the context.

We started with this idea that context matters. We all say that, right? But really thinking about how there are, over the course of educational change making and reform, that there are “awakenings.” That there’s “morning” work where people are seeding and starting things, putting things in motion, creating policies and structures.

There’s what we ended up calling “midday” work where all the lights are on, the folks are doing the work, there’s lots of support. There were resources that happened in the wake of the murder of George Floyd after 2020. And then, all too quickly, we move into “evening” work.

And now we’re arguing that what we’re really seeing is night falling, where there’s the pushback, the anti-DEI work, more subtle retrenchment and budget impacts to the much more explicit attacks on public education writ large, but also any of the sort of equity-focused endeavors that folks have been working on across years.

So our argument is that there are things that we learn across those times. And as we move into night, it’s a time to reflect. It’s a time to rest. And it’s a time to keep going and keep moving, but that we might need to change the kinds of strategies that we’re taking up to do that. And a new day is ahead.

It may be a while, but “doing the work,” as the folks in the field say, it continues on. So that’s kind of the overview of how we approach that.

Paul:

That’s great. So the work, as you mentioned, is complex. There’s a lot of different pieces, a lot of strategies. I want to focus in on one piece.

You mentioned just a moment ago about looking beyond principals and superintendents to this larger ecosystem of leadership. And you write in the conclusion of the book, “leadership for systems equity work requires multiple people in a variety of roles with a broad range of expertise.”

I was hoping you could talk a little about, in your research, what are some of the different roles and expertise that are needed? And who and how are those people coming together to build the coalitions or networks or collaborations they need?

Ann:

Yeah, hopefully I can keep it succinct. Two different examples. One is in the book and one is work that I’ve been doing locally that is not yet in a book.

So one is in a district. We have pseudonyms for all the districts, but one of the districts that we studied over time was one we ended up calling Sky Mountain. And so there was a kind of group of Black women principals who were connected to each other and were supporting each other. There was some district support, but it was really coming from them.

And in one of the schools, the leader there partnered with families and then a community-based organization. They ended up creating this series of films that the kids created.

So this is elementary school. And so all the kids in the school, it was part of a literacy effort. And they all created films. Each class created different films with a focus on either Indigenous sovereignty or or Black Liberation. And then there was also sort of food justice and water protection in the mix.

And they created these amazing, beautiful films through this partnership. I share this one because I know that you do a lot of work around the arts. So they had this whole curriculum that they developed, and it was really key that the teachers were able to be thinking about both literacies, but also communities and histories.

And then they had community-based organization who really brought in the expertise both around community histories and organizing, but also had the film expertise. And then families brought their support of their own young people, but also their hopes and dreams for their children more broadly. 

Man, they were amazing little films they ended up putting them together. They had a community film festival. And what I remember in particular was, they redid Ruby Bridges’ first day of school. Like if they could reimagine what it would have been like. And it was really beautiful.

Probably there were no dry eyes in the room after that. It was this very short film, but it was so powerful. One of my colleagues was like, “That was healing that I needed.”

So there’s technical expertise in terms of the film production and script writing and all of those kinds of things. And then there’s like this collective imagination that I think we don’t often name as a capacity, but it’s something that young people have already. It’s just that we, especially in schooling contexts, don’t often think about how do we cultivate that in tandem with these other aspects, some of them are technical, some of them are cultural, others are coming out of historical context. But all of those things together kind of harnessed with the cultivation of imagination made for this really powerful production and learning.

And yes, they actually did really dramatically improve the literacy scores. People always want to know that part. But to me, that was only one one small part of a much bigger and more expansive effort.

Paul:

That’s beautiful. So as you describe in the Lead for Equity project, you’re an engaged, participatory researcher. You work alongside schools and communities, families, and educators to do research together using what you call co-design methods.

And so I was hoping you could talk a little bit before we’re done about what it means to co-design in education. And maybe you could walk us through the Kings of Literacy project.

Ann:

So actually, that was the second example I was going to give. That works great.

So, I think a lot of folks use the word co-design very loosely these days in the way that folks probably continue to use the word engagement very loosely. But the particular flavor or brand of co-design that I do comes out of the learning sciences and participatory design research, and the folks who study race, culture, and learning.

So Dr. Megan Bang is one of the folks that I had the opportunity to work with early on in my career. I really learned a profound amount from her, not only about the learning sciences and the theories and methodologies of participatory design-based research, but also, the ways that that particular flavor or brand of co-design really builds from indigenous and decolonizing methodologies. So we came to call the work Solidarity-Driven Co-Design, and that, of course, as you know, came out of the Family Leadership Design Collaborative.

And so the work, it came out of this effort called the Early Literacy Collaborative. And, you know, it’s funny because now that I think about these two examples, it’s going to make it sound like I’m a literacy person. I’m not at all. But when you partner with folks in the field, you go where they need you to go.

So that’s been some deeper learning for me. I’ve been immersed in more of the early literacy literatures and trying to learn about how do we leverage that as a kind of entry point or “apertura,” as we’ve said, to co-design with families, and in this case with Black families in particular, and Black boys in second to fourth grade.

So this all came out of a long-term partnership with a school district, with our local urban school district, and they had developed strategic plan goals focused on the third grade reading levels – based on standardized assessments – of Black boys. And they had developed this African-American Male Achievement Initiative.

And it was an opportunity for us to come alongside them and say, “Well, what would it look like if we were to take seriously the idea of Black families being at the table to work on this goal and to improve literacy for all children, for all young people? But especially think about how could we do better with and for Black boys.

And so we brought their families together. This is a collaboration with the school district, with this initiative, with three elementary schools, and with a couple of community partners as well.

And we brought them together and we said, well, if we think more expansively about literacy and take a kind of critical literacy approach, then we realized that reading in books at school is only one kind of literacy.

There are all kinds of literacies that are happening at home and in communities. And those literacies, and this was African-American and African immigrant families, often reside in storytelling.

So we started from storytelling as a way to tap those ancestral knowledges, practices and wisdom and then co-designed, it ended up being the young people themselves – the Kings, we call them – were really at the helm. And so it was an intergenerational co-design. We didn’t start that way, but that’s where it ended.

And we co-designed this story about a little crow, his name is Pixie, and he was a little curious crow. And it’s this really profound story about a crow who’s across the waters with a fruit that is beautiful, like the teachings of his ancestors. And then he sees something shiny in the water and is attracted to it and tries to go and pick it up, but it’s very heavy. He can’t carry both of them. And then a storm comes and it threatens to wash him out to sea.

And so then we came up with different endings to the story and realized that…we actually really struggled. We were trying to figure out what’s the one right ending. And then we finally realized, wait a minute, actually the power of this is the Kings getting to decide the ending themselves. So we turned it into a choose-your-own-adventure.

And all of the stories, the one thing they all had in common is the crow’s not alone in trying to figure it out. So his family comes, his friends come, his ancestors come, and he continues on this journey. And there are multiple different endings, but the power of it is that the Kings have a sense of agency about how they get to navigate that journey.

So that has been this really profound journey over the past three years in co-creating that. And now the families are continuing on.

They’ve gone into co-design at their own schools. So one of the schools, for example, has continued on and they’re making a cookbook that is rooted in the different recipes and cultures and family histories that the kids themselves are in.

So there’s so much more to say. It’s really hard for me to stop talking about it because it’s such cool stuff. But ultimately, the idea of co-design is, you know, we are trying to improve schooling and outcomes and the experience of learning. But ultimately, one of the things that we’re kind of after is shifting the relationships between parents, young people, teachers, other educators, and really fostering what in the literature we call transformative agency. Because that’s the thing that’s going to sustain across time.

Paul:

So one of the things we try to do on this podcast is really get into the how. And so my question here, you know, that is a beautiful story. You’ve told us a number of stories about how you or other leaders have brought families, schools, organizations, folks together to create something new, to co-design, to imagine and bring to reality new learning opportunities, new products, new experiences. If someone else wanted to get involved in this kind of work, what would be one or two pieces of advice that you would give them? Maybe things that you wish you had known when you first started but had to learn along the way?

Ann:

Hmm. I think one is if you are in a position, if you have a role in a formal institution, your first job is to learn. Before you start creating anything, to learn, to inquire, to understand where creation, where knowledge and wisdom already resides.

So you start with the assumption that’s there, because I think we sometimes can think like we’re going to drop in and we’re going to create something new from scratch. And often it’s: where are these things already happening? How do they already exist?

And so in the example that I gave, it was trying to figure out how do we do some story work because it already lives in the ways that families are teaching their young people about their culture, their language, their history, their values, and figuring out that stories and proverbs were one of the places that that lived and figuring out how to tap that. So the starting with learning as a first move always.

I think the other one is not being afraid of the messiness. And I’m still learning this. I freak out every time. I feel like, oh, this isn’t what I expected, or this isn’t going where I thought it would go, or people are confused about what’s going on, or tensions emerge. But just expecting that that’s part of the process, and it’s disorienting.

And I think what happens, especially in schooling context, when you invite families who have never experienced something different to share their expertise, it’s very disorienting and can be confusing. So I’ve come to recognize that that’s part of it, to expect that.

So what happens is when I’m coaching other educators and families are like, “What are we doing?” Basically, they won’t say this in so many words, but like, “I came here, thought you were going to tell me something I needed to know. When are you going to tell me all the things or give me all the materials or whatever it is?”

And we’re not, and we have to keep saying to them, “Actually, this is about your expertise, learning from your expertise, and then we’re going to co-create something together. Many times educators want to be like, “Oh, we’re not doing this right. We need to give parents what they expect.”

And I think that’s one of the things, it’s messy in there. There will be tensions. It’s disorienting for everyone. And trying to not slip back into: it’s our job to tell parents what to do or tell parents what they need to know. Really trying to hold on to: actually, we’re trying to do something different here. We’re trying to partner in real and different ways. We’re trying to build relationships, and we’re trying to learn together and not being afraid when it gets messy or confusing or disorienting.

Paul:

You mentioned that in the framework of your book, the people doing equity work in schools are entering a nighttime phase. During this nighttime phase what is giving you hope?

Ann:

Yeah, I think what’s giving me hope during this nighttime phase is also the same kind of thing even during the midday was giving me hope, was just young people themselves who are not afraid to take a stand, to push back, to organize to be part of really continuing to make change.

There’s folks in universities, there’s folks in K-12 and communities, it’s real out there right now. People are being attacked. They’re being taken, you know, the consequences are dire. And even so, it gives me hope that young people are not deterred. They’re not gonna take it laying down and that their creativity and ability to imagine the worlds that they they and we want is as strong as it’s always been.

There’s an added layer also. In the wake of the pandemic I was really struck by this. Another one of my current projects is called Aunties and Uncles in the Schools and it came out of work with families families of color, who were really thinking about how when they were growing up, community aunties and uncles or aunties and family of the heart were crucial in their being well.

And one of the things that I’ve been struck with is – I’m partnering with a group that really centers youth – how the youth, when they’re sharing

what they want, are really explicitly talking about their own social and emotional well-being and the need for adults to support them, to enable them to process. And they’re just able to articulate that in a way that at their age I definitely could not do.

So I think the thing that gives me hope continues to be young people and their visions, and this particular generation of young people is able to narrate and be explicit about some of the things that they need, both individually and collectively, in ways that I think prior generations haven’t had the language or the capacities or the experiences to be able to do. So I find that really powerful.

Paul:

Thank you. So that’s the end of my questions. Do you want to let people know when the book is coming out and where they can find it?

Ann:

Yeah, it’s coming out September 26th, and it’s going to be published by Teachers College Press. And we will be doing a number of different book events across the country. We’ll also be sharing at some of the education conferences. So we’ll be having a series of events and activities to celebrate the release.

Paul:

Excellent. Well, let me know and I’ll share them out on the Partnership Work Networks. And thank you, Anne, so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Ann:

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

Paul:

Thank you all for joining me today. To see the episode transcript and show notes, head over to partnershipwork.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for our free Substack newsletter, where we’ll be sharing updates, essays, book reviews, and more. If you like the show, please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. That’s one of the best ways for us to find our audience.

Partnership Work is an independent podcast produced with the support of the wonderful organization Urban Media Arts here in my hometown of Malden, Massachusetts. Check them out at urbanmediaarts.org. I’ll see you next time. Take care.