23. The Lifeline of Learning: Dr. Sawsan Jaber on Radical Love, Agency, and Humanizing Education in the Age of AI

Education
Written By Lydia Kumar

Episode 23 of Kinwise Conversations · Hit play or read the transcript

Episode Summary: The Challenge of Human-Centered Innovation

In this episode of Kinwise Conversations, we sit down with Dr. Sawsan Jaber, a global educator, equity strategist, and author of Pedagogies of Voice. Dr. Jaber challenges K-12 leaders to move beyond factory-based educational models and embrace the profound opportunity AI presents: to finally ask what is truly essential to teach. Drawing on her experience as the daughter of refugees and an award-winning educator, Dr. Jaber advocates for classrooms as healing spaces built on radical love and student voice. She argues that institutional change hinges on educators viewing teaching as a "liberatory skill," ensuring students at the margins are not made "invisible statistics." This discussion provides policy-makers and school executives with a clear mandate to balance technological adoption with the unwavering commitment to humanity and equity.

Key Takeaways for K-12 Leaders

  • Humanity Over Standardization: The post-COVID push for qualitative, asset-based learning must resist the "swinging pendulum" back toward standardization, which makes students "invisible statistics."

  • Teaching as Liberation: Core curriculum skills must be framed as "liberatory skills" that give students the power to advocate for themselves and their communities, making learning a true lifeline.

  • The Danger of Assimilated Thought: The call to "stop teaching kids to think" and let AI take over is a dangerous, dystopian vision that strips students of the criticality needed to challenge systemic oppression.

  • Your Best AI Detector is Trust: The foundation for responsible AI use is built through trust-based relationships, co-created classroom norms, and viewing the educator as a fellow learner.

  • Meeting the Moment: Institutional change requires normalizing "discomfort" for seasoned teachers and leaders, allowing them to unlearn traditional power dynamics and pilot small, incremental changes.

Reclaiming Humanity in Education

The Crisis of Standardization: Policy and the Invisible Student

Lydia Kumar: Welcome to Kinwise Conversations. Today we're talking to Dr. Sawsan Jaber, a global educator, equity strategist, community activist, and National Board Certified Teacher. As an award-winning leader, Dr. Jaber's work is rooted in her lived experience as the daughter of refugees and her profound belief in humanizing education and empowering students through voice, agency, and radical love. If you've ever felt the tension between the need for standardization and the call for true student-centered learning, this conversation is for you. We'll explore how to view teaching as a liberatory skill, how AI forces us to finally ask what's truly essential to teach, and Dr. Jaber's framework for building classrooms as healing spaces that nurture the next generation of scholar-activists. Let's dive in.

Lydia Kumar: Hi. Thank you so much for being here with me, Dr. Jaber. I'm so excited to hear about your story, and your story in education, your foundational beliefs, what's led you to the place where you're at. And so to get us started, I want to give you an opportunity to share with listeners a little bit about who you are, so they're oriented to the person that they're hearing from today.

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you as well. I like to introduce myself as a storyteller. And anytime I present or if I'm doing keynotes, I always introduce myself as a storyteller, because I feel like I am the amalgamation of stories of my ancestors, whether it is my Palestinian ancestry and my family who was displaced time and time again until my parents came here as refugees in the 1960s, or my ancestry as a Muslim and the stories that are in the Quran that really define my character and who I am as a person and how I show up in spaces, or my ancestry as an American, and with having people like Dolores Huerta and Martin Luther King, who really carry my legacy as someone who fights for justice for all students in classrooms, and really kind of roots a lot of my work in equity based on those three identities. I am an educator, currently an assistant professor at a university in Illinois. This is my 26th year, which feels like a super long time. My experience has been in K through 12 education for 25 years, and I've really done it all. I consider myself a global educator because I've worked with different countries and really had the opportunity to kind of see what education looks like in so many different places. And I feel like I bring that perspective into my work in working with students here in the United States.

Lydia Kumar: That's incredible. I feel like you have a very expansive story and identity that plays into your perspective and your purpose as an educator. You've been in education for a long time, but in the past decade, we have all seen a lot of changes that have impacted students in our educational environment. And so I'm curious, in your perspective, what have been some major shifts that you've seen that have particularly impacted how students express themselves or feel seen in the classroom?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think it's really interesting because I feel like education is that swinging pendulum. Like with No Child Left Behind and ESSA, we saw a real move towards students being statistics and kind of numbers and the grades and standardization of education, which is super scary because that makes kids invisible. It makes their lived experience invisible because we're focusing so much on the quantitative that we lose the qualitative piece of the students and the street data of who they are. And we move from a humanizing space to a very factory based space. Post-COVID, those problems became really highlighted. And so the move and the push became to push back and to humanize students by following the qualitative data, by looking at who students are, by seeing the stories and talking more about equity. Now that pendulum is kind of swinging the other way again, and a lot of those very conversations are being labeled as un-American, and students that we were trying to meet their needs are now being targeted in sociopolitical contexts. And so it feels like that seat that we were working super hard to give them at the table is now being pulled from under them. The work now becomes, within our locus of control as educators, how can we still continue to give these students voice and agency to really provide spaces that are seeing them from a holistic sense and from an asset pedagogy? We need to push back against these larger systems that keep telling our students that they're not good enough, and continue to feed into an identity of radical love. I believe that our classrooms should be healing spaces where hard work happens.

Reimagining Curriculum: Liberatory Skills and Intrinsic Motivation

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: When I teach grammar, we don't talk about a period being the end of a sentence. We talk about a period being where your reader is forced to sit in your words and really think about them. That period has power. We talk about rhetoric as claiming your voice and having power to convince someone of something that is important to you. And so, all of a sudden, this idea of audience and writing skill, they have a different layer of meaning because they become liberatory skills. They become skills that are a lifeline for students.

Lydia Kumar: It makes me think about the richness of how language is about... the purpose of writing something isn't necessarily just to write, it's to develop your own perspective and communicate an idea to someone else. I think there's a lot of discussion in the AI space about how we have to teach students why they're doing things and how to use the tools that they have effectively.

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I also think it forces us to really think about how to harness love for education again. It's not about writing to get a good grade anymore; it's about writing to reclaim your voice. If AI is giving us the opportunity to do something, it's to reignite ways of loving learning and education and the why. It's about time that kids want to be in our spaces, that they want to be engaged, that they want to do the work. I call my students scholar-activists.

The AI Challenge: What is Truly Essential to Teach?

Lydia Kumar: Earlier in our conversation, you said that AI was an opportunity for schools to think about how to kind of redefine what learning is. Do you have examples of people using this technology as a moment to redesign what's possible in learning, or do you have ideas about what that could look like?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think both extremes are very scary scenarios: either we're going to avoid it altogether and go back to the traditional ways, or we're going to adopt it full-on whether our staff and our students aren't fully ready. And again, it's about balance. How do we pause? Schools are not good at pausing. The reality is the fields are going to change. And what we're preparing students for with AI transforming and the innovation around AI happening so quickly, we don't even know what we're preparing them for. What becomes central is the question that teachers need to be asking: What are the skills that really become central in a time where these tools are being developed, and how do we embrace them in a way that is still building criticality innovation, and really not losing the humanity in education? Do we really need to have students writing five paragraph essays? Or do we need to get students thinking more critically about what creative writing looks like? I've had students write and throw their essay into AI and ask AI, "Can you improve this based on the criteria?" And then print out and compare and contrast the AI version and their own version, and 99% of the time they like theirs more, because it's better, because it's their authentic voice. So AI is giving them an opportunity to see their work from a different lens, but they're not having AI write their paper, they're not losing the skill of writing. AI is a direct threat to humanizing education if we don't find a way to balance it.

Institutional Change: Building Trust-Based Learning Environments

Lydia Kumar: A lot of conversations I have with educators, it'll come up, this idea of setting a culture and expectations around AI use in the classroom. When you're working with a group of students and you're introducing a new technology, how do you go about building a shared norm or understanding of how that technology will show up in the learning environment?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think it goes beyond the technology. I think it means just building relationships of trust at the beginning of any school year. It's about building communities that we trust each other in this space. I believe that the first two weeks of school should be solely focused on a deep dive in who we are as individuals and who we are as a community, and co-creating with students norms as a community and what's acceptable and what's not. I always tell my students, "If it's not going to make you better out there, then we're not doing it in here." When those kind of foundations are set, then the learning is more likely to take place in authentic ways. I always say my students have always been my best teachers. We learn from each other's humanity. And I always say that our power is in our classrooms and not in Capitol Hill. Our power is in our classrooms to build humanity and elevate this humanity so that people understand each other.

Lydia Kumar: For people who may listen to this and think, "That's amazing, how do I get there?" What do you say to those people?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I would say that start somewhere. In Pedagogies of Voice, the book that just came out, and Street Data, the book that precedes it, Shane Safir always calls it a seed store where you can go and kind of pick the seeds that make sense for you in order to grow your garden. It's a marriage of letting go of power. I would say, normalize that discomfort as an educator, start somewhere. Try, even if it's something small, perfect it and move on to the next thing. The antidote to all of that is by humanizing each other in these classroom spaces that center humanity, center our students. I would say, if you really don't know where to start, start with Pedagogies of Voice. It's a great starting point that has a bunch of different on-ramps.

Lydia Kumar: Do you see opportunities for teachers to use generative AI in some way to help them start?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: There's no harm in using it as a thought partner. But I don't think that we can take it blindly without worrying and remembering that AI is a man-made tool. And there are biases and blind spots that are built into AI that we need to be interrogating and questioning. That idea of inquiry has to be front and center, whether the educator or the student. When we even say profile, it's really defining what does a good student profile look like. That's where your teacher voice comes in and helps to feed some of that humanity into a tool that doesn't recognize humanity.

The Future Workforce: Concern Over Criticality

Lydia Kumar: What is the biggest concern you have when it comes to this new technology, and what's a hope that you have?

Dr. Sawsan Jaber: My concern is I've heard in educational conferences, "Let's stop teaching kids to think, let's just teach them to love." And that is such a scary... to me, it's like we're that dystopian thinking. If we're not teaching kids to think innovatively, creatively, and differently and uniquely, then we are assimilating thought, and that is very dangerous and scary because we're giving up that power of criticality. My hope is that it'll force educators to really do some deep thinking about education and about the things that have never worked for us in the past, and to really consider how we can reform education in order for it to meet students' needs while integrating AI as a tool innovatively. It's going to serve as a tool or it can serve as a weapon. And we, as the gatekeepers of what education looks like in classrooms, have the power to determine which way we're going to go.

Connect and Resources

About the Guest

Dr. Sawsan Jaber, PhD, NBCT, is a recognized global educator and equity strategist with over 20 years of experience. A Cook County Teacher of the Year and ISTE 20 to Watch awardee, she has held roles from high school English Department Chair to Assistant Professor. Dr. Jaber's work, including her co-authorship of Pedagogies of Voice, focuses on inclusion and belonging for students from marginalized communities, establishing her as an expert advocate for equitable institutional change.

  • Lydia Kumar: Welcome to Kinwise Conversations. Today we're talking to Dr. Sawsan Jaber, a global educator, equity strategist, community activist, and National Board Certified Teacher. As an award-winning leader, Dr. Jaber's work is rooted in her lived experience as the daughter of refugees and her profound belief in humanizing education and empowering students through voice, agency, and radical love. If you've ever felt the tension between the need for standardization and the call for true student-centered learning, this conversation is for you. We'll explore how to view teaching as a liberatory skill, how AI forces us to finally ask what's truly essential to teach, and Dr. Jaber's framework for building classrooms as healing spaces that nurture the next generation of scholar-activists. Let's dive in.

    Lydia Kumar: Hi. Thank you so much for being here with me, Dr. Jaber. I'm so excited to hear about your story, and your story in education, your foundational beliefs, what's led you to the place where you're at. And so to get us started, I want to give you an opportunity to share with listeners a little bit about who you are, so they're oriented to the person that they're hearing from today.

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you as well. I like to introduce myself as a storyteller. And anytime I present or if I'm doing keynotes, I always introduce myself as a storyteller, because I feel like I am the amalgamation of stories of my ancestors, whether it is my Palestinian ancestry and my family who was displaced time and time again until my parents came here as refugees in the 1960s, or my ancestry as a Muslim and the stories that are in the Quran that really define my character and who I am as a person and how I show up in spaces, or my ancestry as an American, and with having people like Dolores Huerta and Martin Luther King, who really carry my legacy as someone who fights for justice for all students in classrooms, and really kind of roots a lot of my work in equity based on those three identities. I am an educator, currently an assistant professor at a university in Illinois. This is my 26th year, which feels like a super long time. My experience has been in K through 12 education for 25 years, and I've really done it all. I consider myself a global educator because I've worked with different countries and really had the opportunity to kind of see what education looks like in so many different places. And I feel like I bring that perspective into my work in working with students here in the United States.

    Lydia Kumar: That's incredible. I feel like you have a very expansive story and identity that plays into your perspective and your purpose as an educator. You've been in education for a long time, but in the past decade, we have all seen a lot of changes that have impacted students in our educational environment. And so I'm curious, in your perspective, what have been some major shifts that you've seen that have particularly impacted how students express themselves or feel seen in the classroom?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think it's really interesting because I feel like education is that swinging pendulum. Like with No Child Left Behind and ESSA, we saw a real move towards students being statistics and kind of numbers and the grades and standardization of education, which is super scary because that makes kids invisible. It makes their lived experience invisible because we're focusing so much on the quantitative that we lose the qualitative piece of the students and the street data of who they are. And we move from a humanizing space to a very factory based space. Post-COVID, those problems became really highlighted. And so the move and the push became to push back and to humanize students by following the qualitative data, by looking at who students are, by seeing the stories and talking more about equity. Now that pendulum is kind of swinging the other way again, and a lot of those very conversations are being labeled as un-American, and students that we were trying to meet their needs are now being targeted in sociopolitical contexts. And so it feels like that seat that we were working super hard to give them at the table is now being pulled from under them. The work now becomes, within our locus of control as educators, how can we still continue to give these students voice and agency to really provide spaces that are seeing them from a holistic sense and from an asset pedagogy? We need to push back against these larger systems that keep telling our students that they're not good enough, and continue to feed into an identity of radical love. I believe that our classrooms should be healing spaces where hard work happens. When I teach grammar, we don't talk about a period being the end of a sentence. We talk about a period being where your reader is forced to sit in your words and really think about them. That period has power. We talk about rhetoric as claiming your voice and having power to convince someone of something that is important to you. And so, all of a sudden, this idea of audience and writing skill, they have a different layer of meaning because they become liberatory skills. They become skills that are a lifeline for students.

    Lydia Kumar: It's interesting because when you were speaking, it was so... I felt like the why learning happens felt so clear to me. Like when you talked about a period being a point for someone to stop and sit in your words, that's such a powerful example of how teaching grammar can be deeper than just, this is where you put this punctuation, but this is why we put this punctuation in the place we put it, and this is what it means, and here's how you can use that to elevate your voice. I think there's a lot of discussion in the AI space about how we have to teach students why they're doing things and how to use the tools that they have effectively. As I listened to you talking about how we've swung toward the quantitative, and there's also this emerging technology, how are you thinking about preparing students for the future in a world where there's so much push toward quantitative standardization, which I feel like can reduce your critical thinking?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think teaching is an art, right? And like with any art, it's a balance. There's something beautiful in the traditional, and then there's something beautiful in the innovative and the new. We can't continue to use pencil and paper, which is where people are running back to because they're worried that students are going to use AI to write papers. The reality is the fields are going to change. And what we're preparing students for with AI transforming and the innovation around AI happening so quickly, we don't even know what we're preparing them for. What becomes central is the question that teachers need to be asking: What are the skills that really become central in a time where these tools are being developed, and how do we embrace them in a way that is still building criticality innovation, and really not losing the humanity in education? That starts with first getting students to recognize and realize why they're there and why the learning is important to them. It's about intrinsic goals. It's also letting go of some of your power and sitting alongside students and listening to them and getting to know them on a deep level. Do we really need to have students writing five paragraph essays? Or do we need to get students thinking more critically about what creative writing looks like? The criticality piece that's necessary can still be built in while using the new technology and innovation that AI has to offer. When we're generating images, my descriptors—how do I write a descriptive explanation for AI to create the image that I envision in my mind? There's a lot of word choice there. That in and of itself can translate into, when I'm writing, how do I take that skill in order for me to get the reader to see what I see in my mind. So it's transferable. It's a marriage of like both the new and the old in order for it to be impactful.

    Lydia Kumar: It makes me think about the richness of how language is about... the purpose of writing something isn't necessarily just to write, it's to develop your own perspective and communicate an idea to someone else. And so there's a lot of different ways to communicate your perspective. You can make an AI-generated image, and it requires some really precise and creative language to be able to communicate the idea in the way that you want it communicated. I think there's such a criticality that's involved in being able to use new tools effectively.

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I also think it forces us to really think about how to harness love for education again. It's not about writing to get a good grade anymore; it's about writing to reclaim your voice. We've kind of killed that by standardizing everything and by making everything contingent on a test score. If AI is giving us the opportunity to do something, it's to reignite ways of loving learning and education and the why. It's about time that kids want to be in our spaces, that they want to be engaged, that they want to do the work. I call my students scholar-activists. Education ultimately is what gets us to see each other from a human perspective. The idea of cultural responsiveness also means being responsive to cultures outside of our local communities because we don't know where students are going to end up in a technological sense. I believe in the power of teachers, and I always say that teachers are the most powerful people in the world because we can use our curriculum as a tool to really build students and to give them their voices back... Or it can be a weapon where we continue to destroy students and their self-concept. I don't know that we have intentionally as a country yet done anything to universally disrupt that because every time we get a little bit closer, we swing right back to the way things are.

    Lydia Kumar: Right. That pendulum keeps happening, which makes it hard to make change. When you told that story about Eli, I think it's such a good example of how a teacher can work with a concept or a standard and totally revolutionize not only a student's ability to interact with the content, but a student's perception of themselves. Earlier in our conversation, you said that AI was an opportunity for schools to think about how to kind of redefine what learning is. Do you have examples of people using this technology as a moment to redesign what's possible in learning, or do you have ideas about what that could look like?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think both extremes are very scary scenarios: either we're going to avoid it altogether and go back to the traditional ways, or we're going to adopt it full-on whether our staff and our students aren't fully ready. And again, it's about balance. How do we pause? Schools are not good at pausing. How do we pause and first teach our teachers and our students? We need to have a community-based education on what the benefits and the dangers of AI are. We need to decide what the new necessary skills are to get students to really innovate. I've had students write and throw their essay into AI and ask AI, "Can you improve this based on the criteria?" And then print out and compare and contrast the AI version and their own version, and 99% of the time they like theirs more, because it's better, because it's their authentic voice. So AI is giving them an opportunity to see their work from a different lens, but they're not having AI write their paper, they're not losing the skill of writing. AI is a direct threat to humanizing education if we don't find a way to balance it. But it's about how do we really create these authentic learning experiences where students can leverage AI as a tool, but not lose their creativity.

    Lydia Kumar: A lot of conversations I have with educators, it'll come up, this idea of setting a culture and expectations around AI use in the classroom. When you're working with a group of students and you're introducing a new technology, how do you go about building a shared norm or understanding of how that technology will show up in the learning environment?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think it goes beyond the technology. I think it means just building relationships of trust at the beginning of any school year. It's about building communities that we trust each other in this space. I believe that the first two weeks of school should be solely focused on a deep dive in who we are as individuals and who we are as a community, and co-creating with students norms as a community and what's acceptable and what's not. I always tell my students, "If it's not going to make you better out there, then we're not doing it in here." You are the center of this space. If I'm struggling with something as a student, or if I feel like life is happening for me right now, that is where students will most likely lean into AI. And so, when we can create communication lines that are open, and that students feel comfortable coming and saying, "Hey, Dr. J, I'm really struggling with this," then I am creating a culture and ethos for a classroom environment where we are a community of learners together. When those kind of foundations are set, then the learning is more likely to take place in authentic ways. I always say my students have always been my best teachers. We learn from each other's humanity. And I always say that our power is in our classrooms and not in Capitol Hill. Our power is in our classrooms to build humanity and elevate this humanity so that people understand each other.

    Lydia Kumar: You're doing something really incredible in your classroom as you're talking. It's like you almost get chills seeing this culture that you've built with your students and the way that's impacting the way that they see each other. And for people who may listen to this and think, "That's amazing, how do I get there?" What do you say to those people?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I would say that start somewhere. In Pedagogies of Voice, the book that just came out, and Street Data, the book that precedes it, Shane Safir always calls it a seed store where you can go and kind of pick the seeds that make sense for you in order to grow your garden. There's no formula. It's a marriage of letting go of power. We have the Agency Framework, which is really four pillars: identity, belonging, inquiry, and efficacy. If you really don't know where to start, those books are a great place to start. And even if you would take one idea and refine it and just start somewhere, and then build another idea. It's really hard for teachers who studied in spaces where you are taught not to smile to let go of all of those things, to unlearn them, and to realize that those are what we call in Pedagogies of Voice toxins. But when we're willing to just kind of take a leap and try it, and we see students' responsiveness towards that, then it's encouraging because that return is immediate. If we only would turn that mirror on ourselves, we would see that so many teachers are not willing to try new things that make them feel uncomfortable. And if we're not uncomfortable, we're not growing. I would say, normalize that discomfort as an educator, start somewhere. Try, even if it's something small, perfect it and move on to the next thing. The antidote to all of that is by humanizing each other in these classroom spaces that center humanity, center our students. I would say, if you really don't know where to start, start with Pedagogies of Voice. It's a great starting point that has a bunch of different on-ramps.

    Lydia Kumar: Well, it sounds like a great place to start and a great book that I'm going to have to check out after this conversation. Do you see opportunities for teachers to use generative AI in some way to help them start?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I don't feel like AI isn't a tool that we can all use. For example, I'm trying to create a lesson that integrates, here's the profile of my students, and here's the intrinsic goal. Can you help me generate some ideas of how to do that? And then taking it, but being critical about what it produces, and then implementing it, but making it your own at the same time. There's no harm in using it as a thought partner. But I don't think that we can take it blindly without worrying and remembering that AI is a man-made tool. And there are biases and blind spots that are built into AI that we need to be interrogating and questioning. That idea of inquiry has to be front and center, whether the educator or the student.

    Lydia Kumar: It's the same because it's not a perfect tool. It's a great way to get started. I could imagine reading Pedagogies of Voice and saying, "Okay, I learned this great strategy," and then I get some ideas, and I role-play, but I can never put my brain on a shelf and just do what a machine tells me to do. As long as you maintain this sense of critical thinking and evaluation and center in your experience and your point of view and your understanding of who your students are, I think I see potential there.

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: I think what Pedagogies of Voice also helps us do is really think about mindset shifts. When we even say profile, it's really defining what does a good student profile look like. That's where your teacher voice comes in and helps to feed some of that humanity into a tool that doesn't recognize humanity. It's a tool, right? It's a robot. It doesn't see the humanity in the people, but you as a teacher bring that human piece.

    Lydia Kumar: I totally agree. It would have to be, because it uses those data points to feed you something. If you only include test scores, you're going to get something very generic. If you know that your students are into whatever they're into and where they live and what they enjoy, the languages, you're able to get such a richer picture and make it more connective. I want to end on our last question. What is the biggest concern you have when it comes to this new technology, and what's a hope that you have?

    Dr. Sawsan Jaber: My concern is I've heard in educational conferences, "Let's stop teaching kids to think, let's just teach them to love." And that is such a scary... to me, it's like we're that dystopian thinking. It makes me think of Fahrenheit 451 and The Hunger Games, right? Where we don't need you to think. That's so dangerous because critical thinking is what we need. If we're not teaching kids to think innovatively, creatively, and differently and uniquely, then we are assimilating thought, and that is very dangerous and scary because we're giving up that power of criticality. There's something super scary about "stop teaching kids to think and let AI do the thinking for them," because, again, AI is a man-made tool and anything man-made is biased, flawed, is going to be limited. My hope is that it'll force educators to really do some deep thinking about education and about the things that have never worked for us in the past, and to really consider how we can reform education in order for it to meet students' needs while integrating AI as a tool innovatively. It's going to serve as a tool or it can serve as a weapon. And we, as the gatekeepers of what education looks like in classrooms, have the power to determine which way we're going to go.

    Lydia Kumar: That was an incredibly powerful conversation with Dr. Sawsan Jaber, a true advocate for radical humanization in education. We thank her so much for sharing her rich, asset-based perspective. Three quick takeaways from our discussion. First, reignite the intrinsic why of learning. Dr. Jaber reminds us that if students don't see the power and necessity in the learning, they will gravitate toward tools like AI to cheat. When learning becomes a lifeline for self-advocacy and justice, engagement follows. Two, your classroom must be a community of trust. Building deep relationships and co-creating norms is the foundation that allows students to be vulnerable, self-advocate, and responsibly leverage new tools like AI. Finally, AI must not lead us to stop teaching kids to think. We must use its innovative power as thought partners to enhance creativity, but we also must interrogate its biases and always keep criticality and inquiry front and center. To connect with Dr. Jaber, find links to her organization Education Unfiltered Consulting and her book Pedagogies of Voice in today's show notes at kinwise.org/podcast. And if your mission-driven organization, school, or district is ready to move from conversation to action, Kinwise offers guided strategy experiences to help teams align AI use with their mission, values, and people. You can find more about our AI readiness roadmap and programs at kinwise.org. If you found value in this podcast, the best way to support the show is to subscribe, leave a quick review, or share this episode with a friend. It makes a huge difference. Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and stay Kinwise.

Lydia Kumar
Next

3: AI in Schools: Beyond Substitution to Redefinition