Learning Unboxed

PAST’s podcast passion project, Learning Unboxed, has reached the 100 episode milestone! To commemorate, we thought we’d turn the mic to me, your host, Annalies Corbin, to explore the origin story of the show while celebrating milestones past, present, and future. We talk about how my life-long thirst for knowledge ultimately led me to PAST and this podcast. I’m so grateful for this incredible pla...

Today we’re delving into PAST’s origin story with the founders who had the courage and vision to start this foundation with me twenty years ago.  Dennis Aig, Sheli Smith, Andy Hall, and I take a walk down memory lane to reflect on how we set the stage for PAST to innovate, teach and succeed – despite the growing pains we all had to stomach along the way.   We wouldn’t be here today without our inc...

We’re super excited to have Jasmine de Gaia and Paige Love from JPMorgan Chase & Co. back on the show for the second segment of our three-part series on innovation strategies within education and the workforce.  We touch on the importance of failure and fluidity for an evolving workforce to thrive and the different ways the tech industry encourages more women, girls, and minorities to move int...

Riley Andrews is a middle-school student who we’ve had the pleasure of watching flourish academically since transitioning to a STEM school. Today, Riley shares the educational shifts between her different schools, how she navigated the increased workload, and the pros and cons of virtual learning during the pandemic. To learn more, visit: pastfoundation.org Learning Unboxed is produced in part by...

The Veterans Curation Program hires veterans to curate and maintain archeological collections that preserve U.S. history and endow participants with employable skills for the ever-changing civilian job market.  This wonderful trio of educational leaders —Kelly Brown, Shannon Johnson, and Jessica Mundt — is on the ground, literally making history with those who have served. We discuss the ins-and-o...

On October 4, 2017, Shaesta Waiz made aviation history when she became the youngest woman to fly solo around the world in a single-engine aircraft. And since then, she hasn’t stopped making her mark, in the skies or on the ground. Her foundation, Dreams Soar, runs inspiring outreach programs across the globe to encourage more girls and women to study and work in male-dominated spheres of STEM and...

We cover quite a bit in this week’s episode Elizabeth Dinschel and Kristine Bullock: the work of Presidential Libraries, their public outreach and engagement of K-12 students, and a lot of social studies and language arts — and, of course, how that all ties back into STEM and STEM education.  To learn more, visit: pastfoundation.org Resources: Hoover Library Visit the Presidential Libraries online...

Jasmine de Gaia, Executive Director of Transformation at JPMorgan Chase & Co., explains how the advancement of digital innovation in low-tech and high-tech industries is transforming the cultural fabric of our lives. If we adopt Jasmine's notion that ‘every company has become a tech company,’ it becomes of crucial importance that educators are preparing children for future tech-focused car...

We’re talking to Ohio State graduates, Ruby Xun and Melissa Liang, who reached the finale of Best of Student Startups (BOSS) last year.  While Covid-19 derailed execution plans for their sustainable fashion platform, Twirl, the applied learning experience at BOSS endowed them with useful insights for creating, maintaining, and growing a business. We imagine the different ways entrepreneurship coul...

Groundwork USA shares our mission to move youth from the classroom to the forest, learning and thriving in the great outdoors. Today, Curt Collier and Lucy Crespo talk about how they’re combating environmental and socio-cultural barriers to getting kids outdoors, to make the mountains mainstream for urban youth. We discuss the cultural and generational shifts towards environmentalism, effective co...

Tim Mitchell, executive director of The Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), has mastered the (seemingly) impossible: he’s curated a hugely-successful fine art, math, and science institution — within the state’s public school system.  With 85-95% scholarship rates for college — compared to the national average of 15% — it’s clear that their diverse student body is thriving. However, it’s the magic...

At just 23 years old, Imran Nuri is transforming the way America approaches philanthropy with his impactful non-profit, The 52 Million Project.   His subscription-based program, which costs $1 a week, donated just over $30,000 to 52 different non-profits last year. By breaking down the barriers of donating, students, young professionals, and local communities have jumped on the philanthropy wagon,...

Learning through seeing, thinking, and wondering is the educational utopia we’re striving to achieve, and thanks to teachers like Sabrina Walters and parents like Lori Trent from Upper Arlington City School, we’re closer to making it a reality.  These forward-thinking educators reveal how creating an active dialogue between parents, teachers, and students can revolutionize the learning process. Th...

If it involves getting more folks outside, learning, and protecting our environment, we are all about it here at the PAST Foundation. And that’s why we are so enamored with the programs offered by the National Park Service.  And today, Julianne Geleynse from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is going to teach us about the Parks as Classrooms program, which is offered at a number of different...

Employment is a big conversation these days, for both those seeking employment and those seeking to hire, and the issues involved are numerous and complex. And this was a big conversation before 2020’s record unemployment numbers. Now? It’s simply one of the biggest conversations that needs to be had. So we sat down with Dr. Rachel Angel, President and CEO of Anexsis, which has developed an intera...

Yellowstone Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) is a paid — yes, paid — student residential employment and education program in which 64 teenagers live, work, play, learn, and grow in Yellowstone National Park. They stay in the park for just over a month to work on projects that improve the park for both visitors and mother nature, and one hour is set aside each day for purposeful education, leadership...

The Ohio State University Center for Innovation Strategies has an incredible program called OnRamp, which is a corporate innovation idea accelerator driven by innovative students.  Given initial concepts generated by a sponsor, a group of students conduct customer validation and innovation techniques over a multi-week program to result in out-of-the-box solutions. This gives students from any area...

Today we’re covering a topic that we’ve never actually talked about on the program before: What do school boards do? Why would someone run for one? And is it really important? Really, it’s impossible to talk about what’s going on within our school without considering what’s going on within our school boards. So, we sat down with three newly elected school board members to hear why they were compel...

Project Zero is an educational research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education dedicated to understanding and enhancing learning and thinking. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about Project Zero on the show — and it probably won’t be the last! — because they are trying to make teaching, learning, and the future of work very relevant and right now. But the secret to this conversati...

Yellowstone National Park is one of the most iconic spaces in the United States, if not the world, due to its unique geography and, increasingly, the sheer size of undeveloped land. Yellowstone also happens to be one of the most incredible classrooms in the world, and today we’re going to learn a little bit more about that. Our guest is Beth Taylor, the Youth Education Program Manager at Yellowsto...

Our collective unwillingness to have conversations around things like mental health, familial mental illness, and addiction is really holding a lot of kids back from making it through the day in a strong, successful way — especially this year — but the 16 Strong Project is trying to change that. Learn how you can break the stigma around mental health with Samantha Wettje and Susan Solar. To learn...

2020 has brought a lot of challenges. But at the same time, it’s brought a lot of opportunities to access educational resources from all around the world that were previously inaccessible to most people.  And right now, there's an amazing opportunity — and necessity — to bring native voices into your teaching and learning every day. To teach us more about what it looks like to bring native voi...

Can we create #ZeroDirt beds via a repeatable process that can be utilized in almost any urban environment — and on another planet? This is the question that we wanted to answer when we started #ProjectMartian. Inspired by our previous SOIL Lab Project and a forced pivot in the midst of a global pandemic, we wanted to show the community of Columbus what STEM looks like when deployed to feed people...

When the PAST Foundation travels around the country to talk to policymakers, colleges, universities, and trade schools, there’s one topic that gets brought up in just about every conversation: manufacturing. So it’s clear there’s a bigger conversation we really need to have around STEM education and the future of manufacturing jobs. To help us parse out what needs to be done to get a new generatio...

Today we’re talking to a few of the people who participated in one of Ohio University’s most unique teaching programs: the STEM+ for All Teaching Fellowship. STEM+ is focused on supporting individuals  with science, technology, engineering, and math backgrounds — so people who do not already have a background in education — who seek to change their careers to become intervention specialist teacher...