The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 257
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 257 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll be talking about why it’s more important now than ever to bring joy into our schools, and how to do it.
GONZALEZ: It would be an understatement, not to mention repetitive, for me to say that we’re living in very troubling times. And for teachers, many of those troubles are magnified. Policies seem to emerge every day that restrict what you can teach and strip away anything that looks like equity. The rights of your students and their families, along with your own, are being chipped away. In many communities, families are living with the constant fear of violence and separation. All of this is layered on top of the already high demands of teaching in a post-Covid world.
It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. And if you’re like a lot of teachers I’ve talked to lately, you might feel like you’re running out of reasons to keep going.
So why would I want to spend an hour talking about joy?
Because along with intermittently following the news and trying to distract myself from said news, I’ve been listening to the voices of people who have been through hard times before and still manage to lead with strength. One of the themes I keep hearing from them is that building community and making space for joy are not “extras.” They’re survival strategies. They’re what make us stronger and more able to resist.
My guest today, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, has been one of those voices for me. In 2020, on episode 151, Dr. Muhammad came onto the podcast to talk about her book Cultivating Genius, where she introduced her framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. The goal of the framework is to make students’ education more “humanizing and complete” by building learning experiences around four pursuits: identity, skills, intellect, and criticality. Three years later, in her 2023 book Unearthing Joy, she added joy as a fifth pursuit. When the book was published, I put it on my list for possible interviews for the podcast, but it ended up getting pushed back over and over. Now I think that delay worked out for the best, because I think the world needs joy now even more than it did two years ago.
In this episode, we talk about why joy is a necessary pursuit, what to do if you’re working in a place where joy seems almost impossible, and what specific practices you can put in motion to bring joy into your classroom.
I’m finding that in 2025, I have to intentionally look for things that give me hope. This conversation definitely did that for me, and I hope it does the same for you.
Before we get started, I’d like to thank EVERFI for sponsoring this episode. Back-to-school season is here and there’s no better time to set your students up for real-world success. As you build your lesson plans, consider this: do your students know how to budget? File taxes? Understand credit and debt? Financial literacy is more essential than ever, and with EVERFI’s free, digital financial education courses, you can equip your students with the skills and knowledge they need to manage their finances with ease. EVERFI’s lessons cover financial basics like budgeting, banking, taxes, credit, and investing, plus hands‑on simulations like filing a 1099 or opening a savings account. Lessons are standards‑aligned, include built‑in grading, and the easy-to-use teacher dashboard has tons of time-saving features that will make lesson planning a breeze. The best part? All of EVERFI’s resources are always free, with unlimited student and teacher access. Make a powerful start this school year — visit cultofpedagogy.com/everfi to bring EVERFI’s digital financial lessons to your classroom.
Support also comes from The School Me Podcast. Are you looking for inspiration to elevate your teaching? The School Me podcast delivers practical solutions for today’s classroom challenges. Whether you’re a first-year teacher or a veteran educator, each episode brings valuable insights directly to you from fellow colleagues across the country. Every month, host Natieka Samuels sits down with educators who share their classroom-tested strategies and professional wisdom. From lesson-planning techniques to work-life balance tips, School Me covers what matters most to educators right now. Join thousands of educators who listen to School Me as a part of their professional development regimen. Learn more at nea.org/schoolme.
Now here’s my conversation with Gholdy Muhammad about building joy into our schools.
GONZALEZ: Gholdy, welcome back.
MUHAMMAD: Thank you. So good to be back with you.
GONZALEZ: Oh, I’m really excited. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. We’re going to be talking about joy today. Before we get into that, just for anybody who didn’t hear our interview on cultivating joy, I’m sorry, cultivating genius in 2020, this is your second time.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: That was Episode 151. Just give people a little quick background of what is your work in education, what is sort of a little bit of your background, and what are you doing right now?
MUHAMMAD: Sure. So I believe this is my 22nd year in education. I started as a classroom teacher, middle school teacher. I taught language arts and literature and social studies in grades 6 and 8. I then moved to be an academic coach in literacy, in a literacy specialist. I’ve served as a school district administrator over curriculum and instruction, really focusing on things like intervention, assessment, and, of course, curriculum and pedagogy. And I always make a joke but it’s true that I was a school principal for three weeks. I discovered that I wanted to lead more in curriculum rather than school buildings, but shoutout to all of the principals out there, because it is very difficult work, as I discovered. And then that really led me to going back to school for my PhD in literacy, language, and culture. And for the last over 10 years, I’ve been a professor. I’m currently endowed professor over literacy, language, and culture at the University of Illinois Chicago. And in between time, I served as a school board president and I wrote two books around genius and joy. And that has sort of created a position where I work to support, consult with educators, parents, and others regarding culturally and historically responsive education. And in addition to all of that, I like to think that the role that I take on the most is that of curriculum writer. I love writing lesson plans and unit plans. And that’s what I’m currently doing. I’m writing resources around curriculum and instruction in a K-5 curriculum.
GONZALEZ: Awesome. I’ve actually got that on my list of questions to ask you about as we near the end of this so you can tell us all about it. So for anybody who hasn’t, did not listen to the last time you were on, I’m going to get everybody up to speed. So you have a 2020 book called “Cultivating Genius” and this is where you introduce to your framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. So that framework consists of four pursuits that teachers should build into learning experiences to make students’ education, and this is from the book, more humanizing and complete.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: And that was identity, skills, intellect, and criticality. So we talked about this already in depth in Episode 151, but just, could you give us just a quick kind of overview of the framework, because in the next book, then you introduce the fifth pursuit, so that’s where we’re going to focus today.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. I started writing the book when I was a graduate student studying the history of education. And I discovered a part of Black history, American history that I never learned about, which were these organized spaces around books and libraries and literature called literary societies where Black people in the 1820s started to gather and organize around learning. And I found that they had five, which I really go deep into the four, major pursuits of learning. So they had these four goals that I identified early on. And when I studied these literary societies, I tried to study everything. What did they read, why did they read, what were some of their objectives for learning? If they set any goals, what was the language around their goal setting? I tried to, anything educational —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: — I tried to really pinpoint. And I found that they called their learning goals pursuits. They did not call them standards like we do in schools today. And they used the word “pursuit” very intentionally because a pursuit sort of signifies this more empowered, directed goal of learning that comes from the self, that’s ongoing. It doesn’t stop, like a pursuit. It doesn’t come from someone else, like a pursuit.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And they had a No. 1, the goal of identity development. As they were reading and writing and learning literature and math and science and history and art and all of these disciplines, they were coming closer to the self, learning who they are, whose they are, who they are not, their collective identity. And the self was really important and a part of education. It wasn’t like this separated pursuit.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: The second pursuit they had was skill development. This is learning the proficiencies, the competencies at each discipline area. Now we call these skills, right, state learning standards or national learning standards today. The third pursuit they had is intellectualism, and they knew that as they were reading and writing and learning, they wanted to be smarter about new histories and concepts and people and places and things, not just get a sense of skills but put it in the context of the world around them. And the fourth pursuit I write about in “Cultivating Genius” is criticality. Now criticality is the social justice oriented pursuit. This is, this is the pursuit that led them to reading and writing and thinking with the purpose of naming and questioning, understanding, and disrupting harm in the world, oppression in the world, hurt, and humanity. From the environment to living organisms, to the self, and to others with inhumanity. And I write about these four pursuits as a collective framework, and I push educators to ask, what happens if we give these pursuits to students today, like the ancestors did? Because something’s not working in education, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: It’s just not.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: You can look at assessments, you can look at — talk to teachers, talk to students. It’s not working for all of us. And perhaps it’s because we have to return, to go forward we have to go back, right, we have to return to this excellence that we had in educational history in the United States. And that’s what, and I give educators strategies and approaches to really get toward these pursuits of education, and I lay it all out. So it’s a beautiful way of returning to history to advance students’ educational progress today.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. In that book and in your current book, “Unearthing Joy,” you’re very clear, and I want to make sure I phrase this accurately, so correct me if the way I’m phrasing it is inaccurate. But the way that you frame it is that your framework was built with Black students in mind, specifically. And I want to make sure that anybody listening to my podcast comes to your work understanding what the thinking was behind that. Because I have a lot of people in my audience who are white teachers who teach a lot of white students in addition to a lot of students of other ethnicities. And I don’t want anybody coming to your work saying, oh, well, this is not for my kids. This is not for all of my kids, so I’m not interested. But you had a really clear rationale for why you began with that in mind, so if you could talk a little about that.
MUHAMMAD: Well, my intentionality was for all students. I want to be very clear with that.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MUHAMMAD: We think when people — we learn from Black students in history from Black history to teach white children better today, to teach Black children better, children of color today I — with the focus though of children who have been historically excluded.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: Because we can argue today that children that, who have been historically excluded, like Black children, and there’s a lot of diversity in Blackness.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: You can speak Spanish and be Black. You can be half white and be Black in this country, right?
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: Or children who speak multiple languages, they’ve been historically excluded.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Indigenous children, right. So I do focus on those who have been historically excluded because I feel like we need to catch up and give educational reparations to them.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MUHAMMAD: But I do say and make it very clear that I am drawing from Black educational history to teach all children better.
GONZALEZ: Mhmm.
MUHAMMAD: And a lot of folks, when they see, oh, she’s centering Black children in some way. She’s centering Black history. This must only be for Black children.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: Black students, Black teachers. Then, you know, I always like to inquire a little bit more about those statements because, you know, nobody asks, is Lucy Calkins just for white children, even though she doesn’t draw from any other history or research. No one asks is Vygotsky and Piaget and Maslow and John Dewey and others just for white children, even though, once again, you can make the same argument.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: But sometimes when we center, we’re so not used to specifying it and centering Black history as the model —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: — Black excellence as a model, that when we do see it, that’s where people’s minds have been trained to go. Oh, it must not be for me as a white teacher.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: It must not be for my white children or for my Latine students. But the truth of the matter is, how can you deny that other children who are not Black, how can you deny them identities, skills, intellect, criticality —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: — and with the last book, right, joy. That will be unethical to say that white children don’t need and deserve joy or criticality. And I try to make that very clear. And as much as I make it clear, I know that we have that way of still seeing, oh, it must just be for, because nobody has really centered Blackness as a model in the mainstream educational system quite yet.
GONZALEZ: Correct. Right.
MUHAMMAD: When we look at Chicago, New York, LA, even the school districts that have mostly Black and brown children, and if you backtrack for a number of years, their educational theories and models that they have adopted, their teacher evaluations, oftentimes you will find that they don’t even come from Black and brown histories, indigenous histories, epistemologies. We have been so used to having it a certain way. So it is absolutely, I’ll make it very clear for every child, every child has been underserved in this country.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And some more and some differently, sure, but every child, and so my argument is they deserve a new way forward.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I love that.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah.
GONZALEZ: So you’ve got that framework established. It was fantastic. But then, and I remember reading this section in the book, during COVID, I believe, it was sort of when you had this epiphany that you kind of needed to add a fifth pursuit. And so with your 2023 book “Unearthing Joy” you added joy as a fifth pursuit. So how do you define joy, and what motivated you to add that?
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. So it’s funny that, I remember our last conversation and during that time, we were in a pandemic and children were all at home, and I think people were understanding the work of teachers a little differently having children at home all day.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And perhaps appreciating them or in some spaces we were still under appreciating teachers. And I think given the loss, the illness, the change, the shift, the confusion, and so much more in our country, in the world, I said, I thought to myself, wow, we need joy more than ever.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: We started to sit with ourselves a little bit during those COVID days and those Zoom. A lot of people started to talk about equity who have never talked about equity before.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And they started to say, wow, we need equity. Then we had the summer uprisings with George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and so much was happening around race and violence in our country. I mean it wasn’t just happening for the first time. It was continuing to happen, but because people were sitting still a little bit more —
GONZALEZ: Yep, yep.
MUHAMMAD: — perhaps they paid different attention. And all of this led me to going back to the archives and the artifacts and some of the same archival data I looked at with and examined during “Cultivating Genius.” I said let me go back to it and see how the ancestors spoke and wrote about love and joy and these things. And I had written about joy in “Cultivating Genius” but it was not a prominent pursuit. Like love, I just assumed that we were all doing joy every day. Because when I teach a lesson, write a lesson, it’s like joy city. I assume that perhaps we don’t have to be as intentional about it, it’s just innate, it’s already there. But it’s not for everyone.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: We need to be more intentional about our joy. Our leaders need to be intentional about teachers’ joy and teachers need to be more intentional about students’ joy. So I said, what happens if I add it as a fifth pursuit to complete it? Because leaving it off with criticality, it did not feel finished with everything going on in the pandemic at the time.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: That, that was my sitting still moment.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Because there’s a relationship between justice and joy. You don’t get to joy without justice, and justice is not the end. Joy is the goal. And I thought about the ancestors during the time of literary societies. We had brothers and sisters in the South who were enslaved, who were raped and violently abused, and we had all these abolitionists fighting for anti-slavery. What they were really fighting for was joy. No one wants to get up and fight every day. So joy, I found, according to the Black ancestors, was something more than just having fun and celebrating. Joy was peace. Joy is that embodied feeling that you have once justice is achieved. Joy is a sense of belonging, of safety. You feel safe. That’s what joy is. Joy is not just smiling all the time. It’s a feeling of peace and safety. Joy is wonder, imagination and laughter and creativity and art and music. It is a sense of collectivism and self empowerment and self determination. So I really break down all these different historical examples and definitions of joy. And they are very prominent, and they are very serious. And when you have something, and I say “serious” because, you know, a high school teacher told me, we don’t do joy in high school. We do the serious work. That’s what he said.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And I said joy is the serious work. It’s just as serious as skills. But, you know, saying that to certain groups of people, they look at me. I say, yeah, joy is just as serious as the state learning standards.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: All you have to do is be an adult to know that. And ask yourself, what did you have to work on or use today in terms of the five pursuits? And most people use identity, criticality, and joy sometimes more than skills in a daily, just in a day of the week.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So all that to say is joy became this very prominent, nice balance to complete the historically response framework, the five, and they became the five pursuits.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And what has happened, when we unearth joy, is unearthing those people, places, topics, strategies, theories that no one told us to teach, that no one said that we were allowed to teach. And we are bringing rich experiences into the classrooms that children remember, that they feel loved by, that they feel invigorated by, that they feel a sensation throughout their body when they’re learning. That’s joy. So if we don’t have joy, how are students going to pass the tests? How are students going to see themselves in the learning? How are students going to understand justice? So it really completed everything I had written prior to that point.
GONZALEZ: It sounds almost like what you’re talking about, just listening to you talk about it, that this is what makes our curriculum actually sink in on a deep, personal level. It creates a visceral experience. It really makes it more memorable.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. Isn’t that the goal?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Who became a teacher to test prep?
GONZALEZ: Literally nobody.
MUHAMMAD: We wanted to experience that same feeling, that sensation.
GONZALEZ: And teachers need it so desperately now too, as much as the kids do.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah, if not more. Because if a teacher isn’t teaching with a sense of joy, you know, we’ve all been in professional developments or meetings —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: — where the leader, the facilitator had no joy, no wonder, no imagination. And we see the difference when we are in those kind of learning —
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: Right?
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: We feel the difference and we remember it, but most of all, we learn. The goal is learning. The goal is not just fun or sensations. The goal is coming away elevated, higher, ascending. And that’s what joy offers, that ascension.
GONZALEZ: So we’re going to talk about just a couple of your favorite practices that you advise teachers to try or to add to their lesson plans. And the book is full of ideas. I mean, the book, for anybody listening who’s not familiar with it, there are coloring pages, there are playlists, there’s art and there’s a lot there. But just maybe when you think about your own work with teachers or what you advise or even sort of the earliest iterations of this for you, what are some of your favorite practices for bringing joy into the classroom?
MUHAMMAD: Well, I think the first practice is seeing yourself as an artist, as someone who creates aesthetics and beauty, who tells stories. Like, we have to move from seeing curriculum just as a set of package materials scripted to use.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: To curriculum as storytelling, curriculum as the world around me, curriculum as the legacy I’m leaving. That’s what artists do. They leave timeless legacies. That’s why in this book I work with Pharrell Williams because when he creates and produces music, the look on his face, the embodiment he carries, I said to him, that’s how I look and feel when I write a lesson plan.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And that’s my art.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Just like writing a song or creating a visual piece of art or dance or whoever. There’s so many different types of artists. So the first practice is see yourself as an artist, as someone that’s creating this legacy story, lifetime something that leaves an imprint into the children’s lives. And I also, in both books I talk about the strategy of layering texts. Typically, the textbook or the anchor central text will not get to all five pursuits.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: They may be written in ways that just address the skill. So I invite teachers to bring in short, powerful, multi-modal texts, videos, songs, memes, objects as texts. I taught a fourth grade unit a couple years ago on architecture, and I brought in some tools that architects use as texts. So texts can be anything that children can make sense of in, across the different modes. I also suggest the practice of a student spark. That’s how we start each of our unit plans. I student spark, you know, in that first 5, 10 minutes of the lesson. How are you going to ignite the flame for learning? How are you going to sort of gauge interest? And not just joyful interest but intellectual interest too. Because children, especially the older they get, they want to see purpose. Like, why am I learning this?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And we should be able to tell them very intellectually why they are learning it. I think joy, particularly as strategy, should be in the environment, and it can be as simple as what we put on the walls, the color, the people. Are we putting people on the walls who are still alive who are mathematicians or just people who have passed on, right? So they need to see math and science and language in the past, present, and future. The future of being in themselves. They need to see it being organized and clean. Sometimes we just put stuff on the wall just to fill up the paint on the wall space.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And I just tell teachers be very intentional, and how do we see the five pursuits? Do have things hanging up that might elicit skills or intellect or criticality and justice and joy? So use the five pursuits to think about what you put up around you in the environment. The materials you use. Are they joy giving? I talk about different strategies to go beyond just print texts and use all sorts of materials and texts that are joyful. I also discuss the strategy of joy in the experiences we give to children, like the learning experiences, to move away from the packets and the worksheets, to just have these sort of enriched memorable learning experiences that are very collaborative in nature where students can, you know, creatively use their genius and their joy to learn whatever the topic is. So those are a few things and of course I always encourage the teacher to start with the self, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: There’s a chapter on the self in “Unearthing Joy.” But I want the teacher to ask themselves questions like, who am I? What’s my identity? Before I go into teaching and helping to create a space for students to learn about themselves, what have I learned about myself? Who am I?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: What’s the genius of my culture and my people and my family, my background? Have I ever experienced marginalization based on any of my identities? I want them to think about their skills, including their efficacy in the skills that they actually teach. Because believe it or not, I have met writing teachers who hate to write.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And so I’m asking, if you want children to develop their writing skills, how are you developing yours?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And also your pedagogical skills?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: For intellect, I ask teachers to consider, how do you cultivate your genius? How do you learn new things to teach? Where do you discover new knowledge? How are you a lifelong learner? And of course I have them look at their own criticality.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: What types of injustices have you observed and personally experienced? And that’s important, because you don’t have to experience every kind of injustice to know that it’s real, right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: I have never experienced war outside my home. That is real and true for many children and many people. And to understand criticality, you have to understand, you have to have intellectual knowledge and trust the humanity of people experiencing the things that we don’t experience.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And then, what injustices have you experienced? And then for joy, of course I ask teachers questions in the book like, when you walk into your building every day, do you feel like this is a place where I belong, that will nurture my genius and joy? You may not walk in happy, smiling every day.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: I don’t know if that’s realistic for any job. I mean, you might, which is great, but if you don’t, that’s okay. But you should feel like this is a place where I feel at peace, I feel at home, I feel safe, I feel like I belong, and that I can have the potential to live out my creativity as a teacher artist.
GONZALEZ: So if someone is listening now going, “I definitely don’t feel that way about the place that I work,” what do you recommend they do, apart from just go get another job? Is there something they can do within the existing place that they work maybe to address that?
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. I say, why? Is it, it may be something going on in their personal lives. We still have to go to work unfortunately if there’s sadness in our lives —
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: — if there’s loss, despair in our life. So we have to figure out the why because it may not be permanent. It may be just something else we’re going through. It may be just that one leader.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: I worked with a school district this month, and they had, I think in the last 10 years, no, in the last 20 years I think 10 to 12 different superintendents. It was a lot.
GONZALEZ: Wow, yep. Yeah, I know schools like this too.
MUHAMMAD: So you know, the leader, they may not stick around if that’s been the turn over. Is it the colleagues? Is it the children? Is it your patience level? Some, some schools may not be where you are in your phase of life. You might need a different type of environment. I’m always trying to question before you just apply for another job and bring that sadness with you, or bring whatever with you.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Let’s try to pinpoint why.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: And being in acts of service, my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, she advises some form of therapy to do the work that we do, because this is, it takes so much to be a teacher and an educator.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And sometimes talk therapy, as one form, helps us to identify the cause of why we don’t feel safe in that field. And if we determine everything, it’s just the culture, it’s toxic, then I do advise to find a school that will nurture and cultivate and elevate your genius and joy. Because they’re out there waiting for you. Or, you know, leave education in terms of K-12 schooling. There’s lots of educational jobs that will take your genius and your talent and your experiences, and you can apply it there. I think we get some kind of fear when we say, I’m leaving the K-12 classroom. I mean, I had that too when I went to grad school full-time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: I’m like, what am I doing? I’m just going to leave my classroom and the pension and the retirement, you know.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: All of it. But if we’re not well or if we’re destined to do something else, we have to move in that direction because we don’t know what, who we will become and the impact it will have.
GONZALEZ: That is absolutely true. I would also like to add, because I was listening to you talking about if you work in a toxic environment, and both schools that I taught in for several years each, there were people whose presence could make you feel like you were really working in a toxic environment, and then if you moved away from those people, and just put more time into the people that you felt good around, just noticing that —
MUHAMMAD: Yes.
GONZALEZ: — you can make your own little pockets of joy even in a school where things are not okay.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. You’re absolutely right.
GONZALEZ: And really nurture each other, yeah, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: My mom used to say, because they’re going to be everywhere.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: You go to a new place, there’s going to be a different face but same kind of feeling. And we have to, and sometimes it’s like us giving them our power, like my mom used to say.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: Are you giving them the power? I’ve learned this the older I get, to set boundaries, and to just not care what they may think of you.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: I used to really want everybody to just be my friend or love me, but you know, now it’s like, okay.
GONZALEZ: Your energy’s better spent pouring into people who are going to give it back to you, and then it’s exponential.
MUHAMMAD: Exactly, exactly. And they can keep moving. And our kindness will be a model to them, and they can either learn from it or not.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So apart from potentially, you know, toxic colleagues or leadership, there are other forces, and some of them very recent and still happening, that are really working against this. So one is sort of pre-present day, which is just the time aspect. Teachers that are working in schools where it’s just like, you’ve got this curriculum to cover, you’ve got this test prep to do, and so those teachers may be thinking, this sounds great. I don’t know how I make time for it. So that’s Part A of this question. And then Part B is there are a lot of communities now where teachers have been specifically told, we’ve got a list of names here, and if you’re reading any of their books or anything that’s even remotely related to equity, you can’t go anywhere near it now. Luckily, I think there’s a lot of work out there that doesn’t have that label on it necessarily. I had a really good conversation with Zaretta Hammond a couple of years ago or a couple of weeks ago about this, and she said, yeah, a lot of the stuff I advocate for doesn’t have any of those words in it, and it’s all really good stuff. So you could just keep on doing it. But what, what can you say to people that are in either or both of those situations where they’re sort of like, I love all this, I don’t know if I can do it.
MUHAMMAD: What these environments are, anti-intellectual, anti-scholarly. And here we are telling our children to be intellectuals, to be scholars, to be thinkers. We’re not even doing the same thing. Shame. You know, a teacher from Texas, she said to me, she said Gholdy, I’m going rogue, and I’m going to teach your model. I said, sis, that’s not what going rogue — going rogue means you’re doing something dangerous that is a departure. You’re actually doing something beautiful and more elevated, more rigorous as a departure.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: The system went rogue.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
MUHAMMAD: What we have been doing, the real question is, I’m sure we can all, no matter what your ideologies, your vision, who you voted for, we can all ask this question. Are the children academically achieving and excelling in our country? Yes or no. That’s my question.
GONZALEZ: Almost always no.
MUHAMMAD: I’m not here to convince you that something more challenging, rigorous, invigorating, joyful, intellectually stimulating is better. That’s just like me trying to convince you to drink water. You should just kind of know it. It’s good for your body. So let’s start with this question. Are the children academically achieving? How would you answer that, Jenn?
GONZALEZ: Absolutely not.
MUHAMMAD: Okay.
GONZALEZ: For the most part. And, listen, I’m going to even add a little bit to that, because I’ve got three kids who — my youngest just graduated high school. All of them had more or less straight A’s. And they will tell me like that, “I hardly learned anything in school.” So even, even the ones who are academically achieving aren’t really gaining a whole lot when it comes to skills.
MUHAMMAD: The children who are academically achieving and passing the tests, they sometimes have high suicide rates.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: They have mental health issues. They have issues with identity and the self. They have issues with joy. It’s a, passing the tests is not a goal. That does not make you whole.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: But I ask that question because I did not, and I would never write a book to replace excellence. We don’t have excellence in the first place. So we all should be trying to replace what we have until excellence is at the standard for all children across rural areas, urban areas, characteristically urban areas, whatever you, whatever environment you name. We want children achieving for all. And we have to define what is achievement because as you said, it’s something more than just the A’s and tests.
GONZALEZ: Yep, yep.
MUHAMMAD: The truth of the matter is, Jenn, the model of the five pursuits is a test prep model. Because it is teaching skills in more, in a more rigorous, contextualized way.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: It’s actually more stimulated for the teacher and the students.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And it’s more contextualized where children don’t just pass the test, but they actually remember how to use the skill in real life. When we teach decontextualized vocabulary and other skills, children may remember it in their short term of how to pass a test, but then they don’t know how to apply the same mathematics to a situation that they actually will have to use in life, and that’s the problem. And that, educators have been arguing that. Are we teaching the right math? They’ve been arguing that forever.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Yep.
MUHAMMAD: So this is not going to be more time. Teachers say, I don’t have more time to teach four more pursuits. You’re not going to get more time. You’re not going to get more land, you’re not going to get more time, you’re not going to get more gold. So these three things my mother told me to invest in. But it is how we use our time. You teach that same skill but you, you contextualize it. When you see some of these lessons, it’s the same time that you had.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So, for the leaders, for anybody who says, we can’t go near the five pursuits or we can’t go near equity, I challenge them to a lesson plan right off. I say, now I write my lesson, you write your lesson, we teach it to children. Because I cannot argue with somebody who has never written a lesson plan or taught our children. How can you tell me what children need when you have not experienced it? You’re just talking. It’s just opinions. You haven’t done any research.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: You haven’t done any practice. You need to be fully rounded if you’re going to lead our children. And when, for the argument, so the time is the same.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: We just use our time differently. No. 2, all children are not achieving at the, at where they should, so ethically we owe it to our children and their parents to do better by them. And I tell you, teachers and leaders who were sort of naysayers, when they, when they practice and teach with these five pursuits, they love it. They feel like, I get emails all the time. I’ve been teaching 20, 30 years. This is why I became a teacher. You just created something inside of me that makes me want to go another 20 years. So they are loving it. The children are loving it. We have data to show that children are excelling higher in reading and math and other scores. And so to the last point, the people, the teachers, the educators and leaders who say they can’t go near equity, how do you combat hate? See, that’s not a pedagogy, that’s not an intellectual debate. It’s a spiritual one now. I can’t just tell you to read the research, let me teach you how to write a lesson plan. Let’s engage with — you can’t do that with hate.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Because their hearts are not even open enough to say, well, let me look at the data. Let me read the research. Let me read the book —
GONZALEZ: Imagine.
MUHAMMAD: — a lot of people are banning books that they never read.
GONZALEZ: No. Imagine them reading a book, okay.
MUHAMMAD: Listen, but you know, they will keep all other things except for books. I was, I was watching the trailer for “Squid Game” and all this, and I’m like, they didn’t ban, this is so violent. But you know, so people got to ask these questions around who or what is happening. I mean, Shakespeare wrote about a murder-suicide and his book was never banned in schools.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: You know, as a white male.
GONZALEZ: Right.
MUHAMMAD: And they call him tradition and classic.
GONZALEZ: Yes, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So we know that this issue of hate is hate, and we have to call it what it is. And violence is racism. It’s all the things when you target certain people and certain types of thinking.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So what do we do for that? That’s a question we’re all trying to figure out right now. First of all, we take care of ourselves. We have to be healthy and whole to keep going.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: We have to study policy and law. Okay. What is permissible and why? Can you show me what’s permissible? Can you model it? A lot of these superintendents and policymakers and principals even, they don’t, they tell teachers what to do, but they don’t go in and show them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: How are you going to be a leader of all these children, and you’re not the pedagogical person in charge? I’ve always had issue with that.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And, you know, I have learned to go around. Listen, I’m a language and literacy person. I know how to use language. I know how to use texts. And I have learned to still teach my five pursuits despite. Now if you are in a building that you don’t know, I always advise the educator to listen, to study. Know who you are around. Because people are dangerous. The hate levels have gotten to the point of danger for certain people.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: Where they’ve made threats of people’s livelihoods and all sorts of things. So listen. Take care of yourself. Get your village. See if there’s other spaces that will nurture and galvanize and organize and talk to parents and children and say, what do you want for your child? And community members. We have to do what the ancestors taught us to do. They gave us a blueprint of advocacy, activism, abolition. And sometimes they use their pens, their tongues, their hearts to feel. They engaged in a multitude of strategies and approaches to combat hate and resistance against love because they’re not against equity. They’re really against love. They’re against humanity. We have to call it what it is.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yep.
MUHAMMAD: I don’t even use the word white supremacy because you’re not supreme over me or anybody else. It’s violence.
GONZALEZ: There’s no joy happening over there, so it’s not, yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So you know, we keep going. We get our people together, and we keep doing the work, and we center the love and humanity of this work first and let them respond to us. I’m tired of ask, people asking me to respond to hate. Let them respond to love because that’s what I represent.
GONZALEZ: I love that. Tell me about the new curriculum. Let’s hear a little bit about that.
MUHAMMAD: Speaking of love, I am so in love with these lesson plans. Myself and we call ourselves the genius garden. I had a group of educators, school district leaders, principals, parents, children. So many stakeholders, as we call them.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Help me to write and create lesson plans and unit plans for this curriculum. I wanted everyone involved. And you know, I discovered why we struggle with academic achievement is because I believe, I don’t want to go too far off on a tangent. So let me just say that a lot of educators and leaders do not know or understand how to write a unit plan for another teacher who they’ve never met.
GONZALEZ: Yes, 100 percent agree.
MUHAMMAD: And it said to me, this is why we’re struggling to follow these textbook and publishing companies.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: A lot of them have never even been teachers, and they’re writing for teachers. And they don’t understand that the pedagogy of joy and how to write, like, it’s a different genre. So that was one of my big revelations during the editing process. We, this is a different way of writing for someone you’ve never met before —
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yes.
MUHAMMAD: — whose children you haven’t met. So we kept all those things in mind, the genius garden and myself. The curriculum is K-5, it’s called genius and joy. I partnered with a small family-owned publishing company named Lerner, that’s the family’s last name. It just happens to be Lerner without the “a.”
GONZALEZ: Oh, that’s cool.
MUHAMMAD: And in each grade level, teachers will receive copies of anchor texts. So I purposely, intentionally picked out very multi-cultural, invigorating, interesting topics of these texts. They’ll receive six unit plans that are two weeks long, and they can extend them or shorten them. There’s a curriculum and knowledge map where they can see across K-5 how children are learning across the learning standards, across the goals of identity, intellect, criticality, and joy. There’s a pursuits poster that they can put in their classroom. There are 30 copies of a genius and joy journal where children across the five days of the week, they’ll write about identity on Monday, skills on Tuesday, intellect on Wednesday, and so on, ending with joy on Friday and a genius and joy action. It’s very interactive and really cool and interesting. I use the metaphor and the history of indigenous and Black quilters, and I studied many of these women who would quilt as a form of protection and social engagement and collaboration and expression and as a way to advance knowledge and humanity and creativity and joy. And I use that as a metaphor of what the curriculum does. It’s also a form of protection, of humanity, of social engagement and so forth. So there’s a section in that. And the themes across the six unit plans start with self and identity, the cultural diversity, community and collectivism. Those are just units about those topics. The third thing is the living and social environment. We have one unit on how to build an insect and the different parts of an insect for that one. It’s a really cool — they make an insect with superpowers and everything. The fourth thing is creativity, literacy, and art. One of the units there is the first Black bookstore in Harlem, The Book Itch. It’s a really cool way, and they have to design their own bookstore and their own books that go in it. There’s a theme on activism and advocacy. And one of the units is the first integrated basketball game in North Carolina, really cool unit. And then the final theme is building the future. And that’s just one, one unit is a dictionary for a better world. How do we think about building a better humanity for all? So each of the units are set across the core ELA learning standards with connections to math, science, physical education, health, art, social studies. Each unit has a “localizing the unit” section where they can make local connections to their genius history in their town or their community.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: There’s a parent letter. It’s just so many engaging and unique parts that I just haven’t seen in so many of our schools’ adopted curriculum.
GONZALEZ: You said it’s K through 5.
MUHAMMAD: It’s K through 5.
GONZALEZ: And you said they’re two-week units? Is it two weeks per grade level? Or does each grade level have six, two-week units?
MUHAMMAD: Each grade level has six, two-week units.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So that’s, yeah. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of material. And when is this going to be ready for people to see it and to get it?
MUHAMMAD: We just finished grade 3 through 5, and so we’re completing K-2 now. And so the complete curriculum set will be out in the fall of 2026.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So I have one more question for you, but before I do, because I like to end on that question. Just where is a place, the best place for you for listeners to go and find more to learn from you?
MUHAMMAD: Well, there’s geniusandjoycurriculum.com.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MUHAMMAD: There is my webpage with the university at the University of Illinois Chicago. There’s an organization that honors my five pursuits, hillpedagogies.com. Those are some places.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
MUHAMMAD: Maybe just a Google search.
GONZALEZ: Perfect, perfect. So this is where I would like to end. With our current landscape, a lot of us feel very, very helpless in the face of all that’s going on, and this is outside of the school system. There’s just stuff on the news every day. So what would you like to say to teachers about how joy can be both an act of courage and a form of resistance, especially right now when the world just feels so unsafe for a lot of people?
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. I think it’s the joy that’s going to keep us going, keep us waking up, keep us fighting. We have to remember the joy of each other, the joy of ourselves. Because we went to a place, it was almost like overnight. Equity was celebrated, diversity was honored, and then it was like all of a sudden, don’t add these words to your grant.
GONZALEZ: Wild.
MUHAMMAD: And we’re removing your grant funds.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And these positions, and we have to retitle the names of this office. Like, how? How?
GONZALEZ: It’s bizarre.
MUHAMMAD: How was this something that you wanted to add to the office title? So we have to remember history. We have to remember when we were in this state before. We may not have been physically alive perhaps — maybe we were, maybe we weren’t — but what happened? How did we come out of that? That gives me the hope, when I think about the ancestors. This is not anything new. Banning books, changing policy for a certain agenda that feels very inhumane or hurtful and harmful. This is not new, and our reactions, our responses must not be new either. I encourage educators to remember their joy so that they can keep going.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: So that they can wake up and take care of themselves and their families. And, you know, not live in fear. Dena Simmons reminds me that when you live in fear, it doesn’t allow you to be fully present in the moment. And if you’re not fully present, how can you give the best of yourself to children? You know, so we have to be smart and mindful if that’s what’s going on. And then we have to sometimes, I do this all the time, I have to redirect when that fear wants to overcome me because I know if I’m fearful, I can’t be my best self. I can’t keep going.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And I must for the sake of myself, my family, my children. And I, you know, I learned a lesson, a very powerful, personal lesson when I was interviewed by PBS, and it was the day after the election. I thought to myself, why would I set up an interview the day after the election?
GONZALEZ: Maybe you thought it was going to go a different direction?
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. And she said, like, two minutes before the interview, it was being recorded, videoed, everything, she says, you know what? I’ve changed all the questions. She was going to ask me about literary societies and love and libraries and humanity, all these great things. She said I’m just going to ask you about Trump and response to the election and how you’re going to overcome and da da da. I’m like, huh, huh, huh? And then it’s like two minutes.
GONZALEZ: Wow.
MUHAMMAD: The first question was about my research and my work, and I responded with such love and joy. And she went to the next question, also about literary societies and joy and identity and the five pursuits, and the next question. She never asked me any of the other questions that she said she was going to pivot with. And I asked her afterwards, I said, why didn’t you ask your questions? I was ready.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: You gotta stay ready, Jenn. And she says, you know, your answers were so beautiful and loving, I just wanted to keep going because we needed it. Now I’m saying this to say, what did I learn? Continue to act in kindness and love in humane ways, and maybe somebody will pick up and follow your lead.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: And maybe they won’t, and for those folks, we create boundaries and we set, we create separation so it doesn’t affect our health. And we just keep going. And when it’s time to rest, we must rest. When it’s time to write, we must write. When it’s time to speak, and that’s what I learned from the ancestors too. You engage in different forms, and you have something to return to, whether that is God, whether that’s your family, whether it’s joy. Name the thing. Like, for me it is joy, and joy is also connected to God and family and all these things I love.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: And let that be your center so that when you want to go out and divert and somebody’s trying to take it away, you remember it to keep going.
GONZALEZ: Thank you so much.
MUHAMMAD: Thank you.
GONZALEZ: Thank you so much. I’m really, really glad actually that I, that we didn’t do this a year or two ago when the book was published, because I think we need it now more than we did then.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. I told you. It’s all the right time.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: I don’t care what happens. I always say, this is exactly when it’s supposed to happen.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
MUHAMMAD: Even the things that we don’t want to happen in our lives, it’s supposed to happen because something greater and higher is going to come from it. And I like to believe that too with the state of education right now.
GONZALEZ: That gives me hope, and hope is hard to come by right now, and it gives me hope.
MUHAMMAD: It is.
GONZALEZ: Just knowing that there are a lot of people like you out there still doing this work and still existing and still, still coming at each other with love and kindness and bravery all at the same time, and joy.
MUHAMMAD: Yeah. Yeah. And thank you for what you do. Like even doing the podcast and host, it’s like all the different ways we do things. We bring voices together, we put it out in the air.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
MUHAMMAD: It’s all the things. It doesn’t just have to look one way.
GONZALEZ: Right, right.
MUHAMMAD: So I appreciate your work too, Jenn.
GONZALEZ: Thank you. Thank you so much.
For a full transcript of this episode and links to both of Dr. Muhammad’s books, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 257. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.