In one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care, Chenxing Han grapples with what it means to practice chaplaincy, especially as she mourns the passing of her closest friend. At one point, Han asserts, “Not-knowing is most intimate.” At another, she shares, “This not-knowing is terrifying.” Han’s memoir holds both truths, inviting readers to listen to the tension between them, and to experience how, at times, they intertwine. This memoir gifts its readers opportunities to practice listening from a position – to printed language one cannot translate, for the patient refusing care, alongside incomprehensible loss, and in moments of joy. Listening becomes a series of ethical choices, made again and again, to tune in as one’s self to each moment, each person, and especially amidst pervasive uncertainty. Han comes to understand that “learning to accompany others through the unknown and unknowable” is core to a chaplain’s practice. The same holds true for an educator's practice. How might we listen when we do not know – or when we believe we do? How do we listen each other through? One long listening is full of complexity, possibility, and care – an ethical listening that may accompany us through rupture towards repair.

In Unearthing Joy, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad expands upon her transformative model of culturally and historically responsive education from her previous work, Cultivating Genius, adding in the pursuit of joy as an essential goal for teaching and learning. Dr. Muhammad provides a plethora of practical applications for schools and educators to reimagine curriculum, assessment, and school practices that intentionally foster opportunities for all students to see and identify beauty within themselves, humanity, and their histories. She provides questions, tools, and strategies to help educators and leaders navigate an audit and revision of our current systems, mindsets, and habits, including ways to assess student joy and wellness, develop professional learning communities and new approaches to staff meetings, and revisit interview questions for prospective employees to ensure they are equity-centered. Ultimately what she leaves us with is both a rich seedbed of ideas we can leverage to engage in this critical internal and collective external work, and a pathway to cultivating communities where all our students are able to flourish. As we seek to make our efforts around student wellness and culturally-inclusive practices hallmarks of our schools, our hallways and classroom spaces must meet the challenges of this moment by enabling, amplifying, and embracing the importance of joy.

How is your school navigating the new and fast-evolving AI landscape? In his fascinating account of employing AI to write a novel, Stephen Marche sounds confident and breezy; after all, to do this kind of thing well, “You need more understanding of literary style, not less” and “Originality died well before the arrival of AI.” Marche anticipates exciting new artistic horizons and delights in his new instruments, welcoming our new era of proliferating AI. In juxtaposition, Naomi Klein’s “AI Machines Aren’t Hallucinating. But Their Makers Are” roundly disagrees with this kind of casual, positive outlook. She calls the training of recent chatbots “what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history” and quotes Geoffrey Hinton on the risk that people “will not be able to know what is true anymore.” Klein argues that we have had all the data and intelligence we need to respond to urgent crises like climate change, housing, and teenage mental health, yet big companies have nonetheless been unwilling to create life-saving policies. “Generative AI [...] could indeed be marshaled to benefit humanity,” Klein allows, “But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.” Perhaps most pressingly for educators, in “AI Is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic,” Jonathan Haidt and Eric Schmidt suggest “five reforms, aimed mostly at increasing everyone’s ability to trust the people, algorithms, and content they encounter online,” including the recommendation to “Raise the age of ‘internet adulthood’ to 16 and enforce it.” Haidt and Schmidt synthesize: “Whoever controls the chatbots will have enormous influence on children.” In what ways and to what extent are educators employing AI to new creative ends and protecting students from its harms?

This gathering of papers by indigenous teachers and scholars is for everyone in schools. Editors Anna Lees and Megan Bang explore the ways that Indigenous pedagogies address and allow us to raise a new generation of children who understand deeply their kinship relationships within their communities and to find a role within these. Knowing the teachings of indigenous wisdom opens possibilities for children to see their connectedness to the land, water, and people as a gift to be claimed and used for the good of the earth and its inhabitants. While on one hand the messages are simple – design curriculum on and with land, water, and human communities – there are complexities that exist within most current schools’ cultures that include heavily prescribed curricula delivered in building-based settings that are governed by regulatory limits on access to the natural world. These papers invite conversation and excitement about introducing the many first steps that are available exactly where we are already situated. The authors make visible what is already in process through indigenous ways of knowing and encourage engagement for our students for reasons that are political, ethical, and ultimately, necessary.

What do the Great Seal on a U.S. dollar bill, Mary Parker Follet, campaign volunteers, and fractals all have in common? In his recent book, Matthew Barzun connects them in his defense of the Constellation mindset for leadership and teams. Unlike the Pyramid mindset and its “power-over” style, Constellation leadership embraces a “power with” approach. It utilizes interdependence and engenders a freedom to work together with “shared principles, habits, and sentiments” when responding to a situation. Along with historical lessons and data, Barzun depicts the Constellation mindset in anecdotes from his time as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He shares tangible tools leaders can use to employ the Constellation mindset; they include three expectations to take into every meeting, “fruitful friction” that creates special relationships, and the snowflake test. Barzun’s storytelling and philosophy will inspire leaders. His candidness in falling into Pyramid mindset traps implies how careful and intentional a leader must be to preserve an interdependence culture. Schools using a distributed leadership model will find similarities and resonance in Barzun’s work. These connections will enlighten the school’s vision for its leadership and also provide specific practices worth trying.

The article delves into the pivotal role of relevance in student motivation and delineates three instructional approaches that educators can adopt to infuse learning with meaning. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), posited by scholars Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, underscores three essential components that fuel human motivation, namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness, with relevance often considered a fourth criterion. Notably, personal relevance has emerged as a particularly salient predictor of student engagement, particularly among those who may harbor doubts about their academic skills. The first strategy proposed in the article is "self-generation," wherein learners identify how their learning can align with their life goals and aspirations. The second strategy, "direct communication," entails teachers underscoring the links between course content and students' lives, although some studies have shown that it might prove counterproductive for some students. Nevertheless, highlighting these connections remains preferable to not discussing them at all, particularly if they have more immediate relevance. The third strategy focuses on real-world problem-solving within the community. Research suggests that learners who engage in community improvement efforts through problem-based learning can elevate motivation by fostering relevance. By using these strategies, teachers of all subjects can make learning more relevant and engaging for students, leading to better academic outcomes and increased student motivation.

Toni Morrison's only published short story, Recitatif, was reissued in 2022 by Random House to critical acclaim. The story follows two women, Twyla and Roberta, who first meet as eight-year-olds when they live temporarily at a shelter for wards of the State. They lose touch but then reconnect years later as adults, which prompts them to remember with fresh eyes events that happened during their time at the shelter. We learn that Twyla and Roberta are of mixed race, that is, one is White and the other is Black. The genius of Morrison's short story is that she removes all racial codes, so it is impossible to tell which is which. But that doesn't stop the reader from looking for clues in their backgrounds and experiences to determine their races. Just that act of trying to figure out the characters' races confronts the reader with the many racial stereotypes and unconscious biases that we all hold given the cultures in which we've grown up. In the short story, the characters also come to terms with how racial and socio-economic stereotypes affected their actions. Recitatif is a powerful text to teach students about unconscious bias and privilege and to generate important conversation about race, class, and justice. The Random House edition of the short story includes an insightful introduction by Zadie Smith, which unpacks and reinforces the themes of the book.

How can educators best understand the challenges faced by today’s students? Kacen Callender, National Book Award winning author of King and the Dragonflies, offers a multifaceted and gentle new novel inviting a better understanding of how suicidality and depression can look, feel, and sound in young people. Callender draws from personal experience in creating the main character, Moon, a Black transgender child of a single mother. Moon experiences depression and intense hopelessness, and they even fear rejection from their mother due to their continued challenges. To escape these feelings, they find comfort in exploring spiritual realms and grapple with feelings of not wanting to return to life among the living. This expertly crafted tale is hopeful and fosters acceptance. We could all use a little more acceptance in our lives. Consider this book for middle school faculty with students who do not feel seen or heard and for those students themselves. Callender’s words will help people to better understand and empathize with the experience of a student struggling to feel whole.