Our Episodes 

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Season 3, Episode 5 | Lineages of Deviant Caretaking

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, the act of choosing pleasure, accountability to one’s deepest self over what work as teachers, teacher-educators, and students demands of one’s self. Anna and Erica share about lessons learned one night at a strip club and releasing themselves from the disciplining of settler colonialism’s projects of school, capitalism, misogynoir, and respectability—led by a long inheritance of aunties who showed them how to do thee things. And as nieces and aunties themselves, they reflect on what they now teach another generation, finding that the lessons and blessings their nieces and relatives give them to be the most urgent ones of all. Share your thoughts with us at us@dancingondesks.org, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks.


Transcript Finalized May 3

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Season 3, Episode 4 | Gimme My High School Experience

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 teaching, and root ourselves in education as the practice of freedom. If pleasure can happen in the classroom, what does this look and sound like? We invite you to share your reflections. What can pleasure look and feel like in spaces of education? What is bringing you pleasure and rest this month? Send your thoughts to us at us@dancingondesks.org, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks.

Participate in Black Lives Matter Week of Action this Feb. 5-8, 2024. Find out what’s happening in your area at: https://www.blacklivesmatteratschool.com/woa.html


Transcript Finalized March 1, 2024

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Season 3, Episode 3 | Habits of Everyday Liberation

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 disrupting their relationship with productivity, a relationship that they inherited from their families but are wary of passing onto their own children and students. 

We invite you to share your reflections. How are you refusing productivity and collusion with capitalism and white supremacy? What is bringing you pleasure and rest this month? Send your thoughts to us at ⁠us@dancingondesks.org⁠, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG ⁠@dancingondesks⁠.

⁠Transcript⁠ (Finalized January 26, 2024)

Season 3, Episode 2 | Bonus Track: Meditation for Educators with Brittney Elyse

Get to a quiet(er) place—it could be your car, your classroom or bedroom, even outside—take pause and turn on the 18-minute meditation.

BRITTNEY’S SUNDAY SWEETNESS

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Season 3, Episode 2 | Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter

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(er) self to teaching. Brittney shares her migration story from North Carolina to Massachusetts and back, reflecting on how she began to unlearn unpleasure, uncare, and working to capacity (which Audre Lorde tells us are not the ways of the erotic). 

We invite you to share your reflections. What is bringing you pleasure and rest this month? Send your thoughts to us at ⁠us@dancingondesks.org⁠, leave an audio message, or slide into our DMs on IG ⁠@dancingondesks⁠.

⁠Transcript⁠ (Finalized Monday, Dec. 4, 2023)

The clips from the protest at the end of this episode were recorded by Erin on October 28, 2023 in London, UK, when she and so many others protested for a ceasefire in Palestine in solidarity with freedom and protection for Palestinians. 

NICOLE YOUNG’S WRITING


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Season 3, Episode 1 | Girl, I'm Going to Quit This Job

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 when she quit her job as the executive director of a school in New Orleans to write full-time and to create fantasy worlds for Black girls in middle grades novels. 


Transcript (Finalized Friday, October 27, 2023)

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Elizabeth Mudenyo’s website

Rebellious Hearts, Dwayne Staats

We Do This Til We Free Us, Mariame Kaba

We Will Not Cancel Us, adrienne maree brown 

Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons, Cradle Community 


Learn More + Be in solidarity with DCIWOC

Instagram: @dciwoc

Facebook: DC IWOC

Email: dciwoc@gmail.com

Patreon: patreon.com/dciwoc

Venmo: @dciwoc

Ca$hApp: $dmviwoc


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Season 2, Episode 7 | Until We're All Free

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-conspirators, rupture in community, and moving in accountability. Laquesha Sanders closes our series with her final segment on mental health and student debt, sharing how she freed herself from six-figure debt. Canadian-Ugandan poet and culture worker, Elizabeth Mudenyo, author of the poetry chapbook With Both Hands, shares her poem “Nothing Owed”. We offer you these questions: What are lessons prison abolitionists teach us in school abolition? How do we move beyond allyship and sit in co-conspiracy? What does it mean to center accountability as liberatory praxis? What do we own when we’re called in or out? 


Transcript (Finalized Friday, July 7, 2023)

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Season 2, Episode 6 | Raising an Ancestor

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 returns to reflect on her mental health journey in part two of our three-part series of her very personal story about student debt. And, as always we leave you with questions. This episode asks: How do we allow children to remain free? What do our children teach us about freedom? How do we as adults heal from the harm we have experienced as children? 


Transcript (Finalized Friday, June 2, 2023) 

Intellectual Inheritance

Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Season 2, Episode 5 | We Keep Us Safe

Read our Retraction & Care Note regarding our removal of the Jenny Sazama reference in the original posting of this episode. 


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 with pre-service and inservice teachers in school to ground their work in liberatory teaching and learning. Then, we welcome our high school birders Natasha, Nelly, and Niya to share a favorite bird. Laquesha Sanders has schooled us in the history of student debt this season and now shares her personal story about how she has navigated a mental health journey informed by the weight of school debt. We leave you with our questions: How do the grown folks in the building refuse the internalization of school discipline and compliance-driven relationships in order to instead co-create a community through loving engagement and accountability? What could school community look, feel, and sound like when people are in deep relationship with themselves and each other? We love y'all.

Transcription (Finalized Friday, Apr. 7, 2023)

Questions? Ideas? Responses? Wanna practice disability justice and help with transcription? Send your notes to us@dancingondesks.org or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks.

Intellectual Inheritance

Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Season 2, Episode 4 | Every Child Born Full

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 with relationship with the land and each other. Laquesha Sanders shares Part 3 of our student debt series, this time on HBCUs. Capital City PCS’s now graduated seniors Natasha, Nelly, and Niya talk with each other about their birding experiences. And, of course, we’re asking: How are you disrupting settler colonial practices in yourself, in your classroom, in your schools? We love y'all.

Transcription (Finalized Friday, Mar. 3, 2023)

Questions? Ideas? Responses? Wanna practice disability justice and help with transcription? Send your notes to us@dancingondesks.org or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks.

Intellectual Inheritance

Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Season 2, Episode 3 | Educator Erotic & Fire Ass Refusal

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, loving accountability, and the fullness felt when, in the words of “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde, “we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion.” Tiffany Mason, a mother and elementary educator teaching in Brooklyn, shares her Saturday freedom dreams and the obstacles to getting there. We leave with the questions: How do we move beyond the mediocrity expected of us and become accountable to our erotic? What acts of disobedience do we engage in and commit to? We love y'all.

Transcription (Finalized Friday, Jan. 6, 2023)

Questions? Ideas? Responses? Wanna practice disability justice and help with transcription? Send your notes to us@dancingondesks.org or slide into our DMs on IG @dancingondesks.

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Community


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Season 2, Episode 2 | Reading Love: Beyond Adult Supremacy 

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 for liberated reading in schools, and their learnings from their summer of creating the Annotation Archives. Poet and Brooklyn high school student, Adedoyin, shares her poem, “This Side of Town,” reminding us that we have whatever we need. Then, LaQuesha Sanders is back with part two of our miniseries on student debt. We leave with the questions: What are we building? What possibility does youth imagination offer school abolition and liberatory teaching and learning? Come with us!

Transcription  (Finalized Friday, Dec. 2, 2023) 

If you’re interested in helping us with transcription, please send us an email at us@dancingondesks.org or call ‪(313) 314-1678‬. We’d love to steward this with you.

Intellectual Inheritance


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Season 2, Episode 1 | Move, Get Out the Way!

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—Kaide, Greyson, and Kyndle—about their bike to school day. We close with LaQuesha Sanders, a lawyer and historian, who shares the origin story of student debt, why student loans are trash, and why the U.S. government has more than enough money to cancel all of the debt student owes. Our storytellers offer us an opportunity to think about the questions: How do youth and adults co-build spaces of accountability, listening, dreaming, and freedom in and outside of school? What allows relationships between adults and youth in schools to exist in what activist, freedom dreamer, and writer adrienne maree brown calls liberated relationship? We love, y'all.

Transcript (finalized Oct. 10, 2022) 

If you’re interested in helping us with transcription, please send us an email at us@dancingondesks.org or call ‪(313) 314-1678‬. We’d love to steward this with you.

Intellectual Inheritance


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 9 | Our Love Letter to Education

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 pools, gardening, swimming, hugging our families and friends, and resting. Erin and monét share their love letter to education, discussing the ways in which abolition is an invitation to living by a love ethic (shout out to bell hooks) and centering practices of care and accountability and R-E-S-T. High school teacher Jessica Rucker shares her abecedarian, “A Love Letter to Education and Unlearning” as she leaves the classroom to pursue her dreams. Poet and graduating high school senior Zoe Bredesen protects her peace in her poem “If the Roles Were Reversed”. Finally, we offer our questions: If we love education, what does this love sound like, feel like, look like, smell like? How might we live there? We love y'all.


Send us your responses to dancingondesks@gmail.com or slide in our DMs on IG @dancingondesks. Let’s get free, y’all!

Intellectual Inheritance


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 8 | Reclaim This Space and Place

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 Abenaki Trails Project in N’dakinna, what is now called New Hampshire. Poet Jennifer Huang leaves us with their poem “Departure,” which begins in the most exquisite way. Erin and monét reflect together about what the outside means to them as humans and educators, thinking about opportunities for coalition building, and drawing from their wells of memories in the Northeastern and Southern parts of the U.S. Finally, we offer you our lingering questions: How do we learn from the outside? How can educators take their cues from Black and Indigenous placemakers, elders, ancestors, and youth in undoing our consumptive relationship with the outside? We love y'all.


Send us your thoughts to dancingondesks@gmail.com  or slide in our DMs on IG @dancingondesks. Let’s get free, y’all!

Intellectual Inheritance


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music produced by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 7 | Queerness, Selfhood, and the Blessings of Creativity 

We invite you to our conversation with queer Chicanx educator Ale, who teaches English to 9th graders in Los Angeles. She shares about the pandemic as a portal to creativity, letting go of perfectionism in and outside of her classroom, 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 exploration of selfhood and sexuality in school. Brooklyn high school teacher and poet Meghan Dunn shares a poem about girlhood and the body from Curriculum, her beautiful book of poems. Finally, we ask: What are the ties to heteronormativity that you must break in order to do your self-work? What do you have to relinquish as a return to loving yourself and to loving? How will you move into deeper connection with yourself? Join us, then share your thoughts with us!

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Texts 


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Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 6 | Young People's Pedagogy

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 that while adults support the space, no one over the age of 25 is making decisions or organizing the work. Cesarina Santana Pierre, a DC-based elementary educator,  joins us again for Resource Room Part II  with a story of how conversations about her students’ identities helped them to better know their community and themselves and Kabelo Sandile Motsoeneng shares a story of a queer South African boy’s coming of age. We invite you to think about the questions: What are you willing to risk in order for education to be the practice of freedom in your classroom? What must you unlearn in order to do this work? Send us your thoughts!


Our storytellers would love to be in community with you! Deets are below.

ig @410_fsujon



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“Watercolors” John Deley & the Players


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes 

Episode 5 | Care is the Antidote

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 speak with high school English educator Christa Calkins and her newborn Wilder in rural New York during a time of parental leave. She discusses how her journey as a new parent has made her reexamine her relationship with care, capitalism, and whiteness. Our first Resource Room of the new year is with Cesarina Pierre Santana, an elementary educator in Washington, DC, who talks about being in her 26th year of teaching and what she’s unlearning in order to listen to her students. The convo with Cesarina was so delicious we will share part two in March. We also hear from fifth grader Sabreena, who comes to us from Singapore to share an essay she wrote about her faith, Islam. In this new year of learning, what are you refusing and unlearning? What commitments are you making to your self-care? Come with us!


Send us your responses at dancingondesks@gmail.com, on instagram @dancingondesks, or at dancingondesks.org! 

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Other Books We Like for Conversations about Identity and Self-Portraits

Early Childhood and Elementary


Middle/High School


All


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 4 | Carceral Curriculum | Building Futures: There's No Other Option

In this final episode of our three-part series on the carceral curriculum, we engage educators with what manifesting freedom dreaming might look like in classrooms and curriculum. Our guests this episode are Ebony and Zani, two early childhood educators who are spending this year designing a small Montessori preschool in Washington, D.C. by engaging community members, families, and students as they create their curriculum. They insist that abolitionist and liberatory education must be done in community and with accountability to our students, their families, and their communities. In our Resource Room, elementary administrator Leensa Fufa returns to the classroom and shares how she uses self-portraits to facilitate conversation around identity with young learners. Michigan poet Carlina Duan shares her poem “Alien Miss Confronts Her Past,” from her newest book of poetry Alien Miss (University of Wisconsin Press). And monét and Erin sign off for a long winter’s nap of freedom dreaming and rest. We’ll be back February 5, 2022, with our next episode. Take care of yourselves. We love y’all.

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Thank you to Rahsaan Mahadeo for recommending many of these texts in our conversation with him. And the ones he did not recommend were inspired by his words. 


Music


Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 3 | Carceral Curriculum: It's By Design

During our three-part series on the carceral curriculum in our schools, we ask, “How do we abolish carcerality in our schools (and beyond)?” In this second episode, we ask Dr. Rahsaan Mahadeo: “How are schools designed for carcerality?” Rahsaan challenges us to consider how schools become places of racialized disablement for Black and Brown students through curriculum and discipline policies. Mahadeo implores us to consider how educators can refuse to consent to participate in school-based carcerality and to understand our complicity in upholding carcerality in our schools. Special education expert, LeShone Jai, adds complexity to our discussion of IEPs. In “What I Don’t Get Paid For,” Kishanna Laurie gets us to delete the email app from our phones and #ReclaimOurTime. Poet Kweku John moves us with a poem about dance inspired by Adinkra symbols. Thank you for listening. Love, us.

Episode 2 | Carceral Curriculum: Owning What is Ours

During our three-part series on the carceral curriculum in our schools, we’ll be asking, “How do we abolish carcerality in our schools (and beyond)?” In this first episode, we learn about curriculum violence, a manifestation of carcerality, through a conversation with Dr. Stephanie Jones, Assistant Professor of Education at Grinnell College. Dr. Jones defines curriculum violence as “planned activities, planned assessments within the classroom space that are particularly harmful to Black and Brown students and their knowledges,” whether it is intended to be or not. We also discuss how educators enact racial trauma via the carceral curriculum in their classrooms and ways we can be accountable to ending curriculum violence in our schools. In our Resource Room, Kishanna Laurie shares about her Reiki practice of self-care. Erin’s former student, Lissa, shares her poem, “Where I’m From,” celebrating the many parts of her identity. And throughout, Erin and monét invite you to sit with the violence we have enacted as educators and how we can repair and transform our classroom communities through our practices. Thank you for walking with us.

Intellectual Inheritance


Music

Original Dancing on Desks theme music by Mara Johnson and Elliott Wilkes

Episode 1 | Teaching for Joy, Liberation, and Abolition

This episode is about knowing. We introduce ourselves, the podcast, and how we define teaching and learning for justice, liberation, and abolition through conversations with two teachers from our own schooling experiences: Mrs. Brenda Fleming and Michelle Cotnoir. In this episode's Resource Room, we hear from Chase-Mitchell about a book that keeps her grounded in her teaching practice and Zoe, a high school student from Virginia, shares a poem about language, identity, and the power to become. Who are your podcast hosts? (monét and Erin) Why this podcast, why now, and why should we join together on this journey toward liberation in our schools? Well, you'll just have to listen. Thank you for coming with us.