The Stories Our Students Carry

Interactive Transcript

Speaker A Brought to you by Moonbeam Multimedia.

Speaker B This is sixteen to one, a podcast about education, teaching and learning.

Speaker A Hi.

Speaker B Hello. Hey. Hello.

Speaker A This week is moderately important for the podcast because we're back, but most important because Taylor Swift is back tomorrow. Okay.

Speaker B Okay.

Speaker A We are two showgirls. She is a showgirl.

Speaker B We are all showgirls. Wow.

Speaker A Thoughts. Let's just jump right in.

Speaker B Swifty deep. Okay. You survived your school's homecoming.

Speaker A I did.

Speaker B There was a parade, there was a.

Speaker A Dance, there was much jubilee game ceremony. There was five days of pep rallies, which I don't plan much of the pep rallies, except for to support the.

Speaker B Teachers in your life. Don't tell you enough about the strange and unexpected parts of planning community and school events. Like, they don't tell you what happens when a car wrecks through a vendor shop that's selling you something that you need for an event. They don't tell you how to respond to that or how to respond to the last minute closure and paving of a road that might be a part of your parade route, for example. They don't tell you how to navigate those things in teacher training programs.

Speaker A I really, you know, I value my degrees. They haven't been much use, is what I would say. I also remember being told so many times in my undergraduate, in my graduate, all of it, that teaching is trial by fire. You just have to get in and do it. And I always thought that that was like kind of a weak answer because I was like, tell me, prepare me. Yeah, like, help me out. And then now I'm like, I could not prepare you for the next five minutes if I tried.

Speaker B Yes.

Speaker A My favorite thing to say is that's a sentence. Because the amount of times I've said something or heard something out loud that I've never thought would be strung together just like calls for a wow. We said that and meant it. And, you know, that's like, what Mark the event. That's what teaching is. I will say, though, and I need to tell my friends this because I have a really good group of coworkers and really good friends who help it and do this all with us. And one of my students today asked me if I was sad it was over. And I was like, no, I'm not sad. It's over. And he goes, I felt like every time I looked down at all of you teachers on the floor, like you were just having the time of your life. And. And I was like, we are. We really are. Like, we have so much fun together.

Speaker B Well, I'm glad that you conveyed that.

Speaker A To them, and I'm glad that my kids see it. And this is a kid who did not come down and participate in these events and so that was fun to hear from him.

Speaker B Well, before we jump into the main topic today, just want to remind you, go ahead and sign up for the sixteen one Podcast email newsletter to get the latest updates, episode announcements, resources and workshop offerings from Moonbeam Multimedia. That is us. And if there's a story in your local educational community that you think we should cover, we would love to hear about it. Please contact us using our website or write to us@hello61.com America's education system is trapped inside a pressure cooker. Over the last decades, as political and economic tensions have increased, a sharp decline in college enrollment has caused a permanent change in the way schools recruit and retain students in public education, legislative gridlock at both the federal and state levels has held up reforms such as here in Ohio, where since 1997's landmark Ohio Supreme Court ruling, De Rolf v. The State of Ohio, students have attended public schools that operate under an unconstitutional funding model. As schools struggled to do more with less and to keep up with what feels like the astronomical pace of technological and workforce change, many people are questioning long held assumptions about the purpose and relevance of formal education. This public debate, though often emotionally charged and politically attuned, reflects conversations that educators themselves have in staff meetings, in teacher training programs, and in research institutions around the country every day. What is essential to learn in school? Who has the right to decide what, when, and how we learn? Why, after decades of attempts at reform, do inequities in our schools persist or even worsen? How can teachers prepare students to recognize and address real problems in their communities and in society? In American schools, these more abstract policy debates come crashing down onto the desks of classroom teachers and professors for whom these existential questions take on very practical forms. How do I convey what my students need to know in a way that's truly accessible?

Speaker A Culturally responsive pedagogy is teaching that acknowledges that learning never happens in a vacuum. Students arrive in classrooms carrying histories, traditions, languages, and identities that shape how they make sense of new knowledge. In American colleges of education and psychology, practitioners have for years been exploring what might happen when teachers make an effort to take those realities seriously. Teacher candidates are often introduced to culturally responsive pedagogy as a framework for thinking about curriculum and instruction, and researchers use it as a lens for analyzing how teaching can either reproduce inequities or open up space for empowerment. Related areas of scholarship, such as critical race theory have become flashpoints in recent public discourse. But the core questions that animate culturally responsive pedagogy are not new and they're not partisan. They are the same questions that teachers have always faced and will always face. What knowledge matters, and how do we ensure that every student has a meaningful place in a community of learning? We've explored questions like this before. For example, check out our episode 116 on social learning theory, where we covered thinkers like Albert Bandura and Lev Vygotsky. Those psychologists showed us that thinking and learning go beyond purely private processes happening inside our heads. Education is shaped by interaction, by who is talking to us, and the cultural tools we have picked up over time.

Speaker B Educators and researchers who are advancing culturally responsive pedagogy test, refine, and reimagine their theories with real students in complex and diverse learning environments. Dr. Louis C. Mall, who passed away in 2024 after a distinguished career in educational psychology research and teaching, was well known for his study of how the culture of one's home impacts how we learn. Moll, who literally wrote the book on Lev Vygotsky, LS Vegetti in education, was a keen observer of Latino family and home life in the U.S. he studied how students families, each with their own traditions, relationships to work and leisure, cultural practices and social histories, follow learners into the classroom and end up peeking through in essays in classroom behaviors, in club participation or lack thereof, or in how they choose to navigate friendships at school. Mal's research strategy involved visiting households to better understand the wealth of wisdom particular to each day generated by the family's practical experiences and intersections with others, at work and at play. He referred to these chunks of wisdom as funds of knowledge, which he documented in detail. Mal was especially concerned with Head Start and early childhood education programs, where he felt teachers had a special opportunity to document and adapt students funds of knowledge. There's always a filter in the acquisition of knowledge, moll observed, and he used what he learned about those filters to support educators in schools serving large populations of Mexican American famil with the goal of providing more responsive and tailored educational supports.

Speaker A He believed that teachers likewise bring personal funds of knowledge to their classrooms, which to mul were not separate from professional skills but integral to their development. Communities are only made stronger when we learn from each other. Sharing our experiences in our classrooms build more confident students, improves their well being, and allows opportunities to learn about and develop collaborative social methods.

Speaker B Two of the most influential scholars who have worked on the relationship between culture and pedagogy are Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings and Dr. Geneva Gay, who in the 1990s and early 2000s translated their insights into practical approaches to curriculum and instruction. Where Moll highlighted the funds of knowledge that families and teachers carry, Ladson, Billings and Gay showed how those funds could be activated in classrooms to foster achievement, engagement, and critical awareness. Let's talk a little bit about culturally relevant teaching first. This was popularized by Dr. Gloria Ladson Billings.

Speaker A If it's culturally relevant teaching, then it connects the curriculum and the instruction to the students lived experiences. But it also is developing their ability to critique those same social systems that they've been raised in, that they're living in, that they've experienced. It's not the only part of teaching that's ever going to be happening. It's just one part of a bigger puzzle that teachers should be implementing, in my opinion, into their classroom to allow voices and opinions and things like that to come through. As a high school teacher especially, the culture changes so rapidly. What they're into, what they're not, what they're watching, what they're listening to. And I have to pay attention to those things or else I'm going to understand them even less than I already do.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A One of the examples for Latin Billing was of the importance of teachers allowing a student to use their home language in a classroom. It's not only for people learning a second language or something like that, but it's also even allowing them to communicate in ways that feel normal. What I mean by that is, you know, when, when I hit the door, I miss day. And the way I communicate is different from how Katie speaks.

Speaker B You're code switching.

Speaker A Exactly. And so my students are doing the same thing. And for Latson Billing, one of the things that they actually found was that allowing students to use their home language helped build a stronger community in the classroom and also built trust and a stronger rapport. But part of the requirement was that they had to tell you what it meant, which I love. So they don't just get to use a phrase that doesn't make sense or speak a sentence or something like that. They have to tell the teacher what it means, which builds part of that trust. It's seen as kind of a give and take of like progress and willingness to understand better another culture or language or. Yeah, even jargon, slang.

Speaker B There's even like idiomatic expression like, can be super important to communication for, especially for young learners. And like, those don't always. For sure those don't always translate well or like the meaning just isn't accessible across. Across cultural divide. So it's interesting to think about incorporating those into regular classroom practice.

Speaker A Yeah. I remember growing up in a rural part of Ohio, and my teacher's telling probably me and also my friends to not talk like hicks, rednecks, and that.

Speaker B Was something we heard.

Speaker A You know what I mean?

Speaker B Hicks and rednecks don't talk like that.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B Basically, don't speak as though you're uneducated.

Speaker A Exactly. Language is so much more than just.

Speaker B Those, than some arbitrary signifier of educational attainment.

Speaker A And so that's something I've had to really work on in my classroom because I remember being so annoyed by, like, dumb phrases or being like.

Speaker B Like, slang teenager phrases. Yeah.

Speaker A Or just being like, you know, when bruh came around, I was like, I'm not your bruh. And now I accept bruh, because I'm like, well, you didn't call me something much worse.

Speaker B The word dude is stuck into my brain. I have a real hard time not using that word.

Speaker A You do like that word.

Speaker B It was just, you know, the thing that got baked in. In my adolescence.

Speaker A And so earlier in my career, I would be, like, so annoyed by, like, the dumb trends or the phrases or the slang or whatever. And now I just, like, kind of lean into the goofy of it. And, like, I really had to remind myself that, like, I grew up at a time saying, like, was up and, like, stupid stuff. And me doing that is no different than them calling me unk or something like that.

Speaker B That's a new one that I've heard.

Speaker A Yeah. Unk was really shifted my world a couple weeks ago. And so, you know, at first this year, I was like, I'm already tired of the 6, 7 joke. And it's not even a joke. It's just a bad trend at this point.

Speaker B They're just memes.

Speaker A They're memes. But now when it happens, we just, like, lean in and get extra into it. And then they're like, okay.

Speaker B Understanding the way that meme culture works for teenagers, it's difficult to do because, first of all, it's just very difficult to keep up with whatever they're talking about. But it's also difficult to redirect those energies into more.

Speaker A Right.

Speaker B I guess I'm just saying it can be disruptive.

Speaker A That's all it can be. Yeah, I remember that. I can still quote mean girls.

Speaker B Sure.

Speaker A And I have to remind myself that, like, I am some glob of all of these things as well, just as my kids are. They're enjoying this time, just like I did with my friends. Now, do I think that that's maybe exactly what Ladson Billings was doing. Maybe not verbatim, but I think it fits. I really do think it fits.

Speaker B Yeah, no, they're definitely more concerned. Both Ladson Billings and Gay are both concerned more with race and ethnicity in the classroom specifically. You just don't have a lot of that going on in your extremely white school district.

Speaker A No, not a lot.

Speaker B You have a different approach to culturally relevant teaching because you have to.

Speaker A So. Yeah, but I mean, you know, we have foreign exchange students and that's part of conversations. And even sometimes the difference in religions and things like that are part of it too. It happens in lots of ways.

Speaker B Okay, well, let's talk about culturally responsive teaching. This was the term popularized by Dr. Geneva Gay. Core focus here kind of similar. We're responding to students cultural backgrounds to make learning more effective. Kind of do that with as much as we can inclusive and adaptive instructional practices, doing everything you just mentioned building rapport, you know, engagement, learning through cultural awareness and relevance. This kind of comes out through Geneva Gay's work by things like noticing that we've integrated our schools, but not necessarily the tables in the lunchroom. So this looks like understanding the media that students are consuming. Like, you were just talking about books, music, movies, games, social media trends, annoying phrases, TikTok awareness of different worldviews, religious practices, traditions, learning about their families and communities, and having explicit conversations on code switching. You've done that with your students. I remember even on the pod you've mentioned they were asking questions about the way Kamala Harris was communicating to different voter populations in the election.

Speaker A And they saw it as a inability to be herself.

Speaker B Yeah, they found it inauthentic to code switch.

Speaker A Right. And that conversation was really interesting because then I talked to them about how they're code switching right now. Because they are when they speak to me, you know, and so am I. We all are. So. Yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker B Yeah. So just some examples that came from Dr. Gay's work. This looks like curricular choices that present more accessible narratives that make more sense for students. Real life experiences and their like, you know, storytelling traditions, sensitivity to different communication styles. So that might mean something like an emphasis on oral tradition over written within a certain community. So you might be doing something more like call and response or discussion style where you might otherwise have been using written assignments, Something like that. Really kind of digging into the fine line between academic, rigorous and acknowledging structural barriers to achievement. And then just like acknowledging diverse points of view, especially when covering history, historical events. For Dr. Gay, this meant Stuff like acknowledging the accounts of black men in the Union army when talking about the American Civil War.

Speaker A That's interesting.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A I realize much too late that I'm getting a lot further with a lot less when the kids see me buy into them, like who they are and their interests and whatever, and that if I can build trust and rapport from the ground up, then like, the rest will come and. And then they will trust me with these things. They will trust me to handle these things, and that's the best I can do.

Speaker B What does that look like? Just showing them that you're curious about them or.

Speaker A Yeah, I mean, it's like. It's like a million little things, you know? Like, all of my seniors right now think that the Lorax is the funniest movie. I don't know why. I mean, I've never seen it, so maybe it is a really interesting movie.

Speaker B I speak for the trees.

Speaker A Okay. So I have to watch the Lorax soon. So it is. It's just like all of these goofy things. I have a big group of boys right now who are all playing Red Dead Redemption. You play that game?

Speaker B I do.

Speaker A Or have started playing that game and so I have doubt at it. Well, the good news is though, is that it has given me nuggets to talk to them about.

Speaker B Yes. Of cultural relevance. Your kids are really into the tuberculosis then?

Speaker A My kids make a lot of tuberculosis jokes because of Red Dead Redemption. And I had to be like, what are we joking about? So I find myself googling a lot of weird things and.

Speaker B Or you always got to make sure that whatever they're talking about is appropriate too. That's also a challenge.

Speaker A I would. That's the hardest part of my job. Okay. Okay.

Speaker B Like, is this quite literally school appropriate?

Speaker A No.

Speaker B That's the first thing you got to figure out.

Speaker A It's usually no.

Speaker B Okay. Our conversation so far has centered on scholars who study how race and ethnicity shape culturally responsive teaching. That's where a lot of the fundamental scholarship has developed. But these basic principles like honoring students lived experiences, connecting classroom learning to community knowledge, creating educational communities that reflect students cultural identities. Those things are just as important in places like rural Ohio where you teach like what you just like what you're talking about. On paper, schools in Appalachian Ohio look fairly homogeneous. This is just to kind of use an example from around here. 90% of the population in this area in Appalachian Ohio is white. Most students come from working in middle class families or whatever's left of middle class families in homes where adults commute 15 minutes or more to work usually through a landscape where a third of the land is farmland and most of the rest is forests. That's all just to point out exactly where I work.

Speaker A Yeah, yeah, that's exactly where I work.

Speaker B But that's not a geography that's familiar to all of our listeners. And it is always interesting to me how much geography is destiny. So many issues of school and culture fall out of the fact that we are situated. How we're situated here, like we're already talking about culture is not absent here. It runs in rhythms of work and in family traditions, religious and civic life. And there's also a really strong sense of place that comes from living in tight knit communities here. Scholars of rural schooling, especially in Appalachia, have long noted that these regional cultural identities are less visible in national conversations about diversity and equity, and they tend to attract less research and policy attention too. This is where work of scholars like Dr. Amy Price Azano, who is the founding director of the center for Rural Education at Virginia Tech, becomes relevant to Azano has studied how rural students can be overlooked in national conversations about education, their lives and communities either left out of curricular development or described mainly in terms of poverty and decline. That's pretty familiar, I would say. She raises questions of what it might look like to approach rural students with culturally responsive teaching. And scholars are applying similar approaches across many different communities. With Indigenous students, Brian McKinley Jones Brayboy has advanced the framework for understanding how cultural knowledge shapes schooling in Native communities. Sarah Dryden Peterson at the Harvard Graduate School of Education has studied refugee education, asked how classrooms can build belonging and continuity for students whose schooling has been disrupted by displacement. Others have worked with English language learners and bilingual students. Some have focused on financial literacies. And yet others explore disability communities, faith traditions, or the effects of double marginalization. And really the beauty and challenge of public education, which I know you understand, is that learners from many varied cultural backgrounds are invited to the table. That work is definitely not simple and it's kind of never finished. But it's also what makes for the sort of teacher that you remember for the rest of your life. Here's looking at you. A lot of your students seem to remember you many years later. So let me just open it up for some question here. Let me grill you. Who decides what knowledge matters?

Speaker A I would say the Department of Education.

Speaker B State departments of education are the knowledge brokers right now.

Speaker A I would say that they. They are some factor of it. Yeah, for sure, because you have a national standards or whatever it might.

Speaker B I mean teacher training programs Too, to.

Speaker A Some extent, I would say they're part of it. I would say that I have become much more inclined to ask my students what they want to know and then try to build around those things.

Speaker B How do you balance what they want to know with the sense that there's something that they ought to know that they don't know yet?

Speaker A I think that question is difficult to answer for a lot of reasons, but I think especially because it's such a teacher by teacher response. Right. So I currently still have a lot of control over what I teach in my classroom. We have. We do not have like a prescribed curriculum or something like that.

Speaker B Meaning like a. Like a district mandated. Right. Okay. There's not overreaching from a top down.

Speaker A Right.

Speaker B Okay.

Speaker A It seems that it's coming, but it hasn't arrived yet. I would say that I decide what knowledge matters based on my understanding of my students, and that happens by way of my lessons, their questions, their interests, all kinds of things.

Speaker B What part of that, if any, is constant from year to year? Where's the balance between being responsive but needing to hit certain goals or objectives in the classroom?

Speaker A I think for me, that answer varies by what, what class? I'm talking about my 10th graders. It's. There's a little bit less flexibility because they're a state tested group for my seniors. This is the first time I've been back to teaching this group of seniors in 12 years. So that's a very different answer right now. And that's because they're an untested group and they're a new population. We're figuring a lot of it out together. But I can do that with them because of the more relaxed nature of senior English as compared to my 10th graders, which are tested by the state every year.

Speaker B Okay. That kind of leads me to another question, which is like, how do you measure the success of culturally relevant teaching? Does it look like measuring success in other frameworks or approaches?

Speaker A No.

Speaker B So the goal isn't necessarily like raising test scores or preparing for college or career here. Because again, you're like blending this approach together with a sensitivity to academic rigor and all of this stuff. It's a really careful balancing act.

Speaker A I'm still figuring that part out. What is it for each kid? Right. Do I look at my class as a whole? Do I consider it as a success that we did a new book, that we completed the project where I felt like people were hitting the goals of the assignment? Is it really deep, rich conversations? Is it like engagement? Is it willingness? Is it effort, curiosity? Exactly how curious they are. Exactly. And, and my group of seniors, they're, they're a pretty curious bunch. They ask a lot of good questions. We're reading 1984 by George Orwell right now, and we have great conversations. They ask great questions. If anything, I feel that I'm holding them back right now because they're moving quicker than the pace that we're reading with some of it. And so I would say now, if we're having a really good conversation, if we're really digging in, that's success to me.

Speaker B Mm.

Speaker A And I think kids a lot of times think like, oh, I got Ms. Day off track and we talked for 20 minutes. But they don't realize that there's learning and, and we're doing a lot of it together, which is fun.

Speaker B I'm gonna use myself as an embarrassing example for this next question, which is how do we avoid falling into stereotyping and othering people when we're trying to practice culturally responsive pedagogy for the listeners. This is like two brightest whites women having this conversation for the record. So, like, we know that our likelihood of stepping in it here is high. I'll use this example, which.

Speaker A My mouth is open, my foot is large.

Speaker B I'll use an example from my own life where I had to. I was so immediately and aggressively humbled. But I was talking with. This was in a teacher training program. Okay. I was talking with a classmate of mine, and this is an example where I had to starkly and immediately recognize my own, like, Eurocentric background, small world perspective, or like. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A So what happened?

Speaker B Well, I was just having, if I recall correctly, we were having a conversation about the academic calendar and Jewish religious holidays. But I kept insisting to this person who happened to be a Jewish student, we were talking about law and different conceptions of law in these religions, Christianity and Judaism. And I kept referring to the Old Testament, like over and over and over again to this, to this girl who was like. And I, you know, I was raised in a, in a very singularly minded town with respect to Christianity. It was very white, very Christian, very conservative.

Speaker A WASPy.

Speaker B Yes, it was very WASPy. I was jumping from there into this very diverse graduate school environment. So anyway, I was just like, old Testament this, Old Testament that. She's like, are you talking about the Hebrew Bible?

Speaker A And you were like, the what?

Speaker B And I was like, oh, yes.

Speaker A In fact, silly me, that is the Old Testament.

Speaker B So anyway, I strongly deserved the horrific shame that I felt.

Speaker A How did she handle it? Okay, well, she like a good spoiler.

Speaker B No, she was extremely gracious and patient with me. But it only takes really a few minutes like that in your life before you start to realize that the stuff that you think of as being normal is actually a perspective, a limited perspective, a window into the world that you have that is unique to you because of your own limited cultural exposure.

Speaker A That reminds me a lot of the TED Lasso quote, be curious, not judgmental.

Speaker B Yes.

Speaker A Like, that was exactly the moment you were living. Was.

Speaker B Well, that's become my life mantra very much. And now I try really, really hard to put my foot in my mouth less aggressively, especially when I feel like I have strong convictions. The observation there is that there's a way in which small town, like rural conservative, this, all this stuff we're talking about, these cultural factors can make students inclined to be a little bit dogmatic and not realize it. Like, they can show up in places not equipped to understand that they're. That their small slice of the world, of experience, of life, their small slice of that has baked in assumptions that are not shared by everyone everywhere.

Speaker A And I mean, doesn't that, like, entirely recontextualize the Old Testament to you too, to think of it as.

Speaker B Yeah, it ought to.

Speaker A Yeah. So, like, I'm just saying though, like, what a cool moment for you to then be like. To see this text in its place in multiple ways. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B This is another moment with this, again, a religious thing. But I remember I was like, helping out with some sort of summer camp that some high school students were doing, and we were reading something from the Bible. We're giving it a secular reading, but we're still taking it seriously. And I remember one student having his mind absolutely blown by the process of reading his particular sacred religious text as if it were just like any other book. He's like, oh, I can. I can just read this like a book. And I'm like, well, it is a book, but we don't. But it's so much. It's not just a book. So anyway, that kind of sensitivity where you can have people on totally different planets with respect to these questions, it's really. It's really striking. Do you have a sense of how your students respond to your attempts at culturally relevant teaching? Does it go well? Does it not go well? Is it awkward?

Speaker A I think it goes pretty well, yeah, for the most part.

Speaker B Okay.

Speaker A I do think it's something I do well, is I can laugh at myself. I think you have to be able to do that in teaching. This year I'm co teaching with a special Ed teacher in my classroom a few periods of the day. And one of the groups she's with me is 10th graders. And she was on one corner of the room, I was on the other. That's kind of how we divide and conquer. And I heard someone say, are you looking up corn? And from across the room, it didn't sound like corn.

Speaker B Oh.

Speaker A And I was like. I looked at her, and we made eye contact, and her face wasn't, like, worried. So I was like, okay, what are they doing back there? And then I heard someone else say, what is the price of corn? It took me a minute, but I realized that they were literally looking up the price of corn to sell. Huh. But from across the room, it sounded like we were about something that teenagers Chromebooks taken away. Right, right, right. I remember thinking to myself, surely we're not looking up, you know? And then also I was like, oh, we're actually looking up the price of corn.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A Because that does actually deeply affect my students personally. Yeah. And so have I ever been so aware of the fluctuations in corn pricing? No. You know what?

Speaker B Just another day of teaching in a rural classroom.

Speaker A Teaching in Appalachia. Okay. It's a million little things.

Speaker B A million little things and the price of corn. Okay, let's wrap up by covering what we learned in the last couple of weeks.

Speaker A So part of the senior class is letting them tell me things they want to learn. And a lot of them wanted to learn the CPR and the Heimlich and talk to our school nurse about things. So I brought in our school nurse for a day, and I learned how to do CPR and the Heimlich on babies and small children.

Speaker B Wow.

Speaker A It's very practical. It's one of those things that, you.

Speaker B Know, I heard you talking about the. The rhythm of cpr. Right.

Speaker A When we started the school year, we had a day with just a freshman. And one of the things that they did was CPR training. And last year, the really popular song, and still is popular, was Pink Pony Club by. So she taught us last year. Our school nurse taught us last year that if you couldn't remember Staying Live by the Bee Gees for your compressions, then you could use.

Speaker B This is culturally relevant teaching.

Speaker A It is like Staying Alive by the.

Speaker B Bee Gees are gonna be like, what.

Speaker A Are you talking about now? When you start singing Staying Alive, they usually do recognize. And so the school nurse was like, oh, yeah. Pink Pony Club is about the right beats per minute if you're doing chest compressions to remind yourself of. And so she came in and she taught us some things and it was really great. And they got to ask some really good questions. And she had also been a labor and delivery nurse, so that was really fun. And I have some students who are thinking about pre med or nursing or STNA or, you know, LPNs and things like that. So it was a really fun conversation, but very good, very important. What about you?

Speaker B Well, I was just doing a little daydreaming to myself about YA literature that I thought accurately depicted Appalachian geography and culture, maybe just kind of offhandedly. And I was wondering to myself, do I feel like Hunger Games does that? Suzanne Collins?

Speaker A I think so.

Speaker B Hunger Games does fall into the. The trap discussed of depicting Appalachian culture primarily in terms of poverty and decline. But it is a fictional future dystopia. So to be fair, poverty and decline, doing a little bit kind of part of the work there.

Speaker A But I mean, that's, that's what the Hunger Games are. So.

Speaker B Yeah, this one.

Speaker A Hunger Games don't exist, unfortunately.

Speaker B That's the point of the story. Her heroes are from District 12, which in her world is the coal mining region that roughly is equivalent to Appalachia, West Virginia. Yeah, right. We could do a whole episode on whether or not that's an accurate depiction. But the one thing that I did learn while I was reading about all of this was that Suzanne Collins wrote for Nickelodeon.

Speaker A No way.

Speaker B She wrote for television. In addition to having written books, she wrote for Little Bear, which was one of my all time favorite shows growing up. I love Little Bear cartoon. And she also wrote for Clarissa Explains it all, which was another favorite of mine.

Speaker A Also a classic.

Speaker B Sassy. She's what, in middle school? I think she's like a younger girl. High school.

Speaker A Yeah.

Speaker B Anyway, she was one that sat on.

Speaker A The window bench, right?

Speaker B That sounds right.

Speaker A I always really wanted the window seat like that because she had one. That show. I asked my parents like repeatedly if I could have a window seat like that and they wouldn't redo the house. I don't know why.

Speaker B Oh, rude. Any final thoughts? Parting shots?

Speaker A I don't think so. I feel like so many episodes I'm like, that's just good teaching.

Speaker B Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A But this is just good teaching.

Speaker B Well, I think that about wraps it. We will talk to you again in two weeks.

Speaker A Bye. Bye.

Speaker B Bye. Hello listeners, and thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of sixteen to One. This show is produced by a two woman team. Your co hosts, Katy Day, our lead researcher and social media manager, and Chelsea Adams. That's me. I edit and produce the show and I also make the music you hear in our episodes. Please consider subscribing to the show or recommending it to a friend or colleague. We love word of mouth support. Visit our website at 16to1.com for show notes and resources or to get in touch with us. 16 to 1 is sponsored by Moonbeam Multimedia, a firm that partners with civic innovators, educators and mission driven organizations to help create stronger communities. The Tootsie Trawler after your treats.

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