Anjel Newmann:
Picture this. A new teen, 15, barely keep a routine, the room clean. Who thinks that she figured out all of the mathematics? Missing school, only had to hear the mouth of one parent, but plenty talent, mixing syllables, thoughts and patterns on a palate, treat her body like a palace, don't smoke, drink or act callous. Shit happens, of course, but use the music as a atlas, didn't do her homework, but at home working on a track list. But on average, people think she messing up, getting arrested because she can't keep her hands tucked. When bitches start dissing and pinching punches to the gut, she erupt like what, and tell them some of them knickers suck, corrupt. But hold up. Behind this raw emotional glut she used a pen and paper to dig about the rut. The same things that wake a winter night rough, Shorty, let that beat thump thump thump. That's what she call love.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Angel Newmann, co-director of AS 220. This episode is a live recording of the Deeper Learning 2022 closing keynote, which Angel co-hosted with sam seidel, Director of K-12 Strategy and Research at the Stanford D School. Anjel and sam met 20 years ago as student and teacher. If you want to know more about how that happened, and trust me you do, just keep listening.

Sam Seidel:
Uncle L. Uncle Larry, thank you for teaching me how we can create schools that center students and communities so powerfully. I say names like Joy James because they can spark flames. Mentors who don't censor, but show us we're all links in a chain. I'd like to thank you Umberto Crenca, for showing me how to start programs from nothing that keep art at the heart. I'm trying to pay it forward, invite OGs to write forwards so the next generation of education transformers can be less a historic about what came before us. Each one teach one is done. We all learn from all, whether we're citing it in formal journals or we're writing it on walls. Each of us is here today because we have people in our lives who have taught us. You heard those opening keynotes a few days ago, right? First of all, how good were they? I'm looking at some of the keynote speakers.

Every single one of them talked about the people in their lives, and maybe I'm being obnoxious to point this out, but often they were outside of their traditional schools. Who taught them? Family members, mentors, folks at community programs that they were part of. A lot of times in traditional education we're taught that learning flows in one way, right? From teacher to student, from adult to child, from mentor to mentee. I think we all know that that's wrong and that the deepest learning happens in relationship and it's cyclical. We're learning from each other. So what we want to do in this next hour, 45 minutes, I saw Michelle's eyes cut at me, like, "You don't have an hour." What we want to do in the next 45 minutes is talk about what that kind of learning looks and feels like. We want to talk about the learning that happens when we're all learning from each other and what that unlocks, and we're going to do it in three acts.

So the first act, we're going to warm up a little for y'all because we've been thinking and excavating this, Anjel and I over the last ... Well, two years, since we thought we were doing this in 2020. And so we're going to share some stories about folks that we've learned from and what that learning has looked like, what we've learned. Then we're going to open it up in act two. We're kind of priming the pump for y'all, so you should start thinking about who those people are for you, what those lessons were for you, and in the second part, we're going to invite you to actually think about that and share that. And then we're closing out with a special third act that I'm not going to say too much about except that it speaks to the next generation of this work and where it's going. Is that fair to say?

This feels like an especially important conversation to have right now about the people and the relationships because of the few years that we've just been through, and I really appreciated the opening keynote, the moment of silence we had for folks who we've learned from who are not here. Our way of doing that was to create an altar up here with some of the photos and the words of folks, particularly students that we've lost, that we wanted to bring into the space with us. We invite you all after the keynote to come up, interact with it, add stuff. If you have stuff you want to add, you want to write something somebody's name and add it to that altar, but that's up here with us this whole time and they're up here with us this whole time.

I was raised by progressive educators, children of the 1950s, 1960s, who taught me to question authority, question mainstream narratives, who took me to demonstrations, who taught me about the Black Panther Party free breakfast program? Who taught me about the Wampanoag people whose land I was growing up on. In high school I had some amazing English teachers. Joan Sobel had us write what she called spiritual autobiographies, and we had to excavate what we believed in at that formative teenage time, and then we had to share it with each other. We did a little offsite retreat as a class and we had to share our spiritual autobiographies with each other, and that was a very meaningful experience, and it was one of my first moments where I really realized the power of writing, the power of words to communicate who we are, to understand who we are first of all, and then to communicate it with others and to understand who others are and to understand who we collectively are.

I should say too, Joan, I was going to say let us make, she encouraged us to make rap videos as our final in our Bible is Lit class. And so Michelle was talking about this work that I've done around hip hop and education. That was my first experience in a school context, I think, being encouraged to bring culture, that culture, hip hop culture into my learning. Another English teacher we had at the time, Donald Burrows, if Joan taught us the power of writing, Donald taught us the power of reading, assigning James Baldwin, Shakespeare, Tony Morrison, and then unlike some teachers I had, really making sure we read it, like calling us out if we had not read it, which was important. And just facilitating these electric conversations about these texts that helped me come to love language arts and value reading, which paid off when I went to college and had a lot of reading to do.

In college, I took a class with a professor named Joy James. It was called Race, Culture and Incarceration, and I think 10 years or so before Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Ava DuVernay's the 13th, taught us at that time about the trajectory from slavery in this country to the convict leasing system to the prison industrial complex. But Joy didn't just teach us through the texts she taught or the content of it. She taught us through how she taught. I remember there was a class, it was a long class, so we would've a break in the middle of class, and we came back from the break and there was a white student in the class who said, "I just want to say that I find it interesting that the students of color all sit together and I don't get to sit with them," was basically the implication. And Joy said, right away, "I find it interesting that in a class about race and policing, a white student is trying to police the black students' physical movements in the class."

And I remember just being like, well, this was years before I'd heard this term microaggression. But what Joy was helping me understand in that moment was that these big systems of oppression, the way whiteness plays out in our society, that we were studying kind of at a macro level in the class, was playing out in the class, which has been a very valuable lesson for me. And that one of our roles as educators is to name that when we see it. Around that same time, I was doing my student teaching in our local juvenile prison, and I saw how a lot of the systems that Joy had taught me about in a academic context were playing out in young people's lives. Too many times I saw kids locked, confined inside a too small box. Maybe it was for pitching rocks, maybe it was just because they pissed off cops, but more likely than not, if they'd been white as their tees and held big knots tucked right up their sleeves, the judge in the box would've been pleased and agreed to pleas of not guilty.

I had students teaching me the impact of these systems on their real life. Bayer taught me about the cash bail system and how unjust it is, how a young person can sit for six months, having never had a trial or been proved guilty of anything, because there's no one who can pay the bail for them. Bayer also taught me to love science fiction. He would write, just fill these composition books, composition book after composition book after composition book, creating these universes and sharing them with me and anyone who was interested to read them. As Bayer and other students that I worked with in my student teaching in the prison got out, I started to learn about the challenges that they were facing.

First of all, just fulfilling basic needs and secondly, finding those opportunities for creative expression. The portals that for writing, for singing, for photography, all of these creative spirits that were bursting. Too many times I got that call. Too many times I picked up that phone. Too many times there was a pause and then "Yo, is Sam home?" Just got out. No job, no bed, no food on plate, all on they own. No ID, no social security, no toothbrush, brush or comb. All they wanted from me was an instrumental CD, a notebook to free the dome. No set of keys, no amphetamines, just letters to read and poems.
I decided to dedicate my life after graduating from that teacher credentialing program to trying to create a space that would do both things, that would help young people meet the critical needs that they had in their life at that time, and also create those portals for self-expression, put microphones and cameras in young people's hands, sometimes just notebooks and pens and pencils. Trying to create a program like that was not obvious to me how to go about doing that. And there were some people I learned a lot from at that time, and two of them are here, so I got to talk about them a little bit.
Elliot Washer, who I talked about earlier as Uncle L as many of us now call him, had been one of the founders of the Big Picture. What was Big Picture Company at the time, but now it's Big Picture Learning and the Met School, which happened to be just down the street from us in Providence. I had the chance to do work study with Elliot when I was in college, and he taught me that 90%, you can tell me if 90 is right after I say this, 90% of what people tell you you can't do is bullshit, is 90%.

Okay, it's close. He might have said 99. I don't know a lot of what people tell you you can't do, and that in fact, we have to interrupt the way that things like schools look, youth programs, look, if we want to do justice for the students we serve. Uncle Larry, who I shouted out earlier, was my middle school Aikido teacher, my high school principal. And then around this time when I was trying to figure out how to start this youth program, had moved to this faraway land called San Diego where he had found some open big building in a naval base and was starting this program called High Tech High. But I got to come out here over and over in those years and see what he was doing, building this place and learned a lot of lessons, like what you keep out when you're designing something new is as important as what you let in.

So these guys were teaching me how to design educational programs in real time. We had a mentor in Providence too, Umberto Crenca, who I mentioned earlier, who had a lot of that same energy. Bert also had a style. He had his head shaved, he had this long white goatee. If he had 10 fingers on his hands, he had 30 rings and tattoos peeking out, curse words on his lips. But when we would go into a meeting with state bureaucrats, his passion would just burst out of him and folks would have no choice but to get down with the program. It was kind of that Beanie Sigel get down or lay down energy with Bert. And of course I've learned a ton from the young people that we were working with.

Almost all the young people who came to our program were employed because folks needed to be making money. So we created these youth-run, arts-based businesses. And so we would have these Monday staff meetings that would be this many people ... No, it wouldn't be this many people, but it would be like 30, 40 people folding chairs in this old garage space that we had. And we would make decisions there together.

One particular Monday at one of these staff meetings, I came and I was feeling really good about myself because I had talked to the Department of Children, Youth and Families of our state, and they were going to give our program more money, which I felt we needed, and they were going to give us an extra staff person, a licensed social worker that they had hired. So I announced this and one of the youth staff members, Roger, who was sitting there on his BMX bike kind of rolling back and forth, let me know that if we brought a licensed social worker into the space, he would never set foot in the studio again, and shared all these experiences he had had growing up, feeling like he had gotten burnt, his trust had been burnt by social workers that he had had to deal with.

And other young people started speaking up with some similar stories. And then other young people just said they hadn't really had those experiences, but if that's how Roger and other people felt, they didn't want it. I learned an important lesson that day that more isn't always better and that how you get it, who you get it from and what conditions it comes with really matter. A friend and colleague and I would call mentor of mine now, Barry Spiegel, has this phrase, he says to me, "How we are is what it becomes." If we start to embody the same systems that the oppressive system that we're trying to bust out of and create a liberatory space from holds, we're going to recreate those systems of oppression within whatever it is we're designing. So I learned that lesson. Yeah, that's Roger. You can clap for Roger. One other Monday meeting that I want to share about, we had gotten an invitation from the Rhode Island School of Design, which is a very prestigious art and design school that was in the same city that we were in, to come and share some stories.

And I asked if anybody would want to go, and some young people raised their hands. We said, "Cool, let's go." It was supposed to be on a Saturday. The Saturday rolled around. You know those days, anybody who's from San Diego is not going to know what I'm talking about, I don't think. But you know those days that never get bright, the sun just never comes. It was like gray. It was one of those days, and I was super tired from the week. And then as I was getting ready to go out, it started raining and I was like, "I really don't want to do this." But I told people I was going to pick them up. So I'm driving around in my little old Maxima picking people up all around Providence and Pawtucket, and we drive, and I don't know why this event was at a kind of abandoned old mill building in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

But we go in and folks are sitting in chairs, and immediately the vibe is awkward. Our crew was like Air Force Ones, oversized basketball jerseys, wave caps, fitted hats. The RISD crew was really nice, shiny leather boots, iron jeans kind of buttoned down shirts, fancy architect glasses. And one of the youth staff members in our crew, Harmony, said, as soon as we walked in, she was like, "I'm not feeling this. I feel like if I perform right now or share anything, I'm going to feel like an animal in a zoo. I'm not doing it." And Harmony's a leader. So when she said that, a bunch of other young people were like, "Yeah, I'm not feeling it either. And I was just like, "I don't want to try to get anybody to do anything they don't want to do. I don't want to disappoint these RISD people. I just want to be at home still, I guess.

But I learned an important lesson from Harmony and others that day, which is that learning happens at the speed of trust. And I've heard people say, change happens at the speed of trust. Learning happens at the speed of trust. And I had that trust with Harmony. So she had shared those things with me that felt good. I was learning from her, she was learning from me, but that didn't just automatically port over to this group of folks with the fancy glasses. I know I have kind of fancy glasses now too, so I can say that. That has to be earned. That has to be built.

Around that time, I was with Uncle Elliot at a Gates Foundation convening, and at that time, the Gates Foundation was talking about these three Rs that all our schools needed. They said rigor, relevance, and relationships. Rigor, relevance, and relationships. They were saying it over and over again, rigor, relevance, and relationships. And L was doing his kind of thing in the back of the room, little pace, I could tell he wasn't totally clicked in. And I asked him, "What do you think about this?" And he said, "No, no, they're right about those. You need those three things, but there's an order to it. Relationships come first."

Around that time too, a 13-year-old young woman walked into the youth program with her little sister. They were part of a dance group called Project Heat. Jene, it's all good. It's all good. They're part of a dance group called Project Heat. And over the last 20 years, I've learned a tremendous amount from that young woman. There's so much, it's hard to sum it up, but primarily it's that you can change radically as a person and stay completely true to who you fundamentally are. She went from being a dancer to a rapper, to an audio engineer, to taking my old job, to taking my boss's old job. And not only did she change radically, but stay true to who she was, she did that to the program that I had helped to found. So she flipped things up, but kept the core the same.

When the program moved from the garage in South Providence to a nice space downtown, some things got lost because in the garage it was just this big raw, open space where people could collaborate almost effortless. You've had no choice but to collaborate. When there was all of a sudden a hallway with doors that closed, that spirit was gone. There was all these separate youth run art space businesses that were great, but she saw that it had lost that spirit and figured out how to create future worlds, an Afro-futurist performance piece that got put on every year, that brought all, opened all those doors and brought all the young people back together to collaborate on something. And I saw her challenge authority in these really cool and powerful ways. We had a policy that you weren't allowed to play copywritten music in our space, for lots of reasons that I won't get into.

But she took that on with the founder of the organization because she saw that our mission was to serve the most marginalized communities in the state. And that policy was keeping some people from coming because it was music that they could recognize that was making them comfortable in the space. I saw her challenge the commissioner of education for the state of Rhode Island around the lack of teachers of color and our schools and the lack of pipelines for teachers of color in our school. So the learning between me and this young woman has been that kind of learning I described earlier, learning from each other over years and years and years. And I'm still learning from her today. And I'd like to welcome her to the stage. Make some noise for Anjel Newman.

Anjel Newmann:
Yo, yo, what's up everybody? What up? Picture this. A new teen, 15, barely keep a routine of room clean. Who thinks that she figured out all of the mathematics? Missing school, only had to hear the mouth of one parent, but plenty talent, mixing syllables, thoughts and patterns on her pallette. Treat her body like a palace. Don't smoke, drink at callous shit happens, of course. But use the music as a atlas. Didn't do her homework, but that homework in on a track list. But on average, people think she messing up, getting arrested because she can't keep her hands tucked. When bitches start dissing and pinching punches to the guts, she rough. Like what? Tell them something nigga, suck, corrupt, but hold up. Behind this raw emotional glut. She used a pen and paper to dig up out the rut. The same things that wake her when a night rough, Shorty let that beat, thump, thump, thump. That's what she call love. Deeper learning. What's going on?

I got to be honest with you, I don't feel like I learned anything in school. And it's sad to me because I spent so much of my life there. And as I'm hearing Sam talk about all of the young people that we've worked with over the years at AS220, and I'm sure so many of the young people who are in traditional schools who don't have these amazing missions and this attuned awareness to young people's needs like so many in people in this room do. So many of us go through school feeling so unseen, feeling unheard, and also criminalized, right? So when I think about what I didn't learn in school, I've been reflecting on this keynote, and it's been really important to me because I think for a long time I used to joke about not being a good student and I would label myself. I wasn't a good student. I don't like math. I wasn't that great. And honestly, preparing for this keynote really helped me reflect in a way that I think I needed to because it was never that I wasn't a good student.

It was that the things that my teachers wanted to be me, to be attuned to the math problem, the page number, the content. It was really hard for me to focus on those things because I was locked in, but I was locked in on something different. I was locked in on the people, the politics, and the power of the school system at a very young age. And because I was locked in on those things, I couldn't be quiet. I had a warrior spirit in me ever since I was young. And unfortunately, sometimes I didn't know how to let that out in a productive way. And unfortunately, my teachers and the school administrators did not know how to receive it in a productive way. So what it meant is that very often I was in in-house suspension, I was in detention or I was suspended, and if I was none of those things, I was skating out the door without permission and I was finding my own ways to educate myself.

I found a way to invest in my education in the way I needed to because I didn't feel like my school was doing that. I was getting in trouble for things like calling out the fact that if I was wearing shorts too short, I would see a white girl who was skinnier than me wearing the same shit, and she wasn't getting in trouble. I was calling out the fact that if I was rocking a bandana, because I saw a Nelly rock it on BET, or a upside down visor, which I used to wear all the time, why is mine considered a bandana and hers considered a handkerchief? You know what I mean? There was a profound legacy of anti-blackness in my school, and I saw this playing out as a young person, but couldn't name it because I didn't have the words yet. I didn't realize at that time that what I was seeing was injustice.

I just knew I was pissed, and I was mad and I was acting out because of it or just downright refusing to go to school. And so it was really a blessing to me when I found a space at AS220 when I was 13 years old, and I walk in. If you can just picture this, you're on the south side of Providence ... I know not anyone ever been to Providence, by the way? Whoa. All right, y'all, okay. I was like, I'm going to see one hand and it's going to be Tony, south side of Providence. My sister Amber and I, she looks like me. We're twins. We're not really, people think we are and we don't correct them at all. My sister and I, we were backup dancers in this crew called Project Heat, which actually our mentor used to ... We used to dress a little scandalous back then, so they used to throw us turtlenecks and call us Project Turtlenecks.

So that's why I wore one there today, but still had a sass it up a little bit. We walk in there as backup dancers because our friend Suave, who was a local break dancer and a rapper was like, "Yo, y'all want to backup dance for me?" We're like, "Oh hell, we can do this." He's like, "I heard about this youth program on the south side that's hiring." So we walked to this car garage on this kind of shady looking street on Norwich Ave, and there's this gated window that has a poster that says Youth Performers Wanted, We'll Pay Minimum Wage. And it was like $6 or something an hour. So me and my sister were like, "Word, that's more money than we ever could imagine to backup dance." So we go in, and I swear to you, Sam keeps talking about these portals. It was literally exiting one world and walking into another.
I walked in and I saw a big open space and there were Congo drums on one side with this woman named Nisha, who was just this Indian woman just drumming with this weird white guy with glasses who's also drumming. And this little kid who was like, I don't know what he was doing, but he was doing it. I look directly in front of me. And there's like this table of, they looked like rappers, but they weren't rapping. They were writing in notebooks, quiet. You know what I mean? I'm like, "What are they doing?" I found out that they were working for The Hidden Truth Magazine and they were writing poems and doing record reviews, and they were editing interviews. And then right next to them, they're having this quiet writing session. You have break dancers just spinning on their heads. They're not even noticing the fact, how is this even possible?

Then you had these little cubicles over to the right side, and you would see some young people or staff, you couldn't even tell the difference, right? Some people were sitting on the counter, there was a makeshift studio in the back. People were spinning. But all of this multidisciplinary world that I walked into was everything I had been looking for. And I remember going into that space was the first time that somebody passed me the book, the Lies my History Teacher Told Me, or something to that effect. I never read it, but I touched it and I was like, "Yes, this is it." I'm like, "I know it."

But it was at that time and place that everything I had been feeling, everything I had been feeling in my traditional kind of high school with well-meaning people, you know what I mean? Well-meaning teachers. Now that I'm an adult and I have kids of my own, I'm like, "Yo, they were just stressed. Honestly, they were stressed. The way she was sucking down that coffee, bro. Nah, she was stressed." And it took me a while to realize teachers are handcuffed in so many ways to the curriculum by the state. And I think at a young age, I didn't know. I couldn't process that. I thought they were just honestly just trying to be oppressors, and I didn't realize that they also were oppressed. You know what I mean? In this weird way. And we're all in this system that we want out of, but we're kind of chained to each other in a desk.

But in this space, it was different. It was like folks were unchained. They were unchained in themselves through break dancing, through graffiti art, through conga drumming, through writing lyrics and interviewing people. And my sister and I just immersed ourselves in that world. I learned so much. Sam talked about the staff meetings. I remember my little brother, Tyrell, who was four at the time, coming through fully welcome. We'd be having a serious discussion. He'd come in the middle and take his shirt off and start dancing, and everyone would be like, "Hey, go Tyrell." I learned that family was welcome at AS220 Broad Street studio. You feel me? I learned to this day when I became a teaching artist, and then later the director of the youth program. I had so many students who taught me so much. I remember one day going head to head with my boy Day Day, who's a decade younger than me. Day Day is this real good looking guy with long locks and he gets kind of fiery.

And so am I, and we got into it over something in the recording studio and it ended off, I know Jene, you were there. I think it ended off in the standoff in the hallway of the youth program because he was unwilling to budge on his square. And I'm bullheaded too, and I was unwilling to budge. It got into this back and forth. "Yo, call my cousins." I'm like, "Call your cousins." You know what I mean? And it ended up where we had to take a break from each other. I'm the adult, so I was like, "All right, I'm a chill. Don't call your cousins. I'm not fighting nobody but me and Day Day are tighter than ever. And right now, unfortunately, he is doing a bit right now, but that's my little brother. And it took me some time to realize, you know what? Sometimes it's not about being right as the adult.

If this young person's so inflamed and so impassioned just back down and in that moment, I should have backed down. You know what I mean? And he taught me that. And our relationship is so much tighter. I learned so much from going to the training school that Sam spoke about, working in the youth prison with both the young men and the young women. I learned from my boy Shaq, who was one of the youth out there in the training school that, again, leadership comes in all forms. And yo, if you think you're going to walk into a classroom at the training school and be the leader, you got to get through him first.
I realized that there was no amount of trying to posture or play the authority card that was going to buy his trust or the trust of the students. It was about a one-to-one relationship with me and Shaq. Then once Shaq trusted me, he was able to help me co-teach the class because we had put that time in together. And so there, there's just so much beautiful magic that happens in a place AS220, in youth programs all around our country, in places like High Tech High. I've heard so much about this place from Sam, and I'm just so honored to be here today.

And I don't want to keep on rambling, but I'm really overtaken by the love and the joy and the smiles. I can see the smiles through the mask, which is really cool. And I'm really excited to be here. And we have a fun morning, afternoon in store for you. So thank you so much.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. Huge thanks to Anjel Newmann and sam seidel. You can find links to AS220, the Stanford D School, and the Deeper Learning Conference in the show notes. Thanks for listening.