Listen to the episode by clicking the link to your preferred podcast platform below:
In this episode, we chat with John Rudloph Mueller, the Head of Curriculum and Instruction at Local Civics. He is passionate about nurturing the next generation of changemakers and helping students see they do have power to make a change in their communities.
John discusses the importance of integrating design projects into educational settings and the role of educators as consultants, fostering authentic community connections and expanding students' horizons through partnerships with organizations like Local Civics. The Big Dream John's big dream for education is to create a space where students not only use their unique voice, but are able to step up and take action to see the change they want in their communities. He wants to see classrooms that empower students and inspire them to put in motion the things that they’re excited about. Mindset Shifts Required To successfully implement civics education and community engagement projects, educators need to embrace a mindset shift from traditional teaching roles to more of a consultation role. This involves guiding students through design cycles, encouraging them to embrace complexity, and fostering authentic connections with the community. It can be a major shift for educators who are used to teaching and testing the standards. Action Steps Local Civics’ curriculum starts with an important concept called “civic lenses,” which all educators can implement in their classrooms. The goal is to develop the skill of zooming in on different areas of the community to analyze what already exists and what gaps or opportunities there are to fill. You can begin to implement it with these steps: Step 1: Have students examine their personal stories and connections to their community. This could be in connection to teams or clubs, a religious or identity community, and other things that are important to them. Step 2: Get students to then map out different parts of the community and inventory its needs. For example, you may zoom in on transportation and notice a lack of bike lanes, or zoom in on healthcare and see there are very few senior centers. Step 3: Encourage students to keep zooming in on different areas until they’re activated around a particular focus area. They will naturally connect with different parts of the community, so you can see what areas they are passionate about. Step 4: Develop project opportunities that allow students to create solutions in their focus area. Connect them to community members, workplaces, institutions, or people who can help bring their ideas to life. Step 5: Allow students to drive their projects forward, acting as a consultant to guide them rather than someone to hand out answers or tell them what to do. John shares the example of a high school class that noticed how senior citizens struggled during COVID-19 to leverage technology to stay in touch with their loved ones. So, they developed—and delivered—a kind of “technology 101” course at a local senior’s center to help bridge that gap. Challenges? One of the main challenges in implementing civics education projects is overcoming the traditional mindset of teaching to the standards and testing. Educators may also face logistical challenges in connecting students with authentic audiences and stakeholders. Additionally, addressing complex societal issues can feel overwhelming, but focusing on achievable, localized solutions can help overcome this barrier. One Step to Get Started Start by conducting a community mapping exercise with your students. Encourage them to explore their surroundings, identify existing resources, and pinpoint areas for improvement. This initial step will lay the foundation for more in-depth projects and foster a sense of empowerment and connection within the community. Stay Connected You can stay connected with John through his website, Local Civics, or email him directly at [email protected]. To help you implement today’s takeaways, our guest is sharing their Civic Impact Project Curriculum Overview, Civic & Community Leadership Curriculum Overview, DESE Topics 3-4 Curriculum Materials, NY Pathways Overview, MA Partnerships Overview, and NJ Partnerships Overview with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 225 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my YouTube channel where you can learn about more tips and resources like this one below:
TRANSCRIPT
00:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) John, welcome to the Time for Teachership podcast. 00:05 - John Mueller (Guest) Thank you for having me. How are you, Lindsay? 00:07 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Good, I'm good, I'm really excited to talk today. I know our connection has been through the investigating history curriculum at the state level of Massachusetts here, but you do that and so much more. So really excited to learn about all the civics work that your organization has and diving into all that today. So I guess what is important for listeners to know right off the bat, or to just kind of keep in mind as we jump into that conversation today. 00:32 - John Mueller (Guest) Well, I'll tell you right now we're local civics, so it's in the name, right. It says it does what it says on the package, and we are really excited about nurturing the next generation of changemakers and helping students see that they do have power and helping them leverage their voice and their viewpoint to make change in their communities. 00:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that and I think you're leading us perfectly into this next question. I like to ask about freedom dreaming and Dr Bettina Love speaks so expertly about this as dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So I guess, with that additional concept of dreams freedom dreams being grounded in the critique of injustice and your attention to youth as changemakers, what is that kind of big dream that you hold for education, if you want to expand on that a bit for us? 01:19 - John Mueller (Guest) Yeah, it's really what I just said about the voice of students. I think there's a great Alice Walker quote about people not knowing the power of their voice and I don't have the exact words in front of me so I won't try to butcher it for you all but just that students really, when they're given the opportunity to actually put in motion something that they are interested in and they are passionate about, they come up with some of the most amazing ideas and they're inspired to actually take action on them in ways that I don't think we see often in the regular day-to-day curriculum. 01:55 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) So, so true, I love thinking about I mean, I don't love thinking about all of the turmoil nationally and internationally, but when? I think about it. I think about you. Know how students in a classroom have often been the closest that I've ever witnessed to coming to some sort of like different path forward. That is better because they're so creative, because they're not like bogged down and like this is the way we've always done things and it's like, yeah, let them, let them talk, let them think about these ideas. 02:22 - John Mueller (Guest) There's so much opportunity in that regard. I think there's a lot of things happening structurally, also in education, that have been enabling this. So I think about the seal of civic readiness in New York state. We do a lot of work helping schools navigate that process. There's also the DESE department of elementary and secondary ed projects in Massachusetts for both eighth grade and high school, and so students are not just getting like one chance at this. Even In some cases they get multiple at-bats and they're building that muscle. And I always tell students when they use our curriculum it's like you could use this for anything. You know, if you want to make a lot of money someday, you could probably use the same skills that we're teaching you here. You know how do you put an idea forward in a way that acknowledges the different people in power and gets people on your side, and you know I hope you'll use it for good. But it's really whatever you want to make it and I think when students hear that, it really resonates with them. 03:20 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely right. It's like important life skills for wherever you're going. That's a great framing, and I love the idea of like having multiple at-bats throughout their educational journeys in these various states. That's so cool. And so you mentioned curriculum. Let's go there. So what is you know what's the curriculum about? Can you tell us kind of a story, maybe, of how you successfully implemented that somewhere? Or kind of what should we know about that civics curriculum successfully? 03:45 - John Mueller (Guest) implemented that somewhere, or kind of. What should we know about that civics curriculum? Yeah, so we have our own call it proprietary civics curriculum, we call it a civic impact project curriculum. It's five units long, it goes for about 40 or so lessons and starts with a concept we call civic lenses, and so think of a camera. You know from my intro I'm a photography guy, so I love this, this analogy. 04:09 It's getting students the muscle of zooming in on different areas of community and starting to identify, well, what already exists, where are maybe some gaps or opportunities and and where do I fit into all of that and where do I fit into all of that? So we get students examining their personal story, their personal connection to the community and sort of uncovering even communities they didn't know they were a part of or didn't consider to be communities. So everything from just within your school building, within teams or clubs that you're a part of. Maybe you have a religious community or an identity community of some kind that is important to you, and then we get them mapping like, look at the places around you and actually inventory what do you see. So maybe they zoom in on transportation and they're noticing there's bus stops all around their neighborhood but there's no bike lanes. Maybe they're zooming in on health care and they're realizing there's lots of urgent care but there's not a lot of senior centers or things like that. That just to try and get the lay of the land. As students go further, they start to sort of activate around a particular focus area. So I'll give you a great example. 05:23 One of my favorite projects from a partner in the Bronx is a high school level project. They started to realize that, you know, coming out of the COVID era, that there are seniors who are in nursing homes, who have great access to technology but don't really have the skills to utilize it and to actually stay connected with their families and, you know, use all the splendor of the internet to enrich their lives. And so from that point they, after identifying that as a focus area, they started doing a lot of interviews. They started to try and talk to seniors, talk to the people at the nursing home, people who have the power to say, hey, you can come in or you can't come in. Talking to school leaders to give them an opportunity to get out of the building. All of these little steps and all the different factors that come together to help actually initiate action on something. 06:21 So this group I'm really proud of them. They ultimately designed a six-week course that helped on avoiding scams and phishing, on how to set up your phone, how do you take screenshots and photos of things and send them to people, how do you use FaceTime, how do you do all these different, all the amazing things our supercomputers in our pockets can do. You know and they actually delivered that at a local nursing home. So they took it beyond just planning and, you know, outlining the issue and trying to come up with a solution. They actually went out and did it, and that's when this work gets really special in my mind. 07:02 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Absolutely. It's so frustrating when we just contain things to a classroom and there's no authentic audience. When the ideas are so cool, it's like no, give them the authentic audience that's so cool. Wow, I love that story. Thank you for sharing it. 07:16 I'm I'm curious too. I'm just like backing up a bit, thinking about you know this clearly was an example of a teacher and probably structures that supported all of this work in this important curriculum and they were, you know, excited about it and supported it and it got done and it was great. I'm curious about you know we work with folks who are kind of given, for example, an investigating history curriculum and it's like, okay, but I don't have the structure to teach all the lessons. Or I am new to kind of this like inquiry-based thing, or I'm new to like student leadership, or I've never connected students with their idea with an authentic audience. Like I'm imagining there are some hurdles that you've kind of had to coach people through. Could you kind of maybe talk us through maybe a common hurdle you've seen and maybe what was a mindset shift? 08:08 - John Mueller (Guest) That's a great question. We definitely see lots of different entry points to this work. There are folks who want to dedicate an entire senior year capstone course to doing this type of work and, believe it or not, for a 40 something lesson curriculum especially when you consider that this is basically a design project it certainly can fit into a whole year course. So we do a lot of coaching on just you know what is the outcome you're actually looking for at various stages of this project. Right, do you want students to just produce like a policy memo? Do you want them to just have a trifold or something like that? Or are you trying to expand this into an iterative design process? And a lot of teachers are not familiar or comfortable with that. Right, it's like I'm teaching the standards, I'm testing the standards, I'm responding to what I see and maybe going back and remediating some things. But we try to get across the point that this is a cycle and you can really do it as many times as you have time for. So start with this. You know, investigating the community, identifying a focus area, take it around to get feedback from folks with your prototype and you go back to the drawing board again in your class, who are all in different places, and how do you sort of move to more of a consultation role in your classroom, where you are getting a sense of where everyone is at and just advising them in ways that push them forward, you know, rather than wanting to hand them the answers or, you know, tell them they got it right or they got it wrong. So that's a big shift. 09:50 We also have done a lot to try and figure out ways to create that you said like authentic connections to the outside community. One thing we've done we have a sixth grade class doing projects in Georgia right now and working with them. In the past year we actually got them expert feedback on their projects. So we had all those sixth graders write. You know, here's our focus area, here's our proposal, here's what we want to do, and we put that out because we have a great network. 10:18 You know we're all. We all went to great schools. We have great friends who are professionals in all different fields now. So, you know, leveraging our team's personal network to reach out to lawyers, to doctors, to people who work in nonprofits or who have affected change in all these areas students are interested in. It's been great to make those connections even asynchronously. Those were all given as text-based feedback. Of course, we have all sorts of career speakers and we bring people into schools as well. We've done like town hall sessions with local representatives and various career leaders. So it's really cool to try and help schools who are excited about doing this work but don't necessarily have the capacity or the vision for it. We try and give them as many different opportunities as possible to get students some really enriching feedback and great connections to see that people are listening, people do want to engage in the work that you're proposing with you, even though you're 11, 12, 16 years old. 11:27 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, that's so cool and I mean I think we've had guests on the podcast before that have talked about this type of work and that if you're one teacher doing this kind of thing from scratch on your own, like, yes, leverage your personal network, leverage the network of the school. But I'm just envisioning that it's so cool when you partner with someone like local civics, right. And then it's like now you are connected to all of the networks that you all have as an organization, in addition to the networks that people have in an individual classroom or school, that you are just connected to so many people and so much brilliance that, of course, we can kind of find, you know, an audience for whatever you're looking for, whether that's asynchronous feedback or a live guest speaker. I think that's just really neat, how there's such a relational basis for a lot of this work, and I think that's so real right. That's what like civics often is. 12:14 - John Mueller (Guest) Yeah, and I'll just add I think I think there's a big push right now in corporate America as well to connect more with real students and and and really be a part of the communities where they are located. 12:28 I'll give you another example that we helped facilitate with a life sciences consulting company who had that exact mission. 12:37 They said you know, we have a giving arm or a philanthropy arm and we want to actually, you know, leverage all of the professional knowledge here to help bring more students into this field or at least make them aware you don't have to go into healthcare and be a doctor or a nurse, right, you can get into this consulting space. 12:55 That's really, really amazing. It's just one example, but we partnered with them to lead a whole healthcare exposure series, so a number of we had students from all five boroughs in New York, students from ninth all the way through 12th grade, at various stages of, you know, college preparedness and knowledge about their future career plans. But they were able to hear from career speakers from all across the company, people who work in marketing, people who you know were cancer research doctors before they moved into consulting to sort of show students. It's not a linear path to whatever career you're looking at. You know there's lots of different ways to enter various fields, and we actually brought them all into the office too, so the students got the full experience to share about their, their experiences and and how they got from from point A to point B, and and really enrich students' lives with that experience as well. 14:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I this is so cool. 14:06 I love all of the connection points and I just wish I had that kind of experience as a student, but I imagine there's you know there's so much work that goes into this right. You've obviously created this beautiful curriculum. You've helped make all these connections. I'm really interested too in that like pedagogical coaching kind of that you were talking about, where you're really helping teachers, you know, think of themselves more in that consultation role. Um. So I mean I'm curious about that. I'm also curious about at the curriculum level, you know, if there is a particular lesson or something that is kind of like a really successful lesson where you've had teachers kind of comment like, oh, this really cracked it open for students or this was where you know students lit up engagement wise. Or if even, as you know as coaches, if there's some particular teacher or success moment where you've seen that teacher kind of shift into consultation mode and had a big win, anything that resonates story-wise from your experiences here. 14:59 - John Mueller (Guest) Sure, yeah, a couple of things come to mind I think about. We put together a document a while back. It's like a 60 slide show that takes teachers through multiple design cycles with one project and I think, seeing it in terms of you know, here's something that students proposed In this case it was a group of students. They identified a focus area of we want parents to be more involved in their students' learning at home. You know they hypothesized that if we get parents better connected to teachers somehow, then students who are struggling will not struggle quite as much, and so their original proposal was to have a teacher parent club that parents could come to school on certain nights, they could learn about what's happening in the curriculum, maybe get some tips on tutoring their students at home. And they took that all the way through one design cycle where they put a proposal out there, shared it with lots of folks, got lots of feedback and they learned a lot. First of all, they validated their original idea, which is, in fact, parents do struggle with helping their kids at home. That's overwhelmingly what they heard when they surveyed parents. They also found out that parents don't have the time or the wherewithal to come to school multiple nights a month and meet in person, especially in this particular location. It's, you know, we're talking about parents coming from all across New York City over an hour on the bus, sometimes, just to get somewhere. So they said, okay, great. So we know that this is an area we should remain focused on, but we're going to go back to the drawing board, into that design cycle again, and this time we're going to make it a digital offering. 16:46 So they took it through a whole nother design loop and this time they put together a prototype where for every lesson in the syllabus, they matched it up with some Khan Academy or some YouTube video that helped emphasize that topic for someone who maybe was just not familiar with it, and they shared that in a parent newsletter. And that was their next prototype, prototype that was massively successful and very popular and exciting for parents to say, ok, well, I don't know this topic, but let me sit down with my student and we'll pull up this lesson together and go through it. So that's just the design thinking guide for teachers. Seeing that go from one phase back to the drawing board. Do it again. Yes, it's the same lessons in some regard, but you're coming at it from with a whole different perspective and seeing how the sort of prompts for students can change in throughout that cycle. You know how do you push them to go deeper. We script out all sorts of questions for all these phases of the project that they can use to push students, and that sort of conferencing guide we put together helps a lot as well. You also asked about a particular lesson where it really kind of resonates with students and I think our we call it power mapping policy. 18:03 Power mapping we have one sort of general lesson and one that specifically zooms in on food insecurity. This is where students, I think, realize that there are lots of different people who touch any given issue that you want to look at. So for the food insecurity one, they dive into a group called FarmLink. They were founded out of Loyola High School in Los Angeles, who we've worked with for many years. We can't take credit for their activities. They got it together and we've used them as a model. They came before we started working with the school, actually. 18:38 But FarmLink is an amazing organization that brings food that is no longer ready for grocery stores because they demand very long shelf life of anything that they're putting out in a grocery store in a grocery store so they connect with those farmers who would otherwise be throwing food away and they bring trucks over and they bring food directly to food banks, where it can be rolled out to people much faster. 19:00 And you know students use that lesson to dive into, okay, so there's all the food regulation, health inspections. There's the grocery store owners, there's the farmers, there's the volunteers, there's people who work at food banks. There's the grocery store owners, there's the farmers, there's the volunteers, there's people who work at food banks, there's the individuals receiving food from food banks and it's like oh, wow. There's all these different people who touch this area and I think some of the most successful projects are where they find just one piece of the puzzle that is not working as best as it should or could and get really specific. That's really where the magic happens, in my opinion, and and that I think that process of going through the policy power mapping you know who touches this, how much influence do they have? What would they want to hear or need to see, to get on our side that's a really valuable skill for students. 19:54 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh, I love that example because I think often I mean I personally feel this just right in the current national landscape in the US. I've been recording this in April, so when this airs, what will be happening? But I just think like it often can feel overwhelming when you're like I want to take action and you know I have this niche set of skills and interests Like what can I do within that? Like what are what's the big picture of what's happening? And kind of like where's the piece where I can best fit to support, to leverage my ideas, my network of resources, whatever it is? And so I just love that that students can get into that complexity. I think sometimes in education we kind of simplify to the point where we take out all of that complexity and then we lose the perfect kind of niche fit that a student might find in a particular area and in their ability to make change. 20:46 - John Mueller (Guest) Oh yeah. 20:47 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that you kind of framed it in that way and you give such a beautiful example. I love that farm link program. That's super cool. 20:54 - John Mueller (Guest) You just brought to mind another example. You know there are lots of topics that students are drawn towards because it's what they see every day in their community, and unfortunately, a lot of these issues that students think of are intractable issues that adults you know the big kids have had a really hard time trying to sort out. And so, you know, one that comes to mind is homelessness, of course, and in many areas where we have partnerships, you know, students see homelessness every day. They maybe have experienced homelessness themselves, and so it's really common. I talk to a teacher Okay, kids really want to focus on homelessness. 21:34 They want to propose a new multimillion-dollar. You know shelter in this area and shelters do amazing work, but we just know that you know a bunch of sixth graders coming out and saying, hey, we need a $10 million. Shelter is not really going to fly, and so what we try to do is again find those areas where maybe there's a reason why the great shelters that already exist in our town are not being utilized. So by actually doing the stakeholder analysis, by actually talking to people and getting real people's opinions and thoughts on things, you start to uncover, for example, in many homeless shelters, people who are experiencing homelessness. They don't want to go because they don't think their belongings will be safe. 22:21 So, oh, maybe we don't need a $10 million new shelter. Maybe we need, you know, a couple thousand dollars spent on a locker system. Or, you know, you talk to people hey I'm, you know I want to be working, but I'm struggling with finding a place to just have a shower and, you know, get myself cleaned up. Or I need clothes that are professional. That can you know. Connecting people to services that already exist often can make some magic as well. So, yeah, just's in the name. When you get really local, when you really boil it down to the people and what they really need in any given focus area, you can find something that is achievable for young people to have an impact. 23:11 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Amazing, thank you. I feel like there's so many really great kind of tips and advice sprinkled throughout this episode already, but I'm curious is there anything else you would say to someone before we move to close here, like if they're just starting with kind of civics work, or or maybe they're in New York and they just are like oh, civil civic readiness, like what does this look like? Now in my class I'm the social studies teacher for seniors, like you know, and they're just kind of in their early years of figuring this stuff out. Maybe it's even not a social studies, maybe it's an ELA teacher who's like actually I don't have to do this, but I want to. I'm just interested, like someone at the beginning of that work. What would you say to them? Any advice that you would give in embarking upon this? 23:52 - John Mueller (Guest) Oh yeah, well, we didn't even touch on this, but one of our main principles for this work is asset-based community development, this idea that we're speaking from strengths. I hope that I didn't even use the word problem once this whole time, because there are not really problems right. There really are just opportunities. There are areas we can focus on and improve on. But part of that philosophy of being an asset, developing the community with an asset-based mindset, is there are lots and lots of resources around you already that are unrealized. 24:26 So in your school community, you know, talk to all the teachers around you. Maybe there's someone who worked at an environmental nonprofit who can advise students on that area. Maybe there's someone who has experienced homelessness that can give you that, you know, unvarnished feedback on a project that some somebody else in the school might not be able to give you. You know, maybe you have resources in the school that are being underutilized. Maybe there's stuff in the community that that, that that's there but just not really being harnessed to its greatest use. And so for that reason, I think it's just you got to put students in that mindset, get teachers in that mindset of we have everything we need right here, we don't need anybody else. We don't really need anything else. We can make some I keep saying magic. We can make some magic happen with the resources right here in this community, maybe right inside these four walls of the school. 25:22 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Love that. Yes, because I think often what we do as educators I'm very guilty of this too, as a former teacher right, it's like, well, we don't have enough time, or we don't have enough money? 25:32 - John Mueller (Guest) Oh, totally we don't right. 25:33 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) It's like all the things we don't have when, if it's asset based and you're just like you know, we have all these things with these brilliant students, we have passion, we have all all these relational connections. I love that. I love that frame of asset based. So thank you for that. Okay, so if you are kind of talking to people who are on their way into work, starting the new school year, for example, they're excited to end the episode and take like one action step to get like a little bit more civics in their life, in their curriculum maybe this year. What's one thing they could do to kind of start? 26:07 - John Mueller (Guest) Well, we have seen teachers, especially in history and I know a lot of your listeners are probably history teachers that there's lots of opportunities for baking in some of these civic skills, no matter what grade level or what topic. I mean we had folks using the power mapping process to talk about Japanese internment camps, like it totally seems totally separate. You know we're talking 70 plus 80 years in the past. In the past you can use the same framework for understanding how people react and how they choose sides and all of this sort of. That's one skill that really is transferable. Same goes for just this notion of community mapping. And you know, you probably have even historical sites in your town that you don't even realize. So just knowing that you have more at your fingertips than maybe you realize and really digging into that, I think can be a great start to uncovering new opportunities. 27:06 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Oh my gosh, that's so cool. I'm just like interjecting quickly because I was reading this book about it's an ELA book but it's thinking about like narrative, personal narrative and narrative change narrative, all this stuff. And so I actually, if I were to go back in the classroom, it would be super cool to do a community mapping slash like photo essay narrative of your community as like a get to know you at the beginning of the year. 27:26 - John Mueller (Guest) Love that there could be a lot there. 27:29 Yeah, absolutely All of this stuff, even just the thinking about a project as more of a design cycle and where you, you know you're, you're not just getting it to the finish line and calling it quits, right, how do you come back to the drawing board and improve on that? All those skills, I think, are super transferable. You know, whether you're an English teacher, science teacher, especially science teachers, have civic projects opportunities. So, yeah, just harness that energy that's in your classroom. Students want to have their voices heard, they want to share their ideas and you know even some of the students who might be checked out. When you start giving them something like this, they check in. 28:10 So, lots of opportunity. 28:12 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) Yeah, so this last second to last question is just kind of for fun. So everyone on this podcast is always just like growing and learning. They're like doing awesome things all the time. So, whether it is professional or personal, I'm curious, john, what is something that you've been learning about lately? 28:28 - John Mueller (Guest) Yeah, so I'll share. I think something that I've been knocking at the door of is. There's a book it's, I think it's called the art of gathering. I'll admit I haven't read that yet, but it's been recommended to me about a hundred times. 28:44 Um, I've been talking with a friend from college. You know how do you actually do do some of this community building in your own life, your own personal life, in your immediate area. Um, so, you know, you read, heard in my bio. One of the things I've been really passionate about is getting a photography community together in washington dc, here and uh, and it's just been so rewarding it's. It's truly an. If you build it, they will come, sort of thing. Um, I mean in the bio you heard it it has grown to over 300 people. 29:11 But it really started with me just wanting to get out on a regular basis and take photos and, and I started just telling everybody I met, going up to people who had cameras, who didn't look like tourists up on the street, and I did not have one negative interaction throughout all of that. You know, just going up to people hey, are you a photographer? Hey, do you post your photos anywhere? Well, I'm organizing these walks once a month. Would you be interested? People are effusive, like, wow, I'm so glad that that's an opportunity. I've been looking for that sort of thing, right? So what you're looking for, chances are there's other people looking for it. So I'm trying to lean into that whole. You know how do you organize your community in ways that are enriching to you and feel authentic, and so that book again I haven't read it myself, it's really on my list, but I'm definitely leaning into that sort of work here, just in my personal life. 30:09 - Lindsay Lyons (Host) I love that and I love that story of photography and growing that just by organic conversation. Wow, that's so cool. Finally, I think people are going to want to connect with you, your organization. Where can people do that? 30:22 - John Mueller (Guest) Sure, yeah, so we're LocalCivics. It's localcivicsio. You can find lots of information about what we do there. I'm always open to email and connecting outside of that. So if you want to just email john at localcivicsio, I'll get right back to you.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Time for Teachership is now a proud member of the...
AuthorLindsay Lyons is an educational justice coach who helps schools and districts co-create feminist, antiracist civics-based curricula, discussion opportunities, and equitable policies that challenge, affirm, and inspire all students. A former NYC public school teacher, she holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Lindsay believes all students deserve literacy, criticality, and leadership skills. Archives
January 2026
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed