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Joey Valle is a STEM Educator who participated in the second round of Fire Circles discussions. Listen to his perspective as a Materials Science and Engineering Education Researcher.
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Joey Valle is a STEM Educator who participated in the second round of Fire Circles discussions. Listen to his perspective as a Materials Science and Engineering Education Researcher.
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Joey Valle is a STEM Educator who participated in the second round of Fire Circles discussions. Listen to his perspective as a Materials Science and Engineering Education Researcher.
Listen to Episode 2 - Joey Valle by As the Little Crow Flies MP3 song. Episode 2 - Joey Valle song from As the Little Crow Flies is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 44:03. This high-quality MP3 track has 192 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 10 Jan 2023. Stream and download Episode 2 - Joey Valle by As the Little Crow Flies for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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Joey Valle, a STEM educator, shares his journey and experiences as a STEM educator. He discusses his multicultural background, early interest in engineering, and passion for renewable energy. He talks about his academic path, including attending MIT for undergrad and pursuing material science and engineering. Joey reflects on the limitations of traditional education and how it didn't align with his desire to make a real-world impact. He discusses his involvement in activism and anti-racist work, which led him to question dominant forms of knowledge and research. Joey also highlights the importance of understanding the lifecycle of materials, particularly in relation to lithium mining and renewable energy. He shares his efforts to create a more inclusive and collaborative learning environment for students. As the Little Crow Flies, straight talk from Indigenous communities. This podcast is from the Indigenous Scholars Institute from within Maverick University. I am Michael Little Crow of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Nation on my mother's side and from the Celtic Saxon peoples on my father's side. I serve as your host for this discussion with Joey Valle, a STEM educator who participated in the Fire Circle's professional development sessions during July 2022. Welcome Joey to this podcast on educators talking about their experience with professional development and the journey both inside and outside academia. So if you could start off by introducing yourself a bit, share with us your journey as a STEM educator and how the experiences both inside your context and outside in your everyday life have influenced you as a STEM educator. Yeah, so my name is Joey Valle. I guess I'm coming to you from the home that I grew up in, in Miami, Florida, which I think it's in Miccosukee and Seminole Territory. And so I guess kind of part of what at least I remember and also what my parents would talk about, right, like so I guess my parents, right, like on my mom's side, we come from I guess kind of Eastern European, like Jewry, Jewish folks, and so I'm a Jew. And then on my dad's side, come from Puerto Rico and Mexico. And so kind of get that mixing of a variety of cultures that was fun for me to grow up with and kind of experience. Yeah, I guess so like even from a young age, like favorite toy was Legos. And I have a lot of memories of just kind of playing with Legos and my parents, like in particular, my mom, because she's an educator, she did a lot of special ed work during her career. And so her in particular, kind of like encouraging me and like, I don't know, one of the things I remember is like, I built this little bridge thing and they kept like hyping up like, oh, okay, you're probably going to be like in some sort of engineering field or something like that. And even for a while, I mean, like, my brother was very interested in political science. And so I got to learn primarily about like US history. And I thought for a while, I was going to kind of go down that route. But especially in high school, a lot more of my academic interests performed very well in like math and science, in particular, like chemistry and physics. And so really got roped into actually a bridge building competition from my physics teacher. And from there, yeah, just kind of continually that affirmation of like, okay, you seem pretty good at these things. She considers a career in this direction. And it's kind of being in Miami, one of the things that I got really interested in was just renewable energy, like through the sort of physics courses and the engineering club that I was in. That was something we started learning more about was like, hey, this whole global warming thing is, you know, connected to the sort of technologies that we use. And part of the framing for me was like, okay, I still to this day, when I look out my window, I see like very few houses that actually have solar, even though, you know, Florida is considered like the sunshine state. And so it was kind of like, okay, why is this not the case? And the story that I kind of learned and told around that was, all right, a large part of it is that we don't have the renewable like energy storage technologies to make that happen yet. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to chemistry. This seems like chemistry is a connected sort of situation in that mix. And so from there, I mean, you know, got very good grades, good test scores, all of that sort of stuff, learned how to tell, I guess, the stories that, as far as I can tell, admissions people liked, and so was able to get into MIT for undergrad and pursue material science and engineering with a minor in mechanical engineering, because I was very involved in the electric vehicle team, because that was kind of part of how I took what seemed like more like heady, like theoretical concepts around what goes into renewable energy. And that felt like a way to practice it alongside a lot of the undergraduate lab research that I was doing around just generally battery and energy storage technologies. And so then I had a few opportunities to teach undergrad courses, but it was really just kind of like, okay, here's the textbooks, here's the same way that you learned it. Try and regurgitate this in a way that the students can then learn to regurgitate it after. So for me, it was really reflecting on it a bit. It was a lot of the sort of banking concept of education that comes from Paulo Freire's writings, which is like, you know, from the notes of one instructor to the board to the notes of a student that then become the notes of the next instructor sort of situation. And so kind of seeing that and also for me, part of it was like that story of, okay, you know, we can just get the renewable energy stuff down. I'll fix things. I was like, okay. I mean, I'm still kind of buying this, but something didn't sit as right with me about it. Like it didn't feel like it made something about it didn't track where it's like, okay, so I get to go shove myself off in a lab and not really see sunlight for hours on end and have that be how the world gets better. There was like a dissonance that I couldn't really place. And so in grad school, I continued through to material science and engineering on energy storage technologies. But also there, I got a lot more involved in like sort of anti-policing work in particular in the city and a lot of like anti-racist work in Ann Arbor. And so it's a grad school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is in Anishinaabe territory. And there, through a lot of that work and also a lot of our graduate student workers labor union, GEO, and a lot of general kind of community and labor organizing, also around environmental justice work. So for instance, like being part of the groups that were able to get university admission and divest from fossil fuels. A lot of those educational experiences outside of the classroom really kind of helps me to reflect and contextualize that dissonance that I was experiencing around how being shoved off in a lab somewhere and not really actually having engagement with even the people that ostensibly would be using the technologies we're developing just kind of didn't track for me. And so that really, I think, started to kind of open up a lot of, I guess, philosophical questions around like, why, like, how is this dominant form of knowledge constructed? How is it that the forms of research that I'm doing are legitimated? And how did these things all kind of tie into these notions of like sustainability and equity, right? And just kind of general improvements of the world. So in those ways, that's where I kind of started to feel some shifts, right? Like I had opportunities in grad school to be a GSI, so like a grad student instructor in a lab, in a material science and engineering lab course. And there, right, one of the modules was about batteries. And so I was like, okay, one of the things that I really got nothing of in my education was like around life cycle assessment or generally kind of the sort of connections and relationships that the really where things come from and where it is that they go. Aside from just, okay, these materials have come to our lab from whatever company we ordered them from, and then we're going to make something with them and then go throw them into some little white buckets that environmental health and safety deals with. Kind of expanding that notion of where materials are coming from and where materials are going. So taking a particular look at lithium mining in that course, just because my work was on lithium-based solid electrolytes at that point. And with the education I was getting outside of the classroom, really outside of the formal, I guess, STEM context that I was in, really helped me understand some of the relational dynamics of really just kind of extraction, right, in the context of South America, in the context, right, of currently the Southwest and a lot of those kind of battles that are happening around whether or not where lithium mines will be placed for these electric vehicles that are supposed to bring it around this energy, kind of renewable energy situation that makes everything better. And so kind of trying to problematize that narrative both for myself and how it is that I was contributing to that, and also making space for folks that I considered my peers, right, because even though they were undergrads, like, I was not too far removed from being an undergrad myself to even start questioning those things for themselves as well. And then that also kind of carried through to the last semester of grad school, which was the semester before I participated in the fire circles, where for reasons I was also teaching the sort of introduction to material science and engineering or GSI there. And there I can really start to see some of those, like, some of the ways that made a lot of systems of oppression were being projected into just the notions of materials and what materials were from the lead instructor and how it is that the way that he expected us to hold discussion sections was very kind of rigidly just throw information at the students and they will absorb it. And if they do not absorb it, they are not good students. Where that, you know, also didn't sit right with me, also kind of connected to a lot of philosophical underpinnings of how I understand now we have gotten into a lot of the predicaments that we're in. But in that kind of shifting more toward trying to make space for students to actually be human to each other. I like even giving them opportunities to have smaller discussions, do collaborative work together, which was not what you're supposed to be doing in the discussion section. It's called discussion. Why would you set this up in a way where we're not discussing things where it's just me lecturing at kids? If I can maybe interject a little bit is the summary. You have a strong motivation from your family. Right. And throughout your narrative, you keep speaking about about the story and the holistic approach rather than a singular academic approach that has been different. And as you're starting to talk about your students, I was wondering if you can't think of maybe one or two in particular without mentioning names. How did this how did your approach, your non-Western approach, your more holistic approach? How did you see it affecting your students? Yeah, I mean, so. On one end, it's. In particular, in the lab course, I. I saw a number of them meet it with a lot of difficulty, right? Like because in part, man, I think I remember talking about this in the fire circles, right? Like how just because of what is normalized deviations from that normal, like that normal got to be my resistance, right? Like just tell me the answer. Right. Like this sort of notion of like continuing this sort of notion of, OK, there is one right way here and I want to find it and it being rather difficult to try and push someone off of that or like help someone off of that trajectory if they want to go off of that trajectory and like any in any single course or any single kind of module. But. I mean, I could see how for some of the students, right? There were some alignments with. Wow. Yeah. Wait, why don't we think about this more sort of thing? But. And so I could see some of that. I could also see some of like the eyes glazing over like this. Can you just try to teach me battery things? This feels a bit far off from that. But I guess some of the like a couple of the students straight like. They did reach out after that semester and were like, you know, that was awesome. And because we were in the same department, I was able to continue relationships with them and have tried to help them along that direction to as it is that I moved down. It's really just thinking about these things more relationally than just like. The sort of very, I guess, I don't know if you use the philosophical terms or like positivist, like epistemological perspective where knowledge is just kind of out there to be discovered and then turned into something usable. But you really kind of predicated on like manipulation and control of things, which very intertwined with engineering, but they're like the dominant notions of engineering. But even just kind of making some space for students to talk about things like that basis that I don't know, I found in my journey, kind of like when I was at their stage to be very affirming and helpful. And so trying to kind of make more of that, which also connects to why it is that I've moved into engineering education from material science and engineering. Very good. Yeah, especially because that field of batteries needs creativity, right? Lithium isn't an answer, but maybe it's not the best answer. And I've seen I've seen some recent things where there's new materials coming up. And but that only happens if you get into a creative mode instead of thinking, oh, the teachers, it's their job to give me all the knowledge and I'll just sit here and receive it. But I'm glad that you brought out it's trying to break that cycle is not an easy thing because many of our students don't want to break that or at least they're so ingrained in it, it's hard for them to break out. Yeah. Right. And then I feel like it also kind of connects to like. The transition from like undergrad to grad school, especially the parts of grad school where like you're kind of you've moved through coursework for the most part and are like focused on research, right? Like part of what I saw was like so much of at least in engineering, like the. Education context that you are steeped in is the lab more so than the coursework and how it is that that's kind of like, you know, framed as your own like individual individualized kind of journey in ways where. You can push for a more isolated understanding of what you're doing, especially if it is that you don't have that sort of like connective infrastructure to help relate it to what the folks around you are doing. Yeah, I mean, with that, it did really push for a more kind of relational understanding of like, OK, you know, if it is that I'm feeling like I've just been in lab and not really interacting with others and this problem, these problems feel difficult and I don't know who to turn to. That feels like an entirely kind of different like emotional and relational context than like getting guidance from a number of people. And I guess, yeah, in my journey, it was kind of seeking guidance from nontraditional sources in the engineering field, which turned my professor for a loop for a long while. But he was sort of like, all right, I don't really get this, but do your thing. But was the professor helpful in or encouraging? Was that particular professor just kind of was he neutral, helpful or maybe did they do something that kind of tried to block? So I guess in that situation, I think it's really interconnected with the way that engineering is kind of framed as like this depoliticized field or like really in that way decontextualized, where a lot of what I was doing or like a lot of the sort of directions I was moving in were are deeply political. Right. Like if it is that we're talking about imperial relations underpinning and imperial like in colonial relations underpinning our ability to be in this place and get the materials that we work with to make whatever I am kind of questioning, who is this even for? Right. So because during my time in grad school, right, there was the coup in Bolivia that wasn't explicitly about lithium. But you saw folks like Elon Musk tweeting out like, well, cool, whoever we want to deal with it. And it's there's almost kind of like a wall that's constructed in terms of what it is that we're able to even talk about in the field. And so on one end, there's the sort of notion of D.I. that, you know, the institution has an investment in. And with that, it's very fuzzy. Right. So my professor was like down with D.I. things. But I think the sort of more. Right. Like actual like political aspects and shifting of ways of being to align with certain movements and historical tendencies, that is where I feel like it's just the sort of thing where he didn't have a good context for. And part of that, I think, is purposeful. Sort of stripping of the context, I think, is an important part of how it is that we're able to function to perform the work that we're expected to perform. But at the same time in, I guess, sort of those shifts, it is a kind of shift toward either like a rehumanization or like a I guess even a like different notion of the human and what it is that we're doing that I feel like the time module that we had in the professional development was really generative for me like reflecting on this, like not just thinking about, OK, we're moving from lithium ion to some next battery thing that we know is just going to get overtaken by some other next battery thing soon. But right. The sort of like time scale is a lot shorter. And so that longer time span that we discussed in the professional development was helpful in offering like sort of groundings around, yes, this can seem like it makes sense in some contexts. We can also step out of this context and question them and think about different contexts. Excellent. In fact, I was thinking you were the one who suggested the topic of time when we were in the fire circles. Is that correct? I think I might have done the place one on the place. OK. So we'll kind of switch over this. But but part of what you're saying to what I hear you saying to me is that your work as an educator is like you said, the students, you saw them as peers, your professors, maybe in the system of things are supervisors or colleagues. You saw them as this opportunity to this need to educate them as well, that they had a certain way of looking at things. But maybe by your work, it could broaden their horizons and all this professional development we need to do. I guess that was sort of my thing coming to the fire circles, as I say, so much professional development as this sort of in the Western mode of we've got that we're going to develop you. We have all the information as the developers of a professional development. Right. And all the people that are participants are sitting there grading this in. But we intentionally try to change that by having the participants be co-developers. I was thinking with time and it was kind of everything kind of came organically out of our discussions. But maybe if you could speak a little bit of how that experience, how did you experience fire circles, how it was maybe different than others or how what you what you got out of that? I can't say that I had been like in spaces particularly like the fire circles, but the ones that I feel like I had been in kind of closest to that, where it is that. I guess for me, the sort of notion of like no one knows everything, but together we know a lot kind of came into play that I've experienced from a lot of a lot more organizing spaces and how. I guess that sort of. Played out, right, like I feel like with the sort of expectation that someone might have either when it is that there's a notion of this is how it is or like this is how it's supposed to be or this is the way I feel like there's like a sort of heaviness that comes with that on my end from like having been an instructor and being like, OK, I need to prepare this well so that I can get this right, because if I teach them the wrong thing, then they're going to know the wrong thing and bad things are going to happen. And then on the student and the same sort of thing of like, OK, I need to be able to regurgitate this correctly. Otherwise, you know, I failed the thing and lessen life chances and all of that sort of stuff that comes from bad grades, like all of this kind of like projections that go into that. I guess relationship with knowledge and like where I feel like the fire circles. And it, you know, departed from that or didn't there didn't even take that as a starting point necessarily, which I was really grateful for. It was like. You know, we're going to come together, we're going to have conversations and what evolves of that walk that path together. And I thought it was very cool to not even have like, you know, a set direction of, OK, each week, here's what we're going to be talking about. But just kind of like having it develop organically. That's very validating. That's exactly what we're looking for. And I remember going through these is, you know, myself being in the academic, working on graduate work as well. These ideas of discussion forums and you read the articles and you have to cite who said what and where it was said. And it's all the focus is on that particular article. And I just when we went through the fire circles together, I was I was just so freeing that the article formed an outline or something for our discussions. But the discussions quickly were our experiences with the various things and how it affected us. And, yes, we brought in things from the article. So it was there. But the focus was it was like it was in another place. It was within us. It's the way I felt it developing. And it was myself having been involved in so much and I in professional development, like you said, this feeling that I have to get it right. I have to prepare. I have to, you know, all the stress. And this time we decided maybe because we didn't have a funding that we kind of did. We had applied for a grant. We didn't get it. That's fine. And so we decided to work together just because we were enjoying it. We went through sort of a first iteration where we were doing fire circles on ourselves and we were just suggesting reading. And we said, hey, this kind of works good. Let's see how other people like how can we get these things going developed organically. And it was it's good to hear that that you received it in the spirit it was intended. And especially as I get to know you more about your history and your the work you've been doing of how you want this holistic approach to a topic that is seen as being a cultural having no culture and no no perspective. No, it's just it is what it is. Right. Everything is connected. And that's and I learned so much about the concept of time. And I went in. Oh, I know what time is. No, I don't. They got disgusting and I hadn't thought of it in this way or that way. And I was just so liberating and how each participant had a particular view and and it was all valuable. So with that in mind, as a professional, how do you see the experience? How do you see yourself using that experience as you go forward and in building your your career as a as a STEM educator? I mean, to be honest, it really kind of helped me. Deconstruct the notion of professionalism a bit more, right, because I guess in my studies, right, one of the that became part of what I looked at in relation to engineering, because my thesis ended up being on abolitionist engineering, just kind of drawing from that particular movement and like lineage in relation to the policing working that I've that I've been doing in the city and how that connected to a number of events that played out through my graduate school experience. But also the ways that I guess I saw that, like these forms of knowledge or police, right, like or like what sort of ways of being are allowed to be considered, right? It's something like engineering. What's allowed to be considered? Something like who's allowed to be considered a mathematician, right? Like what these sort of notions of professionalism function to uphold. So in particular, there was a text by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the University of the Undercommons, where it is that they posit professionalism as like not right, sort of like an opening, but like an encircling of something. And so here, I feel like the experience kind of slips that notion where it almost felt like it kind of cracked through what I nominally understand professionalism to be. And in that way, I mean, like it has helped me kind of carry that forward, right? Like especially when you're talking about this having been an unfunded study, right? I think there's a lot of connections to like study as a concept in that way, but also a lot of the sort of work that I do now, right? I guess I'm funded, but it's not like the sort of ways that I'm coming together with people are like particularly funded, right? So bringing together folks for like abolitionist reading groups and engineering education to start kind of unpacking. How are we even here? What does this notion of engineering do, especially since I've moved to Purdue University, which is a land-grant institution, right? Like what the functions of land-grant institutions in relationship to the building of the settler state that is the United States, right? Like what does it mean to be here and continue to uphold these nominal notions of engineering as a profession really kind of start coming into play for me, right? And also some of the, I guess, ways that I even question what like are considered like education spaces, right? So after I guess like especially with that like place kind of discussion, one of the things that I got to do this semester was there were some Anishinaabe canoe builders that came to the Purdue Native American Educational and Cultural Center. And so I was able to kind of hang out with them for a couple of weeks and get to build a birch bark canoe. Yeah, right. So especially for me, like there was a reading from one of Leanne Simpson's texts with Robin Maynard, Rehearsals for Living, where she kind of went through relationships that she had to a canoe that she had bought, I think, after like when she got her first like academic job or something like that, and then kind of constructed a version of a canoe where she had relationships with the trees that were used in the construction, worked with an elder, and how the sort of the distinct forms of relationships and recognition of kind of life in the version within the second canoe, as opposed to the first one, where it's just the relationship is one of property. And how, yeah, I guess I get to that kind of was reflected in that experience of building the canoe with, I guess, Wayne and Lawrence and Timber and all of the folks that had come down for that, and then being able to launch it in the Wabash River. Some of the folks there had said, you know, that sort of work hadn't been done for centuries. And I was like, you know, to me, this process here, right, this sort of reforming of these sort of relationships, because, right, Purdue, my understanding, right, is on Pottawatomie lands, amongst other nations, right, but like, and so it's like that kind of having been able to take place there, not to be particularly significant. Actually, he named the canoe the Three Flyers. This sort of professional development kind of helped me open up to education doesn't need to be in the classroom. It doesn't need to be in my sort of office space. It can be whatever I've been learning in whatever sort of spaces that people learn in. Right. I was noticing that in your email signature, the mention of the fire, and because of where you came from, from Michigan and the land acknowledgement that you had on your signature. And it's just nice to see this, the relationality. I'm in Arizona, somewhere in Michigan, somewhere in Texas. We were all from all these places, but it seems like we're all drawn to the same place because of relationality. And we began our discussion when we came on is actually we didn't record that part. But you had mentioned that you don't want to push yourself forward as an indigenous educator. But part of the part of my goal, I am an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. So it's Anishinaabe Cree. However, I don't call myself an indigenous person because I have that card and I have that that lineage necessarily, although that lineage did because I listened to my uncles and my grandfather, their stories that did invite me. But it's not just the fact that I have that blood quantum that qualifies me to be an enrolled member. That I don't see is what makes me an indigenous person. It's the experience is much like what you had of being with elders who have lived it. In fact, I used to call myself a paper Indian because all I knew about being an Indian was what I read. And I didn't I didn't feel like it was real, you know, until I started having similar types of experiences. And that's part that you're bringing into this holistic approach to material experiences or how we view them. And this relationality part is is what I like to see is is I want people to start thinking we can become indigenous. You know, like I grew up in the city, so I wouldn't say I started off as an indigenous person, but I through my life course, I've I've learned to become indigenous rather than industrial of one who views property and such. And in working with many I've worked with several other Jewish people. And one of the things when we discuss like to get to know each other a little bit better, like we've been doing is Jewish people come from a culture of tribes, 12 tribes of Israel, you know, and we talked about and we could see so many connections because of our cultural backgrounds. And and so that's kind of what this idea of the fire circles is trying to include this inclusivity that we become indigenous when we have indigenous experiences and we when we pull ourselves towards those and those relationality. So that I hadn't heard about your experience with the birch bark. I would have just I've always wanted to build on myself, but I've never had that experience yet. So I'll have to hopefully that will open up for me as well sometime. I'm thinking with all that you've been through, what type of advice maybe do you have to other educators as they as they look to broaden out really the the holistic approach so that our education as we educate, we're also protecting ours because we're at it. We're at a critical stage is if we just keep doing what we've been doing from the Industrial Revolution on, we continue on that track. We're not going to be here. The earth will probably recover eventually after several thousands of years or something, but we won't be here to see it. So what kind of advice do you have to stem educators as far as experiencing some of the things you have and getting that framework? I guess part of how I feel like I was even able to get to this conversation today is. Through. Even just, I don't know, depending on where you're starting from, like starting with an under like learning about whose land you're on, right, like wherever you are, these are someone's ancestral territories and those people write the overwhelming majority, right? Like colonialism has exterminated some groups of people, but the overwhelming majority still do exist in various places, right? They might have been dislocated from their homelands, but that doesn't mean that like those sort of relations can't be regenerated because part of it for me was the understanding. And I've seen Max Lieberman write about this, particularly in pollution is colonialism of the distinction between like lowercase L land and capital L lands of right, this sort of how it's not just. This is there, but it's reflective of, you know, a number of life forms and beings and even all of the kind of spirits and spiritual aspects that are enmeshed in that place and how even just coming to reflect on that for myself has been a lot, right? It kind of has pushed me, especially in thinking with the Anishinaabe, like Seven Fires prophecy of really trying to wear the face of brotherhood in this time and thinking kind of with that sort of longer view of what sort of histories am I teaching, even what sort of stories am I telling, right? Because in the especially in the sort of ways that right, this positivism, right, kind of one right way from knowledge, kind of helping function as a control and ordering mechanism, how that in and of itself is reflective of a story that in and of itself has lineages, right? It's not just this came out of nowhere, right? This form of understanding the work is constructed. And so being able to sit with that and understand there are different ways of understanding the world that are equally, if not honestly, in my opinion, more valid and gaining that understanding of how it is that power kind of functions to maintain what is considered normal and how that kind of plays into classroom settings, right? Especially with like the sort of dynamics that you see in classes in particular, right? Like Paulo Freire and Bell Hooks are a couple of folks that I draw on right where it is that Bell Hooks talks about like the work of self actualization in the class and how it is that if that's something that you're continually striving for, it will be reflected in the sort of pedagogy that you engage because it's at least my understanding, right? It reflects not a sort of fixed way of being, but a way of being that's continually kind of in transition. Yeah. And so even, I guess, kind of with that kind of being open to, I guess, in STEM spaces, right? More kind of like discussion, I would say, right? Kind of inviting more perspectives and kind of focusing more on the sort of relationships that you're holding to the spaces that you're able to convene in with your students, right? As people that are also you are learning alongside, right? And even that kind of shifting to, I am learning alongside the folks that are labeled as my students in this academic context while being able to kind of work with the power kind of differentials that are put onto us in the academy or in the education spaces, right? It's sort of like teacher-student dynamic. But yeah. Pharee talks about it as like, you know, kind of moving from like teacher and student as like two separate things to like a teacher-student or a student-teacher where it's like, you know, maybe because I have more experience in this situation, I can tell more stories and I can speak with maybe a bit more authority or kind of groundedness in a way, but that doesn't invalidate the directions that you're coming at, what we're trying to get at together from. Knowledge always flows in two directions. It flows out and it flows back. And yes. And it's a web of understanding rather than hierarchical knowledge, which again, we find ourselves in this place where we need some new solutions. We need some creativity and, you know, we're not going to get anywhere good unless we change our mindset, I guess, is what you're saying, to accept that we might not, maybe we don't set a destination because when we set a destination, we're determined to get there. Maybe that's not the place we need to get, but we set the relational environment that we want to achieve. And when we have that relational, that connectedness, then the good things will happen. This has been an amazing conversation. I've learned so much from you. And I look forward to going through this podcast and learning more as I review it again. So I thank you so much. And I want to just give you a last opportunity with no question, but any comment that you might want to leave us with. You've left us with so many good ones, so many good things to think about, but also offer the opportunity for anything that comes from your heart. I don't know. I guess it's like on that last bit, one of the sort of notions that I've been thinking with is like the process is the product. So like exactly what you were saying, like how it is that the sort of situations are, I guess Miriam Cabo is an abolitionist educator that I look to a lot. Talks about the best containers, right? What sort of the containers that you're existing and you're co-creating are in and of themselves are kind of like the way that you're able to make anything happen. And so with that, yeah, I don't know. I was very grateful for the opportunity to participate in the fire circles and get to start building a relationship with you. And yeah, I'm going to say thank you for that. Thank you, Joey. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening to as the little crow flies straight talk from indigenous communities. We hope this discussion has helped you think about education within your context and how you can help students to be more successful in understanding themselves, their communities and their lives.
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