1. Harmonizing a New Pulse of Leadership with Jabari Mahiri and Robyn Ilten-Gee

Episode 1 Transcript: https://tinyurl.com/w5h3vhew

In this first episode, Simon Fraser University Assistant Professor Robyn Illten-Gee PhD '19, MA '15 interviews Berkeley School of Education Professor Jabari Mahiri, who discusses what led him to start the Equity Leadership Now! Podcast at the UC Berkeley School of Education (BSE). Mahiri, faculty chair of BSE's Leadership Programs, shares his story and highlights how his lived experiences have shaped and formed his identity as an educator, researcher, and leader. 

As an experienced leader and scholar, Dr. Mahiri imparts the wisdom of practicing and teaching to listen deeply, empathetically, and critically to foster true dialogue and conversation. 

Ilten-Gee takes a critical approach to moral development, investigating ways in which a developmental framework can illuminate possibilities for critical pedagogy and critical moral reasoning. She is interested in how digital media production (e.g. podcasting, multimedia journalism) in classroom settings facilitates a process of students rethinking and revising conclusions and judgments about the world and themselves. Illten-gee most recently published Moral Education for Social Justice
(link is external), an approach that integrates social justice education with contemporary research on students’ development of moral understandings and concerns for human welfare in order to critically address societal conventions, norms, and institutions. 

Mahiri shares how his own lived experiences — from serving in the military to teaching high school students in Chicago — have shaped his research and practical solutions as he continues on the journey to bring more equity in education. 

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating students, particularly for those from historically marginalized communities.

Transcript

Harmonizing a New Pulse of Leadership

with Jabari Mahiri (ft. Robyn Ilten-Gee)

21CSLA Berkeley School of Education Leadership Programs

Jabari Mahiri Host, Editor, and Producer

Brianna Luna Audio Editor and Production Specialist

Mayra Reyes External Relations and Production Specialist

Becca Minkoff Production Manager

Diana Garcia Communications Manager and External Relations

Audra Puchalski Communications Manager and Web Design

Jennifer Elemen Digitally Mediated Learning Coordinator

Jen Burke Graphic Designer

Robyn Ilten-Gee Editor and Media Consultant

Rian Whittle Sound Technician

Transcript

Brianna Luna  0:17  

Equity Leadership Now! hosts conversations with equity-conscious leaders from Pre-K through university settings who transform structures and strategies for educating, particularly for those who are marginalized. We complement the mission and goals of the 21st Century California School Leadership Academy, 21CSLA.

Housed in the Leadership Programs of Berkeley School of Education, we acknowledge our presence on unceded Ohlone Land. We explore innovative ideas and compelling work of educational leaders at the intersection of research, policy, and practice, to realize individual, social, and environmental justice, because our democracy depends on it.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  1:04  

So let's just start out, can you introduce yourself to us?

Jabari Mahiri  1:08  

Sure. I'm Jabari Mahiri, a professor in the School of Education. I'm also the Faculty Director for our Leadership Programs, which includes our educational doctorate called L.E.A.D., Leaders for Equity and Democracy as well as our Principal Leadership program called PLI. I'm also the chair of the Leadership Board for the new project that we've been running for the first three years and now we're going into the second cohort called 21CSLA 21st Century California School Leadership Academy.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  1:42  

Amazing. Well, I'm so excited to be chatting with you here. I'll just introduce myself too. My name is Robyn Ilten-Gee and I'm an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. And yeah, I'm thrilled to be learning more about this podcast that you're working on called Equity Leadership Now. So Jabari, can you tell me a little bit about, what should we expect from this podcast?

Jabari Mahiri  2:04  

Well, we recognize that there are so many ways to provide information to people who are engaging in the difficult job of leading for equity. At the School of Education and our Leadership Programs, we decided it would be great to put out a podcast that featured some of the most provocative, innovative, accomplished thinkers and scholars on very complex and complicated issues of Leading for Equity. Since we have access to a number of these people, we will name some of them, as you'll see on our website the list of people who are coming. I think that it will be a real benefit to the community, to the educational community, to the leadership community, to have access to really interesting modulized communications that they can use in their classes, that they can use in Professional Learning communities, that they can use in Communities of Practice, that they can use in their coaching, to facilitate them achieving their own leadership goals for equity.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  3:11  

Amazing. And when you say leadership, can you just give us like a bit of context about what kind of leaders you might be bringing in?

Jabari Mahiri  3:18  

We want to have a really expanded notion of leadership, so we're talking about leaders at all levels. 21CSLA, focuses on leaders at the district level, at the school site level, and teacher leaders. But we want to expand that.  We're interested in leaders in higher education. We're interested in leaders who train leaders. We're interested in, of course, leaders who are at the district level. We already have confirmed two of the most amazing district superintendents in the state of California. So we have access to a number of teacher leaders all over the state who are doing amazing work in their own right, too. We really will be bringing forth the voices of some students and community leaders, who, again, are doing a major work and sort of, not putting a focus on leadership that's too narrow. We want to see leadership wherever it's happening. And parent leaders, I forgot to mention those two.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  4:28  

I know you've talked a bit about how the positionality of your guests that you have on this podcast is really important to you. Can you tell us a little bit about the connection between identity and leadership from your perspective?

Jabari Mahiri  4:39  

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question because we think that positionality is a key component of your own way of engaging in leadership; that there's no rule for what the best approach to leadership, the best style of leadership is. We certainly understand that leaders coming from different perspectives and backgrounds will have different approaches and strategies for how they engage in their leadership tasks. Of course, we want to be aware that there needs to be as much diversity in the leadership as there can possibly be. So we're consciously seeking leaders who come from diverse positionality--people who don't necessarily reflect the demographics of leadership in the state of California, and in the United States itself. The idea of positionality is that, we want to ask every person that we bring on the podcast, two questions to begin. One is, how do you identify yourself? And secondly, how do you feel US society identifies you? And one of the things we want to probe is the archaeology of the self and my own case. If you were to look at me, you wouldn't necessarily know that my mother's a full-blown Cherokee, because I look like an African American man, and I am an African American man, but I identify as an American of African descent.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  6:08  

Those two questions are so interesting. To use those questions, how do you feel like US society identifies you?

Jabari Mahiri  6:15  

I think US society identifies me as a black man. So that is interesting in the sense that Black lives do matter. And I'm certainly, you know, interested and promoting as much as we can through the educational system to achieve equity and equal representation and development of the most positive outcomes for all students, but particularly with a focus on those who have been most marginalized. African-American males are one of the positionalities that have been most marginalized in the educational system. But I think that we also want to be aware that there are ways in which a simple color-coded definition of who people are, is really a way that the system of white supremacy is supported, because it begins with a simple binary of white and black, and then attempts to put other colorized categories in between. It's interesting that we can't use the term for all of those colorized categories. We can say brown folks, we can say black folks, we can say white folks; but when we talk about Native Americans, when we talk about people from Asian countries, we're very reticent to use the color-coded categories that have been assigned to those, and I won't use them in this conversation, either.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  7:35  

You just shared a little bit about your own identity and how you feel like society views you through this paradigm. What are some key milestones in your own leadership journey, Since you are a leader in so many capacities now, are there any stories memories, or moments that stick out to you as pivotal?

Jabari Mahiri  7:55  

I like to think of myself now as an elder in the community. I could have retired. I just was talking to a colleague when we were at a conference earlier this week down in Los Angeles. And she said, this work of 21CSLA has made me want to come out of retirement. When I thought about it, I say, you know, this work of 21CSLA has made me want to not go into retirement, because it's been so vital. It's been so engaging. Interestingly, this is one of the first times in my history, and I'm gonna get to how I feel like my own milestones as a leader have been a part of the journey to bring me to where I am now. But in every instance, when I was drafted into the Army right out of high school, I spent 18 months in Vietnam. Before that, I went to Officer Candidate School and became a Second Lieutenant. So I was Second Lieutenant. When I got out of the service, two things happened. One, I had a G.I. Bill. That's what allowed me to go to college. Secondly, I had a sense of needing to atone for being so naive as an 18-year-old kid, to allow myself to be drafted and to do a service, a tour of duty, in a country that I really didn't need to be in and that I really didn't belong in. It was a part of a larger set of issues going on in society at that time, that I didn't want to be a part of. I felt like I needed to be engaged in work that was supportive of different ways of being in the world. Education was a key aspect of that. 

I went to college, believe it or not, in two and a half years. I finished my degree at the University of Illinois in two and a half years, and I immediately joined a community organization called the Institute of Positive Education. So I was already engaged in education with people like Carol Lee Donna Lee and others, who were major figures and are still doing amazing work even today. We created a school called New Concept Development Center that all three of my boys went to for the first three grades. So this whole notion of pre-K is so important. You should have all of the basic skills for literacy by the time you get out of third grade. You should have your science skills, your math and literacy skills, and your reading and writing literacy skills, they should be all foundational so that after that, you're just building on that. I think we did that. At New Concept Development Center, I was the chair of the board for its first seven years. So that was one of my early leadership experiences, and that school, believe it or not, still exists today. Forty-five years later, there are still people out there, although the name is now the Mary Cloud Patone School and it goes from Kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. They've also emerged and become a part of the Chicago Public Schools. 

I came to Berkeley after I finished my doctorate. I had several job offers, you know, all research one universities, but they were all in English departments. Berkeley was the only job offer that I had that was in the School of Education. I jumped on it not because it was in California and not in Ohio or Pittsburgh, where I had other job offers. So the University of Illinois, which had a cold climate like the one I come from, I jumped on it because it was the only offer that I had that was a School of Education. I had been teaching high school in Chicago for the last seven years and I was finishing up my doctorate degree. I have a bunch of interesting stories there, we won't go there. Being able to come to a School of Education was so important. In terms of my own sense of continuing the work that I've been doing, from the years of the Institute of Positive Education, but now in a formal institutional structure here at UC Berkeley. I became the leader, and the Director of our Teacher Education Program, I became the Faculty Director of our Leadership Programs. Also as we moved into 21CSLA, I got involved in the writing of those grants and now the implementation of those grants.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  12:26  

I'm really intrigued by this story about, you joining the army and I'm wondering if one of the things you'll be looking for from your guests are moments in their leadership journey when they re-thought something or had a moment where they had to re-examine or change their mind about something?

Jabari Mahiri  12:48  

Certainly, I will, because it's those serendipitous moments that really define us. We have our plan, and life intervenes in the plan that we that we have. I became political while I was in Vietnam. I had time, and for some reason, books were available and being sent out to the troops. So I read Invisible Man, I read, The Man Who Cried I Am. I read all of these works of Richard Wright's native son, while I was in Vietnam. So I'm like, wait a minute--the reality that these people were bringing forward here that speaks to my own experiences as an African American man is much different from the narrative that I'm supposed to trumpet as an officer in the United States Army. So that became an interesting set of conflicts that made it very clear that when my time and tour of duty was up, I was out the door and back into the world, going to college and trying to contribute. So I think I guess we'll have some really similar, exciting stories to tell.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  13:54  

Your personality as a literature and literacy professor is also coming out, I'm wondering if there are other texts that you feel have been, you know, life-changing or transformative or things that you always returned to?

Jabari Mahiri  14:07  

Well, there are so many, but I'll just mention a couple. One was called The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams. When we were back in our Institute of Positive Education days, we would have community learning events called Nation Studies classes, and we would have a metal library, or we had a metal organization. We'd invite the community and we wrestled with these really difficult topics. We were kind of like black nationalists. So we were really out there on the forefront. We had alliances with the Nation of Islam, we had hidden alliances with the Black Panther Party and things like that…you know, the African liberation movement that was going on, the anti-apartheid movement that was going on. Community members who actually built the school, by the way. It was a community school, they also were engaged in learning. We actually had one set of learnings that we didn't put together but, we also benefited from, and it was called the Communiversity, and every Saturday morning at the Center for Inner City Studies, which was in Chicago, people just come out from nine to twelve. They could take classes from the very professors who you would pay to take classes, if you're in a master's program, for free. Dr. Anderson Thompson, Dr. Bobby Right, Dr. Harold Pates, and Dr. Conrad Whirl, were all there to talk about their expertise, but to the community. Those are some of the most vibrant times, I've actually thought about trying to do something like that here at Berkeley, we have this amazing facility. What if we had a Saturday Communiversity here? What would that look like?

Robyn Ilten-Gee  15:43  

That'd be amazing. I remember, there were some teach-outs during the Occupy protests when I was here at Berkeley. Other than that, that sounds incredible. 

Well, can you speak a little bit about the catchphrase for this podcast, Educate like democracy depends on it? What does it mean to you and what do you hope to spark with your guests by throwing this catchphrase out?

Jabari Mahiri  16:04  

We're in a moment in the history of this country that I never thought would have happened. Now that it has, it becomes absolutely clear that education, as well as many other institutions in society, it can't all be linked to education. Institutions in society, economic institutions, political institutions, educational institutions, various kinds of technology, and innovative institutions have to realize that, democracy is under threat right now. The country is divided, and the things that we thought education would do--I'm coming from a literacy background, I'm coming from a rhetoric background. We were always trying to pursue the truth, trying to understand what pieces of evidence and kinds of arguments we're most resilient in, to allow us to get at the truth of what was happening in our reality, understanding that there are multiple streams of reality going on all the time and yet, we can argue that there's still a fundamental set of truths that we hold to be self-evident. If those truths are something that can be self-evident, then education has to be one of the routes that lead people to discover those truths in their own life, and then being able to see the connection between the truth that they experience and believe in definitely connected to the truth of other people that are in a society, too. If we move away from the truth if we say that it's okay to not base our understanding of reality on the evidence and the truth of things that are happening around us, that any narrative that someone creates. almost a 1984 Orwellian way of being in a world where it's just the reverse of the truth. The institutions that you have that are supposed to help us find the truth are actually the ones that provide obstacles to us getting to the truth, like our political processes, voting, and other kinds of things, then we are in trouble. I think that as educators, we have renewed excitement and the work that we do because literally, our democracy depends on it.

There was another book by an author named…that we studied in our Nation Studies classes, and it always stuck with me. He wrote a book called Two-Thousand Seasons, which was the major work. His second book was called The Healers. This notion of the healers, for me, linked into what I thought I needed to do and be, to fully atone, and to contribute to a transformation of individuals and society, to the extent that I can contribute to that. This notion of positioning myself as kind of a healer was something that I have always attempted to do. You never are completely good at that, you can always be better at that. I would add to that, a healer, and the listener. 

We have a thing in our School of Education and our Leadership Programs where when new people come in, we ask them to go around and meet all of the other people, have little sidebar conversations, go to coffee, and go to lunch. I was in a newer person's office, and I was just getting ready to leave and she said, you know, I felt like he really listened to me. That made my day because, particularly as a man, I think I have to learn to listen. 

One of the things that we want to bring into our podcast is the ability to engage our guests, but to really listen to them and to listen deeply, to listen empathetically, to listen critically also so that we can not so much pushback on them, but to challenge the way that things are evolving so that there is a true dialogue or a true conversation. I do have kind of a "Blue’s voice". I've gotten older, this work has prevented me from wanting to retire. I mean, when there's no distinction between the work that you are doing and what you would want to do when you retire, then I think that this is the best position that you could be in your entire life. If I were to retire, I want to travel to interesting places, I want to be engaged with really smart and interesting people. I want to continue to share my ideas, and I get to do all of this, and still keep my salary. Why would I want to retire at this moment when we have this opportunity to do all of this good work? 

I actually interviewed Gil Scott-Heron once, because one of the other jobs I had at the Institute of Positive Education as a Managing Editor of our magazine called Black Books Bulletin, and this work will be in the Chronicle. a Maisha win over at Davis, is doing a retrospective on these independent school movements and the people who made those happen. She intensively interviewed me for maybe, two and a half hours, so some of this information and things that we did back in the day will come to the forefront. This notion of, being a young person, coming out of school, and getting a role as a Managing Editor for one of the few Black journals in the 70s and 80s. There was Black Allegiance, there was Negro World, there was Ebony, there was Ebony Jr. There were very few, The Black Scholar. There were very few mediums that the Black thought could be projected through, and in a way, I guess, maybe this is still an extension of that. I interviewed amazing guests. I got to interview two people who were Nobel Prize winners, and the other one, although this interview didn't get published, was with Toni Morrison. I got to sit in her office for forty-five minutes before she got the Nobel Prize, and just listen to her, and she really guided me through the whole notion of how she thought being an editor allowed her to make decisions about works that brought the true nature of things to the forefront. A guy had written a book about trains, and he didn't include the role of African Americans in the whole train experience in the history of the United States, and she wouldn't allow him to then just put a chapter in the book on Black Americans like us was the caboose on the train. She forced him to rewrite the entire book to integrate the roles of African Americans coming from the South to the North, going from East to West, on trains. For me, that became another kind of thing that guided me, that we can have roles that help us to really bring those experiences to people who are marginalized and made invisible into the forefront, into the limelight, so that the whole world benefits from that. 

When I interviewed Gil Scott Heron, I loved his music, but he talked about how there are a hundred shades of the Blues, and this notion that we have fifty shades of grey. Even when we think about something like the Blues, it might be hundreds of shades of the Blues. When we bring people's stories to the forefront, the centrality of the Blues to American culture, the idea of struggle with the one hand but the hope that the genre is also projecting, and at the same time saying, there's no "one" Blues. There could be three-hundred and twenty-five million shades of the Blues in the United States, because there are three-hundred and twenty-five million.

Robyn Ilten-Gee  23:34  

So you have a Blues voice, I know, you're also a Hip-Hop fanatic.

Jabari Mahiri  23:39  

Well, I wouldn't say a Hip-Hop fanatic, but we did have an opportunity when we were at the conference this last week for me to give a presentation that sort of thematizes some of the things that were coming up. I talked about my own teaching when I was a high school teacher in Chicago. My first book was called African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools. I was making that essential case that there's something central about African American culture, about Hip-Hop, about Blues, about Jazz, about the way we engage in sports and dance and music, that embellishes the entire culture of the United States. And so, my students at the time, these were ninth graders, they were resisting wanting to read Chaucer. I had to teach Chaucer because it was a part of the canon, but what I also understood was that Chaucer was very much like what contemporary young people are doing now with Hip-Hop. In other words, if you look at the Canterbury Tales, if you look at these interesting characters, if you look at the squire, if you look at the Knight, if you look at the Wife of Bath, if you look at the Miller, these are all sort of funky guys on their way to Canterbury and how did they entertain themselves? They entertain themselves by telling these rich stories that had the very same structure that a lot of Hip-Hop has right now, you know, "the Miller was a chapel of sixteen stones, a great big fellow all brawn and bones". I could go on. My point simply is that these young people began to see that, there was a link between their culture, things that they enjoyed, and things that were going on in the 1400s. We had a reinvigoration of their engagement with these ancient texts. At the same time, if we think about it, English was a vernacular language at that time. Latin was the dominant language. When we talk about Hip-Hop being vernacular and a language on the margins, it's clear that maybe you know, in the next 100 years, everybody will be using the genre of Hip-Hop as a primary mode of expression.

Mayra Reyes  25:58  

Our podcast team includes Jennifer Elemen, Robyn Ilten-Gee, Andrea Lampros, Brianna

Luna, Jabari Mahiri, Audra Puchalski, Mayra Reyes, Dara Tom, and Ryan Whittle.