Back to School Special: Teaching Love & Learning Freedom w/ Dr. Carla Shalaby

Many of you are already working to get your classrooms ready and will be welcoming students for the first day in the next couple of weeks, if you haven’t already. It’s a magical and stressful time of year, so we wanted to release Dr Carla Shalaby’s 2024 Conference to Restore Humanity keynote as a “back to school” special podcast. Carla speaks so powerfully to her own practical experience of human-centered education and why we do what we do: moving away from control, surveillance, and punishment, towards a model based on collective care, inclusion, and restorative practice. We hope you find it a great way to center ways of thinking about classroom management that will help get the school year started off on the right foot and sustain community with students throughout the next several months. As Carla reminds us, "Being good at human being requires a ton of work and investment, and perhaps most of all, an intentional rejection of a culture of disposability, the idea that there's ever such a thing as a throwaway person." If you prefer video, that’s up on our YouTube channel as well, just search for Human Restoration Project.

Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an amazing school year! Let us know if you need anything.

Dr. Carla Shalaby is dedicated to education as a practice of freedom, focusing on critical pedagogy and literacy, democratic classroom management, and the role of teaching in social justice. She has held significant educational roles, including director positions at Brown University and Wellesley College, and began her career teaching in New Jersey. Shalaby holds advanced degrees in education and is the author of Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School.