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Sheldon Eakins:

Welcome, advocates to another episode of The Leading Equity Podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Let me tell you something. Today is this very special day for me, it's a total honor and pleasure to be able to present to you, Dr. Geneva Gay. Dr. Geneva Gay is here. So without further do, Geneva, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

You're welcome. And I'm pleased to be here. This is a new experience for me. This is my first podcast. So hopefully our conversation will be something that will aid and assist your efforts and your listening audiences.

Sheldon Eakins:

Thank you. Well, I'm glad to be able to be that first person you can talk to your friends about, "Hey, I was on a podcast the other day." So I'm glad to be there for you for that. I know who you are. And a lot of folks, a lot of the audience has your book, and they know who you are as well, but I'd love for those, there is a small percentage of people that are listening to this episode and have never heard of Dr. Geneva Gay's work, cultural responsive pedagogy. Could you share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Well also let me start with the current and move backwards. I am recently retired from the University of Washington, the Seattle campus. That was my last academic assignment. Prior to that, I had taught at two other universities, University of Texas, which is my alma mater, the Austin campus. And I also taught at Purdue University for a few years. And before that, before going back to school to get advanced degrees and all of that, I was a high school social studies teacher in Center City Schools in Akron, Ohio. But Akron, Ohio is not my native home. I actually grew up in the rural community in Georgia, outside of a small town by the name of Waynesboro. Fortunately, I got out and started a journey across the country, geographically, and a journey intellectually, and socially, and in other ways as well, coming from a very rural background, a very poor background, and a very uneducated family background. So here I am.

Sheldon Eakins:

Nice. Well, okay. And by the way, I'm a former history teacher as well, high school. So we got something in common, so I'm excited now. When you were in Ohio, what was the demographics like as far as student population that you were working with as a teacher?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

I taught in a Center City high school. And the official demographics was about 99% African American. I playfully said is that, "We probably were 100%, but one day a white student got lost, came into the building to look for instructions and he or she was counted. So that made us 99%." But the student population was overwhelming African American, but that was not the case with the teaching population. Teaching population was not 99% European American, but probably 75, 80% European American.

Sheldon Eakins:

Do you remember what the administration demographics was?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

We had White administrators.

Sheldon Eakins:

Okay.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

The principal, the assistant principal. I don't remember about school district, but I not be at all surprised that the school district reflected what the building administration was about. Counselors, everybody that was in a leadership position, other than classroom teachers were all from the dominant population of European Americans.

Sheldon Eakins:

I got you. So now my next question, now, I want to ask you is what led you to doing research into cultural responsive pedagogy?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

In some ways, it was an autobiographical journey. And I've said this before. For many of us who work in this area, the subscript is autobiographical. And part of that, what I mean by that is I think I started, first trying to make sense out of me. I grew up in an environment where African Americans were not just second class citizens, probably third or fourth class citizens, where in that rural community, everything of any empowering position in leadership were always by European Americans. And it was a dual world, you know?

Sheldon Eakins:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Geneva Gay:

To the point of, as a child being in a store, remembering having to, when White adults came in the store, even though you may have been in line waiting to your purchase, you had to step back. And the White people took priority in all of that. But I was an abnormalcy for my family because I was the only one that somehow or another continued to get advanced education. And I always think that something about what did not happen for my siblings, and my cousins, and others in the community age mates, who all had a very difficult time just getting through school, in spite of the fact that during my formative years, all of my teachers were Black, but the curriculum was White. It came from the state and all of this kind of stuff.

               But I wanted to make some sense out of me, of why this happened for me. When I was teaching high school, my Black students gravitated to me for some reason. And I don't know what it was about me that caused them to develop a sense of kindred-ness. And I was a confidant for them in all of this. Whereas, I think a lot of other teachers, I was a novice teacher. I'm right out of college, barely 21 years old and trying to teach. I didn't know anything about teaching. So the experienced teachers were technically much more competent than I was, but there was such a sense of connection and kindred-ness between me and the Black students that I was teaching. And I wanted to find out what was going on there, why that was happening.

               So I went back to graduate school as a way to try to make sense out of that. And, in a sense, almost stumbled backwards into this thing that became multicultural education and ultimately cultural responsive teaching, because my degree is not in that. When I was in college, we didn't have degrees in that. My degree is in comprehensive social studies undergraduate with a degree in history and a PhD degree in curriculum theory.

Sheldon Eakins:

Oh, okay. At the time, like now we see a lot of degrees that are out there, social justice something or diversity oriented type of graduate education that you can get, that wasn't available at the time.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Oh no, because I was going to school. I finished my PhD degree in the mid '70s. So what eventually became the ground swell for multicultural responsive teaching was just beginning. And even then it was not called multicultural education. Much of it was variations of ethnic studies and the ethnic studies then gravitated into ... And on and on it goes. So that's the developmental journey that was happening. But I was just finishing my PhD as that was just beginning.

Sheldon Eakins:

Okay. Now was that around Dr. James A. Banks' work? Were you connected in that sense? Or, I guess far as your work?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Jim is a valued friend and colleague for many, many years. And of course he was one of the people that were starting. But at the college level, there were different people that didn't necessarily prevail across time in the profession, that were not necessarily professional educators in the sense that they had degrees in education. They may have had degrees in history, that were teaching ethnic studies programs, history, or cultural anthropology, or something like that. And I think that multicultural education, as educators professionally trained pedagogues, we emerged out of that. If you will, we were trained as students in those kind of areas. And then as we started our careers, we had to take what we learned in the college classrooms and all of that. And somehow or another shaped that for initially K12 education, because that history professor on college was not going to be teaching K12 education.

Sheldon Eakins:

Right.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

So it was those of us who were their students that had to, and I think that's exactly what we did. We took some of the things that we learned through the ethnic studies filters and ethnic and cultural histories of different groups, and all of that, and tried to place that in our professional arenas. And that's the way in which multicultural education began to emerge and then eventually other variations of multicultural education.

Sheldon Eakins:

Got it. Okay, man, I am thoroughly enjoying this, but I always have more questions. So I hope you're ready for some more questions because I'm very intrigued with how things started. Let's fast forward just a little bit. At some point you started to do the research towards cultural responsive teaching. Walk us through what was the setting? What kind of research were you doing? Or what led you to the actual, "Okay, this is the term that I'm going to coin," as far as cultural responsive teaching?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Well, by training, I'm a conceptual theorist. So my research is different from what a lot of people do in research. And there are some people that still would think about what I do as research or what, I don't know. But I theorize. So what I want to do is, and what I've done, as my professional journey took shape and form, I want to take ideas from other places and see if I can reconstruct them to serve my purposes. And my purpose has always been to do better for people of color, for children, for students of color. And part of that do better is not just to see pathology and negativism, that what other people don't see about us from the inside out is a lot of positivism, a lot of strength, a lot of capability.

               So what I needed to do, then, was take things that I had been introduced to in my theoretical training as a curricularist, a curriculum theory person, and take those things and then rethink them and try to recraft them, and place them within different kinds of contextual settings. And my contextual setting was me. As some of some scholars in education say, is that as educators, as teachers, we always teach ourselves, in the sense that we teach through our own cultural filters. So I was trying to teach, and learn, and shape my thinking in the education arena and my notions, my proposals through me, that, if we are honest about it, as professional, we probably can never totally separate ourselves from what we do, our personal from our professional selves.

Sheldon Eakins:

Yeah, absolutely. I think a podcast, this podcast was founded because I live in Idaho and I represent the 0.8% of Black people in this entire state. And I was experiencing my own forms of microaggressions. And then the kids that I've been working with and especially our kids of color would come to me and tell me stuff, like that was happening in their classrooms at school. And I didn't know how to help them. I didn't know what to do. Shoot, I was trying to survive myself and that's why I started the podcast, because I wanted to reach out to experts in various settings.

               And I would literally them ask questions because I might have had a situation that occurred and I didn't know how to respond, but I would ask those type of questions so that I could gain a little bit more knowledge, so I could help kids out because I just didn't have that. So I agree. I think a lot of the stuff that we do is because we're passionate. Sometimes there's some sort of relation personally that drives us to this work. And then what I'm hearing, that's exactly what I'm hearing, on your end.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Yes.

Sheldon Eakins:

Let's do this. I love the backstory. I love learning more about you. I want to see if you could define, well, I know you can, but I would love for you to define cultural responsive pedagogies, just so our listeners can get a foundation, as far as what it is.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

And my choice of phrase is cultural responsive teaching.

Sheldon Eakins:

Teaching.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

There are some theoretical newer heads that make pedagogy teaching a little bit different.

Sheldon Eakins:

Okay.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

So I probably won't take the time to try to go into those. So while I think the two terms are closely connected, they are not analogous. So I'll just stay with my preferred term cultural responsive teaching. What it really means is using the knowledge, and the experiences, and the frames of references of, for the sake of better term, underserved populations, as filters for better, to improve the teaching and learning opportunities for kids in school setting. And initially I was primarily concerned with K12, but as I spent more and more time in colleges and universities, I was also concerned about, and continued to be concerned about cultural responsive teaching at university level as well, because there's really not a lot going on there, at least not in the scholarship, but the need is there, critical needs. We can talk about some of that later on.

               So it's basically taking the cultural socialization of students from different ethnic racial and cultural backgrounds and using those deliberately and intentionally as filters to connect the academic stuff that we want to happen for kids and the social emotional wellbeing in schools, to connect that to these populations that haven't been done. So in some ways, cultural responsive teaching attempts to take the general theoretical ideas that we think equals good teaching and do for groups of color what is already been done for the dominant Eurocentric group. Because for me, contrary to what a lot of people want to say is that, "Well, good teaching is just good teaching. And when we do good teaching in the classroom it's not about particular cultural group and all of that." That's simply not true.

               There is no such thing as universal good teaching because somebody determines what constitutes good teaching. And those somebodies are cultural beings. So their culture, if you will, their notions about what good teaching is, and learning, and all of that have been contaminated by their own cultural filters. And in the United States, that is the dominant Eurocentric cultural legacy. And if White kids have the right to learn through their own cultural filters, their ancestral cultural filters, then my claim is that other groups should the same rights as their European American peers and all of that. So that's how I got involved in, and that's basically the essence of what cultural responsive teaching is about.

Sheldon Eakins:

Now, thank you for taking the time to define and explain. I get asked a lot of questions with regards to cultural response teaching. For example, An educator might come up to me and say, "Well, we only had two kids of color in our classroom. So why should I even consider, or how can I be cultural responsive in that situation?" How would you respond to that?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

To me, there's not a big mystery at all. We are in the business of educating. So as we educate students, you educate yourself. So let's say if you take your scenario and that person is teaching English, you didn't learn to teach English through osmosis or instantaneously. You studied. So you study your students. You find ways to build your into intellectual repertoire, and then you turn that intellectual repertoire into instructional methodologies. So there's no big [inaudible 00:17:00]. To me that's a convenient excuse to continue to do what you've always been doing. And that is to abdicate responsibility for some students, and to treat them unjustly and unfairly.

Sheldon Eakins:

I love that. Okay. Well, all right. Well, let me add to that. Okay. So let's just say, maybe not exactly word for word, but I give something similar as far as my response. And then they come up with, "Well, we do international festival every month. Or we celebrate Black history month every February. Or we do Dr. King in January." Is that being cultural responsive?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

No, that's being exploited. And if you will, it's like spotlighted. It's again, a way to marginalize students, that you only count when they're special events or whether those special events are positive or negative. So we look at some of the situations that are going on now, within the last two years or more where there are these racial crises, and then everybody gets hopped, and, "We got to do something different." That's a pathological approach. And good teaching is never, or should never be cast in pathology, but it should be cast in capability. The essence of cultural responsive teaching is doing it where regular and routinely, when there's nothing special about it, it's what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Sheldon Eakins:

So it's embedded. Okay. I have another question for you, Geneva, if that's okay, because another question or conversation I've had with folks who, they'll say, "Well, we have an ethnic studies course. Or we offer African American studies in our high school or in our middle school. So we got it covered already." And so they'll say, "We have it covered already, so we don't need to do it in our English, or in these other classes." They have theirs already. How, how would you respond?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Well, in my theoretical world. We make a difference between curriculum, that is teaching what people usually make curriculum analysis to content, which it isn't, but for the sake of argument, let's stay there. But we make a difference between curriculum that is transmitting content and teaching. And that is how you engage with students regardless of what you're teaching. So the point being is that students are cultural beings. They come to the learning task with their cultural repertoires, and they engage with whatever learning you are trying to do, in any and all areas, they don't divorce themselves. They don't stop being cultural beings and then become some, automatons or whatever. They're still cultural beings.

               So if you are teaching science and it looks like there's no science content, it's universal science, which is not true, but nonetheless, it's universal science, you're still teaching children from different ethnic racial and cultural backgrounds. So the essence of cultural responsive teaching is methodological. It is how do you engage so that you don't do injustice and you don't commit atrocities to the cultural integrity of those students that are in place in front of you as trying to learn what you wanted to teach? So the ultimate test of cultural responsive teaching is when it is everywhere. It's not set aside for some special event, or a special course, or a special unit, that's still marginalizing students. And cultural responsive teaching is vehemently opposed to all forms of marginalization.

Sheldon Eakins:

I love this. Okay. So now I have another question, then, because when I'm thinking about, I love that you say, "Various cultures aren't represented just in those ethnic studies courses." Doesn't matter what class. they're the same person. And so their identities, everything is still there. No matter how many teachers they see in the day, they still have their identity, their personality. So within cultural responsive teaching, is it just the academic side, or is there some sort of maybe relationship model that teachers should be concerned about as far as maybe some social aspects as well? What are some of the things maybe that's a little bit beyond the academic portion of cultural responsiveness that we could maybe add into, or so our audience will be clear that it's not maybe just teaching, but there's also some other pieces that might be part of being cultural responsive.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Two things come to mind. One of them is a rave that, one of the latest vogues in education is social emotional wellness. So I think there are very clear ties there. There's a lot about cultural responsive teaching that is not just the academic agenda, but it is how do you respect the integrity and the honor, if you will, the humanness of children from different ethnic racial and cultural backgrounds? And I would add my own personal thing like that is that it is unacceptable under all circumstances to do injustice to the humanity of human beings, and especially students that are under our care.

               The other thing is that maybe a way to quickly capstone what I'm thinking about that is that I've said, and I'm sure I've written it several places that, I won't quote where it's been, because I don't know, but I take the position is that academic performance is always more than academic. And we know that. We know that in, as educators, as pedagogues, we depend very heavily on our colleagues in developmental and social psychology. And those disciplines have told us over and over again, is that children's psychological sense of wellbeing in some ways are prerequisite to academic engagement.

Sheldon Eakins:

Yeah.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

We know those kinds of things.

Sheldon Eakins:

We know that.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

It's that you are marginalizing children. Children are in schools and in classrooms, and they're being ignored, or even worse, they're being targeted. And then we expect them to turn around and engage productively in mental, intellectual insights. It's not going to happen. That's human common sense. We know that if we step outside of the classroom and we just look at our own lives on a day-to-day basis, if we are stressed, if we are dishonored, then whatever other kind of performance behavior we engage in is going to be negatively affected. We know that. But yet, very often, we go in the classroom and say, "Well, I'll just teach the person I don't have." There's no such thing as the person separate from, culture makes us human beings. And to try to bypass our cultural-ness and get at our individuality or our humanness, it's a fool's paradise. It's not going to happen.

Sheldon Eakins:

Especially now. Right? COVID. We had schools closed down. We had all kind of things going on last year and the year before. Well, I guess it's still the school year, but a lot of kids, for example, maybe they're coming to school hungry. Maybe they're coming to school, dealing with whatever they have going on from home. And they're bringing that to school. And then we are expecting them to academic perform at the best and meet these benchmarks, or standards, or whatever it is. And we don't necessarily remember that they're 10, 11 years old and they're dealing with all kind of stuff that we may not even know about, and we still expect that, we have these expectations.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

The circumstances that we are in now, this pandemic and the virus, and all of that exaggerate, if you [inaudible 00:24:46] a routine kinds of things have happened. Just try to imagine what it's like for a Black, or Brown, or indigenous student, or a Asian ancestry student going to school on a day-to-day basis and knowing that you are going to be attacked, you're going to be bullied. Now, there are all kinds of attacks and bullying going on. So I'm not talking about physiological attacks. Let's talk about psychological attacks. Just imagine what that does to a person's sense of being in the kind of repertoire you have to have, the skillset that you have to have, to endure that on day-to-day basis. And then you get the extremes, like what we under now, that just exaggerates.

               But unfortunately, the things that is exaggerating are not exceptional. They're routine kinds of things that kids are going to school from underprivileged groups that are going to school every day. And every day they're in battle. They're on a battlefront, psycho emotionally, because they live in school, so these four or five hours a day, or five or six, or however longer school day is, and they are bombarded with all kinds of indicators that, "This is not a place of comfort, and support, and embracement for you." But yet the kids are supposed to perform intellectually. How the hell are they supposed to do that?

Sheldon Eakins:

Exactly.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

And then I would add is that if I didn't know how to self protect, except the high school teaching, I spent all of my rest of my career in and PWIs. We used to call those predominantly White institutions. I call them permanent White institutions, now. If I didn't know how to self protect myself, I could have been psychologically crazy because every day I would go to my campus, there are all kinds of things to tell me over and over again, "This is not your place."

Sheldon Eakins:

As an adult, you had to deal with that.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Absolutely. And just because I have the PhD degree and the yada, the yada, the yada, and all of that kind of stuff, that didn't stop the bombardment. It's built into the infrastructure of the place that I call my workplace, that the same thing is true when students are going to school K through 12. As students, their schools are their workplace. And even in schools where the population is predominantly of color, of the same ethnic racial group that the students are from, that doesn't still mean it's their "home," their emotional home, because unfortunately demographics of a place does not mean that that is a power source for that place.

Sheldon Eakins:

I feel like we are in church, now. Go ahead. Okay. Here's the next question. I want to shift gears just a little bit because, and I've refused to call it CRT, critical race theory is a big issue. And I've seen, everything seems to be lumped in. And this is all critical race theory. And I want to get your take. A lot of these challenges within critical race theory, how has that impacted the work that you do as a cultural response to teacher? And I know you're retired, but how has that maybe impacted how cultural responsive teaching is viewed?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

Well, I think in some ways, it's a bit soon to know what if the impact is going to be. Well, I know before the current attack on critical race theory, so that's too early to know how that's going to affect cultural responsive teaching. But let's set that aside for a moment and talk about cultural responsive teaching and critical race theory. In some ways, it's a developmental emergence, if you will. In many ways, many of the educators who are advocates of critical race theory, are crossover scholars. Now what I mean by that is that they have built their scholarship in other areas, or they go back and forth between. A classic example of that is Gloria Ladson-Billings. And continues to, Gloria spent and continues to do many years in, her language of choice is culturally relevant teaching. But she's also doing critical race theory.

               So the two things are, there's a close connection between the two things. They're not analogous. And what I would argue is that critical race theory is one of the ideological foundations of culturally responsive, cultural relevant teaching, and other kind of form, language forms of the same kind of issues. So culturally responsive teaching is a methodological domain. It's a technique or set of techniques for responding to the kinds of things that critical race theory reveals. And if you were to follow the legacy, probably critical race theory may have emerged out critical theory by the critical theory scholars, who part of what they spent their time doing and continues to do, but when it first started and was in vogue, was to make explicit the problems and concerns in society.

               And those problems and [inaudible 00:30:29] have a lot to do with inequities, and privileges, and lack of privilege, and things of that nature, while the critical theorists were predominantly White scholars, and they didn't necessarily locate their critical theorizing just in race based issues, but they examine issues of privilege and lack of privilege, many different variations of that. And then I think in some ways is that, as that continued to grow and as cultural responsive and multicultural educators continue to grow, you look for deeper ideological groundings.

               So critical race theory is one of the ideological foundations of cultural responsive teaching. Now, there are other foundations in cultural responsive teaching, but it's a critical one. Because again, cultural responsive teaching is trying to grapple with racism within the educational arena. And so critical race theorists helped to reveal the complexities, and the nuances, and all of those kinds of things of racism in society. And then cultural responsive teaching can take their revelations, their scholarship, their exposures, and more focused methodologically on how to attend to some of these inequities that critical race theorists have now began to characterize in greater detail for us.

Sheldon Eakins:

I guess my question, then, because obviously there's a lot of backlash. There's a lot of parents that are upset. There's a lot of, even teachers and students that are going home, and there's a lot of stuff happening with critical race theory. Based off of what I heard, it sounds like, I guess what I'm hearing is there's a lot of similarities regarding cultural responsive teaching and critical race theory. Why is there such an issue right now with the idea that kids are being indoctrinated and all this stuff? What are your thoughts?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

In some ways it's not surprising that there'd be pushback. After all, that's the legacy of diverse peoples in this country from the very beginning. Every time that diverse people try to push forward, and so it was that, "We've got to change society so that there is more equity." It's fine until, as long as a few people are doing that, but when the effort gains a certain momentum, and I'm not quite sure what that momentum is, but when it really gets a certain degree of popularity, there is pushback. And one way in which you push back is to distort the agenda of the opposition, the people that are pushing in the opposition. So, well, I'm not surprised with people who are criticizing critical race theory, what they're saying about critical race theory, they either know that they're deliberately distorting it, or they haven't read one thing about it.

               So they're operating out of ignorance, but that's a strategy of opposition when you're talking about trying to do social equity, and political, and economic equity and, all of that. And that's a continuation of a historical tradition. So in some ways, I'm not surprised that my field, and my colleagues, and me, not me person, I mean the work that I do, that we are being attacked.

               And I hope that we were not taken by surprise, because it was going to come. Justice, unfortunately, the killing of Black men, well, let's say between 2017 and 2021, that's nothing, that's not new. It's a repeat of historical patterns. So in some ways, and what that says to me is that those are those who advocate and push critical race theory and advocate for cultural responsive teaching, it means that is that we have to double our efforts. And we simply, we're in war. So we have to go to the Battlefront again, or return with a stronger endurance to the Battlefront.

               Not that we've ever left, but there have been a little, a few breaks here and there, but we we just had to go back to it. And one of the things is that one of the oppositions we have to be strategic about dealing with is the distortion of our own, of not by us, but by others distorting our reality. Need I say more? When you look at the beginning of the enslavement, it was a distortion of Black people's realities. So that's what I mean by their historical pattern unfortunately continues. I wish this were not something that this generation of scholars and activists will have to leave for their children and all of that, but I don't see anything else. So we have to prepare our young to go forth.

Sheldon Eakins:

We have to prepare our young. Real quick, I didn't even, honestly, about a year ago or prior, I don't watch Fox News. I didn't know what critical race theory was until I started getting attacked and folks were like, "Oh, he's a critical race theorist. And he's teaching our kids, our students and teachers, how to be a critical race." All that stuff. And I didn't know what it was, so I had to look it up. And I had to do my own research on it to find out exactly what this is, and what I do, and how they relate. And one of the things I attended parent board meeting for a school district that I was working with, because there was a big uproar. And a lot of the comments that I heard a lot of the parents say was, "It's up to us to educate our kids."

               And they were lumping everything together, equity, diversity, anything that had to do, buzzwords, all the buzzwords they could come up with. I was just hearing that over, and over, and over again. And again, the overarching theme was, "Oh, as parents, it is our responsibility to choose whether or not we want to teach our kids about equity, social justice, these type of things." And I was just sitting there thinking like, "Man, how unfortunate for our future kids who would be future police officers, or future judges, or public service people, unfortunately, how that can impact the next generation as we think about at what point will this end?" We're equitable. Everything is perfect. I don't know. Maybe not perfect, but we've made a lot more progress. Let me just say that. And it just really baffled me at that time.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

To me, it's a dead end argument, is that of course parents need to be teaching children, but parents, as citizens create schools to teach as well. So it's not one or the other doing it. It's both doing their fair share. And in their different contexts, parents teach their children, and should be, in ways that are very different from the way in which teachers teach students. The way teachers teach students in high school are different from the ways that teachers teach students in elementary or in college and all of that. So it's not a matter of either/or, it's a matter of how do we engage in complimentary kinds of efforts to try to create a citizenry in a world that's more humane and decent for all of us to live in?

Sheldon Eakins:

Geneva, I agree with everything you said today, and I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And obviously I consider you as providing a voice in equity. What is maybe one final word that you can provide to our listeners?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

I guess where I am in my own development is to begin with a genuine respect for the humanity of different people. And knowing that our human gift, our human legacy is packaged differently, but just because one person is African American or another group is Navajo, it doesn't mean that you're automatically good or worse than, but each of us have our own humanity craft in different kind of ways. So I think if educators would start with a genuine acceptance of the right of respect for children's right of respect for their humanity, and then build from that, maybe we would at least advance the evolutionary progression of human beings. Because it's an agenda unfinished.

Sheldon Eakins:

Yes. An agenda unfinished. Geneva, if we have some folks that want to connect with you, are you on social? What's the best way to connect with you online?

Dr. Geneva Gay:

I'm not on social media. I have a whole lot of reasons for that. But probably the best, there are things that they can find or they can contact me through, I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. So I still have my I email address there. They could contact me through that.

Sheldon Eakins:

That sounds good. I will leave a link for that, if that's okay with you, in the show notes, just in case. Well, Dr. Gay, it has truly been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Geneva Gay:

You're quite welcome. And thank you for introducing me to podcasts.

Sheldon Eakins:

You're welcome. Hopefully this won't be your last.

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