Dancing on Desks

We’re here with a little announcement about how we will be spending this season. Our biggest lesson from our Season of Pleasure?  We need a season of rest.  We’ll be thinking and chopping it up with each other and seeing what emerges when we have space to imagine while not creating our podcast.  Thinking within and beyond this election season, how will you sustain your own rest this year? What mig...

This 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 wh...

What 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...

We 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 ,...

In 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...

We 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 teachi...

Our 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...

Find 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. b...

This 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...

In 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 whe...

For 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-conspirator...

Black 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 re...

We’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 dona...

Read 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 wit...

In 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 othe...

Audre 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, w...

What 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...

After 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—Kaid...

Season 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 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 pool...

In 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 Abe...

We 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 explo...

In 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 tha...

In 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 spe...

After 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! C...