Have you ever questioned how gendered rules and implicit biases shape our education system? Today, we're joined by Jason Ablin, an accomplished author and educational expert with over three decades of experience, to unpack this topic. His book, The Gender Equation in Schools, illuminates the issue of gender equity in education. During our conversation, Jason shares his journey from recognizing his biases to becoming an advocate for change.
Unmasking the often overlooked challenges boys face in education, we dive into the intersection of gender, race, and education. Jason details firsthand experiences and insights, revealing how conflicting messages about identity, the miseducation of sexuality, and a lack of safe spaces amplify these challenges. Together, we explore the trend of deteriorating boys' performance in schools and the urgent need for conversations to address these pervasive issues.
Jason guides us through the transformative possibilities of education when we resist gender binaries. He shares the significance of creating gender-inclusive spaces, fostering resilience, and the often underestimated potential of leveraging students' strengths to liberate them from societal norms. Our conversation is a call to arms for educators, caregivers, and all constituents in education to disrupt conventional systems and work towards a more equitable future. Tune in for a critical and empowering discussion that may redefine your perspective on gender equity in education.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Have you ever questioned how gendered rules and implicit biases shape our education system? Today, we're joined by Jason Ablin, an accomplished author and educational expert with over three decades of experience, to unpack this topic. His book, The Gender Equation in Schools, illuminates the issue of gender equity in education. During our conversation, Jason shares his journey from recognizing his biases to becoming an advocate for change.
Unmasking the often overlooked challenges boys face in education, we dive into the intersection of gender, race, and education. Jason details firsthand experiences and insights, revealing how conflicting messages about identity, the miseducation of sexuality, and a lack of safe spaces amplify these challenges. Together, we explore the trend of deteriorating boys' performance in schools and the urgent need for conversations to address these pervasive issues.
Jason guides us through the transformative possibilities of education when we resist gender binaries. He shares the significance of creating gender-inclusive spaces, fostering resilience, and the often underestimated potential of leveraging students' strengths to liberate them from societal norms. Our conversation is a call to arms for educators, caregivers, and all constituents in education to disrupt conventional systems and work towards a more equitable future. Tune in for a critical and empowering discussion that may redefine your perspective on gender equity in education.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Welcome to SEL in EDU.
Speaker 2:Where we discuss all things social and emotional in education.
Speaker 1:I'm Krista.
Speaker 2:And I'm Craig, and we are your hosts on this journey.
Speaker 1:This podcast is created in partnership with Pennsylvania ASCD.
Speaker 2:Good day, good day. Good day, good day. Sel in EDU Family. We are back again for another wonderful episode of SEL in EDU the podcast. Krista, how are you doing? How's your heart today?
Speaker 1:Oh, my heart is very full. I am still on the getting up early working out trend, had a fabulous weekend. We were just talking with Sean Gaylord and our last podcast about jazz music. We got to go out into Philly this weekend and listen to some live jazz and it was awesome. I'm still full from that a couple of days ago. How are you today?
Speaker 2:I am doing pretty well too. I have spent a lot of time outdoors trying to get my patio together. If this wanted to make sure that we got some good furniture, we got people coming through. You want to make it a home away from home, a place where people can take their shoes off and enjoy. I find myself most excited about just being able to create that space. I am working on a new fire pit to put outside in a backyard because we got one on the patio. Sean gave a great recommendation with the Carlos Santana. I am calling John, I am from Philly, he did the album love, devotion, surrender. John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana.
Speaker 1:That reminds me that I need to get on it. I like to listen to music while I am working. Our guest today is nodding too. Our guest is from the East Coast but currently living out in Los Angeles. I am just a little bit jealous. Family that is where I wanted to be living early on in my life. He said it is a cool day at 65 degrees out there. I am so excited that we have Jason. He is the author of the gender equation in schools. With over 30 years of experience in education, he has served as a teacher, academic director, principal and head of schools. He holds national certification and leadership mentoring from the NASP and SSP elementary and secondary principal's association. He mentors new leaders throughout the country and is currently the director of the American Jewish university's mentor teacher certification program. He currently consults with schools, leading training and workshops on gender equity, positive faculty engagement and school culture. Welcome, jason, I am excited to have you here today.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to have this conversation because this is going to be as much a learning experience for me as hopefully it is for your audience.
Speaker 1:I am thrilled to be here, absolutely. I think that is one of the things I like the most about having a podcast. I am excited to learn more about your work and your research. Can you tell me what led you to have this entry into looking at gender equity in schools?
Speaker 3:That is a journey we go through, different stages and different experiences. I would say that in some ways, gender and education happened to me rather than me happening to it. Let's just start there. I was all of 27 years old. I had just been in education for a few years and started a position at a school where I was head of the English department. I was teaching both at a really interesting school that had a boys campus and a girls campus. This is a story I tell in the book because at 27 years old, as you can imagine, I was the best teacher in the school. By my own estimation. I was incredible. I was just amazing.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Everyone has been there at some point. All the kids in the school wanted to be in my class, all the parents and I was just the greatest teacher. My assistant principal came to me and said hey, there are some researchers who are coming to the school because of the unique structure of our school, they want to come visit your girls' class in the morning and then they want to come visit your boys' classes in the afternoon. They want to see what's going on in both of these classes. Of course, as the great teacher that I was, by my own estimation I was like sure they're going to learn so much from me about how to get this right. I'm 27 years old. I have so much wisdom.
Speaker 3:They came into my classrooms 20 times over the course of a single year, into one 10th grade English class and then into the other one at the boys' school.
Speaker 3:At the end of the process they came to me and said do you want to hear the results of our research?
Speaker 3:Do you want to hear the data? I said, of course, I want to hear what wonderful things you have to say about me. So we walked into a room and I had two and a half of the most grueling hours of my life hearing about all of the ways in which I was clearly bringing all of the implicit bias into the classroom around gender, and that just lit a fire in me and it just spoke to me about how much of good intentions and walking into classrooms we can have and, at the same time, how many of the things that construct our own personality our own being, the way we were brought up all of these different aspects of who we are can be impacting us as professionals without us even knowing it, and that really drove so much of the work I did really over the next 30 years immersing myself in this area Finally to the point in 2018 where I really felt comfortable sitting down and writing my thoughts about it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing that, because that's a moment of vulnerability right there where we can go back and tell a story and say you know what I thought I was doing? Awesome, I had this and I couldn't wait. And then you get the feedback and you're like whoa what? At that point, you have a couple choices, one of which is like well, this is just the way it is, or I'm not going to change, but instead you leaned into it and I really admire that.
Speaker 3:Well, and it was a journey Chris didn't crack, I mean, it was not a one off and then, all of a sudden, I was you know, it was not an evangelical moment, in other words, I was not, you know, healed in some way. I really had to spend years, not only as a teacher but as a husband and as a father and in so many different ways, really thinking about these issues and the way I was interacting in the world, and then, eventually, as a school leader, right.
Speaker 3:That was a whole other. You know we can go all over all the missteps I made along the way there, right, and it really was a learning journey that I went on.
Speaker 2:In regards to the subject area, yeah, I spent some time just checking out your Twitter feed and there, I mean, there's several things that we could talk about, but we're not just on just some of the some, some of the things that have stirred a little bit of what I would call a flame, if you will.
Speaker 2:But your, your conversations about boys is something I would love to lean into a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I was on, I was I put, I made a decision on Sunday evening to participate in this one particular group that focuses on men, specifically black men, and there there's a community of people from across the nation, possibly the globe, that come together to really discuss and explore these conversations about masculinity, manhood, and this topic was the miseducation of sexuality. And so I understand right now, from what I see on the ground with young boys today, that there's so many conflicting messages about just how to be a boy, how to you know, how to grow into becoming the man you desire to be, whatever that means, as well as finding safe and brave spaces for them to thrive in schools, and I see that you've been very much on fire about some of the same, so I guess I'm curious what are you seeing right now in regards to some of the boys, the young men or males that you're encountering and what's got you on fire right now about how boys are learning, or thriving, or just being in their classrooms.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I just Craig, and thank you for this perspective because you're absolutely right. This really does have me very lit up right now, mainly because I've been through in my lifetime already three iterations of this problem and watching people in the field try to kind of solve this problem in different ways and we seem to end up exactly where we were before. And not only that, but we seem to be watching boys have a deteriorating effect in our school systems. They are graduating, they are stopping their programs earlier, they're not finishing school. As we see this kind of, you know, upward trajectory of girls with who are rocking school right now, we're seeing the exact opposite trajectory with boys over the last 50 years. And with all these conversations, what's so interesting to me is that we seem to be having conversations around school but not what happens in school, and to me that's a very powerful way of kind of framing what the experiences of a young boy in school and what I say, craig, because I get this question a lot about you know, by-park kids, particularly black boys in our culture, brown boys in our culture what their experience is, which is different than, let's say, white children inside of schools, which I think is super important. What I say about this issue on that is that we have this baseline issue of gender that they're dealing with in schools, and then what happens is race exponentializes that problem for black boys and for brown boys in our schools, and it takes certain issues and I'm going to give you a perfect example of two year olds in early childhood classrooms.
Speaker 3:Okay, this is, and this is wild, right, we're talking about two or three year olds and what we find is is that teachers will set up all kinds of conditions and rules inside their classrooms, and particularly a lot of them around public space and private space. So there's, if you go into ECE classrooms, a lot, early childhood classrooms, a lot, which I do. What you see is a kind of template of making these public spaces, which you often find the blocks, and then you find in the private spaces, the kitchen, the dress up area, places like that. So the classroom becomes this extremely binary gender environment which has been constructed by the teacher, right? So kids are already fitting into this gender binary. What happens is is that the boys start to make rules about the use of public space inside these classrooms. You can play here. You can play here. We're playing this game. This is the game that's going to be played and this is in direct confrontation, often with the rules that the teacher has established. But because we have this gender confrontation that's going on, teachers often allow it. They allow it to take place. This is kind of ecosystem that gets created in these early childhood classrooms.
Speaker 3:And then guess what happens in the public space. The teacher says to everyone come around, we're going to do circle time right now. And the boys say I don't want to do circle time right now, I'm going to go wander around the classroom right now and do what I want to do. The teacher and child get into this heady confrontation right over rules. All of a sudden that child finds himself in confrontation and in conflict with teachers, with school, with the idea of school. But it's based on the fact that why am I being told that I get to make the rules in this space at some times? But then all of a sudden you're going to reinforce the rules at other times. And boys have a point. Boys have a very significant point about this.
Speaker 3:We're genderizing them in a very narrow way very young and then we're telling them there's a problem with that, and I can give you some examples of when that happens later on as well, but this has happened to two and three year olds.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what you're saying is reminding me of. I am the mom of three boys. I have a bonus son and two older boys and we're in our, you know, right now they're 21, 18, and 17. And when my older son was younger, his caret sitter, who I loved, had gotten sick and he needed to go to school. He was getting in trouble.
Speaker 1:Every day we were coming home with this little notebook that had a happy face or an unhappy face. He'd come bounding out and I'm like how is your day? And he's like wonderful. I'm like, let me see your book. And it was an unhappy no, nothing written in there, just an unhappy face.
Speaker 1:There were times where he wasn't like, he was running around the playground and they didn't want him to run, and so he got excluded from trips, from a trip to the two blocks away to the post office, because they were afraid he was going to run away. I'm like he's on the playground running, like a public space where you're supposed to get out your energy, and then a week later he got taken away. You know something? A learning experience taken away. So that really started my thinking around how we are treating boys in particular, because I only have boys. But then what does that mean for their investment and engagement and learning later on? So I'm super interested in hearing about you said you have another story about when they're older. Could we get into that because I'm very curious to hear that connect.
Speaker 3:Absolutely absolutely, and their attitudes towards school and their feelings about school. Even when boys feel successful in school, in other words, academically, just from kind of jumping through the academic experience, a lot of boys express you know, I don't like school, I hate school. They come home with stories about being in conflict with teachers and adults, fighting over rules, fighting over experiences. As you know, boys get disciplined three times as often as girls do, and when you're talking about black boys in classes and brown boys in classes, that can be upwards of six times as much, four times as much as white children are getting. White boys are getting disciplined inside of schools, right. So school in many ways for many kids along the spectrum, starts to feel like a very carceral experience. They feel like they're being contained, confined, they're constantly being disciplined all the time, and a lot of it has to do with our own inconsistencies about dealing with them as boys. So another example is about zero tolerance policies in high schools, which I think we should absolutely get get rid of across the United States, I think. I think we would be much better off without zero tolerance policies than a lot of places, but this one is in particular when kids get into physical fights. So when, first of all, when girls get into physical fights in schools like real knockdown, drag out fights we have six psychologists in the room. All of a sudden there's a team of therapists around them, like something's really wrong all of a sudden, when girls get into a fight, when boys get into a fight, there was a study done in Sweden and the United States where they took to look at the reporting about the fight that took place and also the reporting about the communication about the fight, and often the language used is it's a normative form of the way boys express emotions. This is how boys talk to each other emotionally and so therefore, on one level in the reporting we're saying boys are being boys, boys are just being boys and this is how they express their emotional lives and therefore there's something OK and valid about. Violence is basically what we're telling them.
Speaker 3:Then we have zero tolerance policies in school. So what do we do? We suspend them or expel them for the exact same act, when they need the community the most to deal with these issues and these problems. We are being exclusionary of their community, of the people who could really help them learn. The example I use is that when we have a math test. A child takes a math test in school and fails it. We don't kick them out of school. They come back and we say, ok, we're going to teach you. Why would it be different with disciplinary policies? We should be a learning institution. These social, emotional issues are learning moments. Kids need to be back in the school and learning when things like this happen.
Speaker 2:There.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's so much to unpack with what you shared.
Speaker 2:I think, in today's current environment politically, there's so many educators who don't know what to say and how to be safe, because there's a lot of legislation that has now dictated what happens in the classroom, so that educators who would be well intentioned and I'm just going to focus on those who are well intentioned and really are trying to do the best that they can and as we continue to, as research, as we learn more, we continue to evolve, but in regards to creating Gender inclusive spaces, that where young people can thrive and since we're talking about boys in this conversation, I'm curious how you know, let me, let me think about this differently what it would it?
Speaker 2:What is your advice to educators who are in places where it may not be as safe for them to get it together as quickly as they can, because there's a lot of controversy about gender identity and gender expression and gender expansive spaces for young people to thrive. I'm just curious what are what has been or what is your responses or our resources or strategies for educators who are really trying to get it right? But are, you know, in some could, what can be considered dangerous places?
Speaker 3:Yeah, greg, it's a great question right now because I was just down in Jacksonville, florida, for a conference and many of the educators who were there, from all over the South you know, they're from South Carolina, they were from North Carolina, they were from Tennessee, they're obviously from Florida and my session I did a session on my book. We were talking about, you know, kind of the one on one version of gender and education and afterwards, you know, at about 30 or 40 people in the room and was a nice crowd, they were lively, they were engaged or really interested and passionate about the subject, and then I would have teachers come up to me and say you know, this is amazing, if I brought this into my school I'd be fired, you know. So that is the landscape, and that's not just. You know, that's also around black history, it's around, it's obviously around gender issues which are going on with the trans community in particular. And you know Florida is kind of like, you know, ground zero for all this. Right now, in our schools, in the schools in particular, what might my big advice to teachers would be is that, no matter what happens outside and this goes back to the SEL, this goes back to you guys and your expertise, no matter what goes on outside, you're going to eventually be the arbiter of whether that space inside the classroom feels like a safe space or not. Right, you're going to be designing spaces inside your, inside your classroom, inside your school. That's really going to define whether kids feel like they have people around them and support them and, quite frankly, it's not just all I shit.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's take it a step further. Let's go beyond that. I should that you're going to be somewhat disruptive and you're going to find ways in which that kids who are coming out, kids who are feeling, you know, uncomfortable in their bodies and need somebody to talk to, that there's going to be. You're going to create the safe spaces in those schools for those conversations to go on and you're going to be there for those children and everybody's going to feel that. Right, everybody's going to feel that school.
Speaker 3:That's whether it's a kid who's feeling like he doesn't fit into the natural sense of masculine, narrow masculine culture which has been created, and it's, you know, it's for girls who are feeling like they want to do like extensive stem work and they want to feel comfortable in the stem lab. So you're going to make those things happen for those students and you're going to, you're going to put the noise aside to make sure that happens for those kids. That's what I think is the most. That's the message I have for them. You've got to think more like a disrupter than you do an ally.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate you saying that, because I think I was a former high school teacher for 10 years and one of my core values for the classroom was that people felt they belong there and they could be their cells, their authentic selves. And taking that back to the research, we know that when people are feeling emotionally and psychologically and physiologically safe, they can learn at high levels, and so we want to create a classroom where people feel that they can be who they are, so that they can engage, so they can learn from each other and from the teacher and from conversations and a very good friend of mine was just in Florida for a keynote session and had this whole list of words. She wasn't allowed to say, one of them being belonging, and I feel that that is something that we want for our learning spaces. We want people to feel a sense of belonging. And I appreciate to your work around the masculinity as well, because I feel that there's so much pressure from society for our men to feel that, in order to be masculine, they have to present as a certain way, whether it's not showing their emotions or dressing a certain way or acting in a certain way with mannerisms and I am tying this back to your book, because there was a part in there where you asked the the and let's say traditionally there's a mother and a father in the household to have the male adult be the one to read to the children and for the female figure to be the one to work on the math and kind of flip those gender stereotypical roles there.
Speaker 1:And two of my boys love learning and one of them came in and like upper elementary school and he was reading this big book and he was sobbing and he's like I feel so stupid because my favorite character is crying and he started laughing but then he started crying and he's like I can't, I'm crying about a book and I'm like, but that's the power of books, that they pull you into a story and that you care so much that it's tapping in your emotions. And this is okay. For you to cry while you're reading a book, it's okay for you to cry when you're upset. It's, you know, to have this release of an emotion and being vulnerable in that way is not a sign of weakness. And so I think that that is something that, whether we're educators or parents or carrying adult figures in a child's life, giving them that safe space to let them explore the ranges of, for them, what it means to be masculine.
Speaker 3:So RW Connell, who's like the grandfather of masculinity studies in Australia, he said what we need to do in schools is create a multiculturalism of masculinity, and I found that to be very powerful. That really resonated with me when I, from my own experiences growing up and also watching students inside of schools, I'll tell you about a story of a program we created when I was principal of a K through eight, and we decided to really, again Craig, be a little disruptive and what we decided to do is really flip our parent, student, parent, teacher conferences. What we decided to do was, instead of having that, have student parent conferences where the advisory program became the center of the way that students went through their classes. They created a narrative of themselves as learners. They sat with their parents and they took over the meeting. They took over that meeting with their advisor to talk about how they were doing in school and where they were performing well, where they felt confident, where they felt successful. And we took it the next step and we really took the SEL principles and made it the guiding, guiding outline for how these meetings would go and how the student would gather information. So where do you see signs of your own resilience? Where do you see yourself as a community builder, all these kinds of ways that students can see themselves? And I didn't really understand the impact of it until we did it. And then I walked out. I was walking in the hallways and a parent was coming out of a meeting and she was in absolute tears. She was in absolute tears and I'm gonna lose it right now a little bit, so go right it okay. She came out of there and I said what's wrong? You know, I was like what happened in the meeting Did something, and she goes. I haven't heard my son speak so much in a month.
Speaker 3:We literally train boys in so many ways to shut down avenues of communication with us emotional communication, talking about who they are, what their hopes and dreams are, what their vision for themselves is. And you know, inside their silence they do something. We asked them to do this actually to become quote unquote men in our culture, which is we de-relationalize them and instead of building up all of those great skills that many women accomplish along the way, where they learn relational skills and they really learn how to integrate with each other and be with each other and be with other people, we do the opposite with boys. And I think our point is about having great SEL in our schools.
Speaker 3:And as you say, christian Craig, I'm sure you're on board with this, it's not a program, right? It's the center of your school, it's the mission of your school, right? Everything else, for me, is around that mission. And so, particularly for middle schools, when we look at middle school boys coming nine, 10 years, we need to express to them we want you to have a full toolkit of relational skills by the time you leave our middle school and with that you'll be happier, you'll be mentally healthier, you'll be stronger, you'll feel better about school. All the good things, right. All the treats you get, them all you don't have to settle for just art of your personality.
Speaker 1:Love that, just how you said. You get everything. You're well, you get it all. And that relational skills piece, I think, is really powerful, craig, I'm wondering what's bouncing around in your head, because I know we've had talks around this before.
Speaker 2:We have. There's so much that I think about especially being a male, a male of color, a black male, and I think about what my experiences have been in public education classrooms, and it took some very special educators who fought enough of me and all of my humanity to love me through some of the toughest patches. And I am here today because I had some really great teachers who saw something in me that I didn't know existed and helped to bring some of that greatness out of me. I think that one of the things that I'm curious about. I know you talk about a number of topics in your wonderful book the Gender Equation in Schools and you have a number of really great anecdotes and stories that you share. You talk about the twins, tara and Sage, and I guess I would be curious to hear a little bit more about what does it mean to experience learning, liberation and integration.
Speaker 3:Wow, what a fantastic question. I mean twins. I've taught twins before, right, I've taught twins, triplets. I had quadruplets one year, okay, so let's just put that in perspective. But I think that for me, the twins were just a great example of where I had two girls who never ever were allowed to see themselves in a particular way, right, it was fascinating to me because they never were able to see themselves as math students, and we know this from the research that the most powerful context for students being able to see themselves and perceive themselves as learners is what happens in the home, right, how parents interact with them and the messaging that they get.
Speaker 3:And this mother, who was a wonderful, wonderful writer and she was a professor, but she was an English person. She had just trained these girls that girls in their family were not good at math and the boys were good at math. That's what she taught her girls. And they bought a hook line in Sinkern. They brought all that energy into class with them.
Speaker 3:And when I took a step back from their own personal narratives and I started to see what they were able to do in class, this one girl would the whole test. I would give them these exams in free algebra and the whole test was like a disaster. It was like a wreck. It was like a train wreck and then we would get to the last question. And the last question was this kind of complicated extra-credit word problem. That was like more of like a brain teaser for the more advanced kids. She'd look at it for a second and then write the answer at the bottom. I said how did you do that? How were you able to do that? She said I don't know, I just read it and wrote it down.
Speaker 3:I was able then to leverage their love of literature and their love of reading and say let's turn math into a type of language, let's integrate in order to liberate. That's what ultimately happened. I leaned into their strengths, I leaned into where they found themselves the most confident and I made that into something that was going to work for them and work for them in terms of mathematics. One of them went on to go take AP calculus. I had broken some spell, which I'll say that took me a while to figure out. They were often running to the races and often it's just paying attention to the student, this person who's in front, if you're knowing exactly who they are. And, craig, as you put it, it's got to be with a lot of love, because they can feel themselves so alienated from these experiences. You've got to bring love and kindness with you into these experiences with them.
Speaker 1:I think that reminds me of in the work that we do. We'll sit down and talk with teachers and administrators and I'm like what's your greatest hope for your students? I think in my 10 years of asking, that only one time has somebody said something where it's a brown proficiency in math. Everybody else is talking about it. I know I'm like no, you're like ah, but it's how we're connecting with people. It's getting to know people. It's leveraging, like you just said, their strengths and using that to help them continue to grow in ways that they didn't see themselves growing before. I think that's incredibly powerful. I'm really latching on to what you just said, that integrate in order to liberate. I think if we keep reminding ourselves what's at the core of what we're doing, it's about the students and their growth, not about our content necessarily. Especially with technology, I feel like they can find the content.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:I do want to wrap this back around again too, because I think it's about interrogating ourselves and how we're showing up and looking at our biases and how we were socialized and just continually trying to be better for the student who are in front of us. I will admit I don't have the book yet. It's on order and it's coming. I've been googling and looking up things, but I cannot wait to dive into this because I feel like there's just so many great pieces that you've been able to offer. I'm really looking forward to continuing that journey. I'll probably be reaching back out to you again.
Speaker 3:Great this is. Your questions are fantastic and they're deep. They're significant. My biggest concern is for absolutely top of the charts of student wellbeing and that they're coming in out of school feeling like they're growing and prospering and they don't feel like they have any obstacles in their way. As they're going through this experience, they should feel like totally free to fail. They should feel ready to experiment and do different things, and experiment also means identity, Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:I read somewhere and well, this was actually even a couple years ago I heard from and I'm not remembering his name, he was an expert in gender identity just that our students nowadays, 30% of them, are not buying into and I use the word buying into the binary that society in the United States, because it's also not the same in other countries, and I think that's something important culturally to bring about and to bring up that they're choosing. You know what? I'm not opting into this narrative that society is telling us and I think that if we're working with young people, we need to constantly be learning from them and evolving as society evolves.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure, amen, amen.
Speaker 1:Well, people couldn't hear me clapping and snapping for you, as you were. I didn't want to interrupt, but I'm like yes, yes, so thank you.
Speaker 2:Right. So I would love to ask you what do you feel is your superpower at this time?
Speaker 3:Oh, my superpower. Right now. I mean, I really feel, like all these years of doing this work, one of the things, one of my as it goes to what Chris was just saying I don't make any assumptions anymore about people's identities. You know I don't. I feel like it's, that's a developed skill. You know, it's something I certainly wasn't born with or I felt all the time, but I feel like I'm much better able to encounter people where they are and how they express themselves and talk about themselves and go from there, and I just feel that's also a lesson for our schools. Our schools should feel very much the same way. We all know the kids come in, you know, one day feeling one thing, and then the next day, because they're eight and nine and 10, they come in the next day feeling something totally different, and we gotta meet the kids where they are. We gotta meet them where they are.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. Where can our audience find you? Because I'm sure that this has piqued so many questions that folks will continue to stir within themselves. But they wanna talk with you more, they wanna. I'll pick up a copy of the gender equation. So how could folks get in touch with you?
Speaker 3:So they can go to my website and ablaneducationcom and they can reach me through. I'm at hello at ablaneducationcom, they can reach me there and I do workshops all over the country and I speak at conferences and I do all kinds of cool stuff with educators and I get to have amazing encounters with them and we do great work together. And the book is on Amazon. The book is on the Rutledge website. It just dropped a couple of weeks ago. It's on audio now. Very exciting for you long commuters. Yes, okay, I did not do the voiceover, just to let you know.
Speaker 2:I was told not to do it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think my New York accent over a while would have been just like a little bit too much for everyone, Christa.
Speaker 1:No, I like it.
Speaker 3:Okay, thank you, I guess. So it's really a great way to listen to this stuff and to take it in, so it's also available there and get in contact with me if you wanna talk. I'm also on social media way too much, as Craig was mentioning before, so if you find me on. Twitter I'll follow you back.
Speaker 1:You're sharing things and in our notes, our session notes, we'll make sure that we're connecting so that they can purchase your book, your website, all of you on social. So if you're listening, please go to wherever it is that you are listening either Apple or Google but we are loading all of those notes up there so that you can get in contact with Jason to learn more.
Speaker 3:And for Craig and Christa. I just wanna express my gratitude and appreciation for the work you're doing. I've dove into your materials and into your website and stuff and it's just extraordinary stuff. You are disruptors in the best possible way and you're moving the needle.
Speaker 1:That's like the best compliment ever. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Like you know, we do all right. We try to do our best, Okay.
Speaker 3:We try.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good to be a great company, so thank you. All right, sel and EDU family. It has been another tremendous episode. Lots of beautiful gems that were shared. Today, you gotta pick up a copy of the gender equation in schools. It is going to be connected on all of our social media and so, until we meet again, we just ask that you hold yourself and those you care and hold dear real time, and we're gonna continue to do incredible things. We're gonna disrupt, we are gonna love, we're gonna liberate and we are gonna stand strong in the light. Y'all, take care.