Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:07
So Welcome! I'm Nate Angell from Hypothesis as I'm sure you know by now because you've listened to me too many times at too many different sessions. And I'm super honored today to have with us here some fellow Coloradans. I was actually born and bred in Colorado and it's a state near and dear to my heart and our special speakers today are also Coloradans and so I welcome that.
00:00:31
Just by way of an introduction I want to mention that I first met Professor Manuel Luis Espinosa in Denver. Just when he came to give a very short talk at another event and it was an amazing experience for me because later when I edited that video of his talk and uploaded it to YouTube, I actually was brought to tears by the beauty of what he said, so no pressure!
00:01:00
No pressure today Professor Espinosa, but...No none at all! ...but I could get kind of emotional and so I'm hoping that comes here today. So with that personal note I just wanted to introduce our guests more formally. So Professor Manuel Luis Espinosa is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver and is part of a collaborative effort
00:01:27
called the Right2Learn Dignity Lab there and he and and his co-speaker will be telling us a lot more about that as we move on. And then he's joined today by Frida Silva who is a graduate, actually, of the same institution, University of Colorado Denver, and has also worked extensively with the Right2Learn Dignity Lab and is a Senior Research Associate there.
00:01:51
And so they're going to talk a little bit about the ways that they have used social annotation in order to do their very important work at the Right2Learn Dignity Lab and I don't want to give away the whole story so I'm going to let them do that and to get us started I'm going to pass the baton over to Professor Espinosa. Thank you Nate, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.
00:02:14
Hello everyone i wish i could be there in the same place with you but we're here in the same virtual place um i am the the current director of the right to learn dignity lab and i just feel my heart tells me to always name everybody who's in the right to learn dignity lab so you'll have to bear with me here and we just go by the dignity lab for short so uh we have tanya soto valenzuela who is the incoming director come november of the of the dignity lab which will make me the
00:02:42
intergalactic ambassador for life and I'll be living aboard the mothership from Parliament we have mandy wong tamara lungai maria carina sanchez velasco valencia ciro arles howard diego ulibari raquel stacy isaac adria padilla chavez lima ali sharla agnoletti soraya latif taylor smith
00:03:07
veronique moa katie rhys gonzalez and spencer childress and together we'll be paid in full everyone so i'm gonna share my screen here for a second because i in order to tell the story that we want to tell today i have to take you back in time just a bit um to 1953 so this is a document that i procured from the library of congress and i was at the library of congress searching for
00:03:34
um primary documents related to the brown v board of education case right brown v board of education one now this particular document is from 1953 the summer of 1953 approximately 78 68 years ago and so there was something curious that happened in 1953 brown v board of education number one as you know it's it's a landmark case here in united in united in the united states and american
00:04:01
jurisprudence and what what's happening there is what's odd that's happening there is that it's not adjudicated in the first term that it that it gets presented to the supreme court they have a period of re-argument right which is something like again this is a break really from the typical so there's a re-argument phase in june of 1953 the case is adjudicated in 1954. now what's happening
00:04:27
in june 1953 is that the supreme court of the united states has given homework to the naacp legal defense fund and the anti-segregation folks right and and the pro-segregation states and their homework has to do with the history intent and meaning of the 14th amendment of the united states constitution right this is big so both sides get their scholarly team together
00:04:55
and the naacp legal defense fund gets howard j graham one of the preeminent scholars of the 14th amendment in the united states and he is in charge of marshaling all these forces almost 200 scholars in trying to understand what the 14th amendment is about right what its intent was and whether it's whether it's broad reach extends and touches what happens in public schools at the time
00:05:22
so now if you see here right that there's there's um up here up at top right howard j graham puts together a three-page document on work to do and here you see just in four quick sentences what it is that he wants people to do he wants them to check newspapers biographies to survey historical material and so on and then he gets to more specific instructions he says
00:05:52
take down verbatim any statement concerning interpretation of law right now that's where it begins right there's something beautiful here at work about intellectual craft right which is where we're going to begin the today's talk let me take you to the next page further instructions more detailed search congressional debates for the 39th congress
00:06:17
and he wants people to look for these terms civil rights civil equality social equality then he says quote exactly again and then there's more material here related to again this thing that he calls related terms and he's telling everyone be sure in all your notes to indicate clearly right here the full reference what was said the person who said it where they said it what was said right
00:06:46
this i think folks like it has to be to my mind at least you know it should be growing you know uh uh clearly uh and apparent that this is like what hypothesis look look like before hypothesis right but let me give you the more stark picture what it really really what really would look like within the naacp working group that's where all that information was supposed to go on
00:07:14
on five by seven note cards right that's what it was supposed to do so here at the very top that's the subject school segregation here to the left the page 708 709 where the source the congressional globe which is the transcripts of the 89th congress right and here in brackets and the brackets like this is how far this is how advanced it is right
00:07:41
it's not even typed in it's penciled in the brackets right and the brackets are to indicate who the author was and what on what and who what when they were speaking and on what page you could find that particular reference the four dots that is paraphrasing anything below these three stars that's what's that is what's supposed to be verbatim right so that's what an annotation looks like in 1953 on five by seven cards
00:08:10
right now there's another reason that i am bringing attention to this right here's the final two sentences in that three-page document by howard j graham who has this incredible task again of marshalling all the intellectual force of the naacp legal defense fund in order to aid in the re-argument he says these instructions must be detailed so that there will be no
00:08:38
likelihood of misunderstanding of notes taken the brief must be accurate for obvious reasons right it's the obvious reasons part that i want to focus on here because what's obvious to them with is not going to be obvious to future generations remember i found this document in in the naacp archives within the library of congress in the madison library
00:09:05
and as you're going through them right it's the smell that hits you the smell of the documents themselves and then at some point you look up and i looked at my finger my finger at my fingertips and it was the yellow dust the yellow dust of these documents and it is slowly disintegrating right but here we have something here preserved for us for the future and that was going to aid us
00:09:30
the right to learn dignity lab in doing and creating our own dignity handbook which i'll talk about here shortly but it's these obvious reasons that really really has me intrigued what's obvious to them is not obvious to us but there's a connection between this way that they were annotating this intellectual craft and these obvious reasons which included of course social advocacy right because what was at stake well what was at stake for the
00:09:59
naacp and for the entire country is that if they lose this case jim crow continues right racial segregation in the united states continues to be a legal constitutional way to pursue the ideal of equality right so that's what was at stake here for the naacp now i'm going to stop sharing my screen and say a little bit more about the our our handbook now again so we copied
00:10:31
for a few weeks this methodology we knew it was going to be a long road but it was thorough right it was thorough so we started it and how did it work it worked spectacularly well and it was so slow it was incredibly slow we used to spend probably the first half hour of our of our dignity lab meetings just getting people caught up on who had which which note card and who had the no and
00:10:57
what people put down on it and trying to refresh their memories from the from the meeting before and then i get an email from a very very very good colleague my dear brother professor remy clear who says manuela got something for you and whenever he's told me in the past years that he has something for me i know it's going to be good and what did he have for us in 2017 and early 2017 hypothesis hypothesis which becomes for us this wonderful mediational tool which allows us to do
00:11:26
everything that the note card did but much quicker without losing any of the thoroughness without losing any of our process which is a process that really values consensus and the values listening and the values taking our time because we needed to get it right for what we had in mind we needed to get it right let me talk to you about what we had in mind so this dignity handbook right why why
00:11:53
create one what was the need so in 2017 so this this clarity right of purpose that we carry around so confidently today was really fuzzy for us and i've likened it you know that that early sense of clarity and purpose that we had i've likened it to those first images that came back from the hubble telescope right that they were they were fascinating but they were fuzzy
00:12:18
and then and the hubble itself was in need of corrective vision right was in need of glasses so what we thought in 2017 was what we were growing to understand in no small portion to every member of course of the right to learn dignity lab makes their valuable contribution sometimes i can point out the specific contributions that people make so my research associate my senior research associate frida silva is one of the people she's the one who asked profe where is all this going
00:12:48
right what's the purpose of doing all this work so for us we knew in 2017 that the education clause of the colorado constitution was in need of amendment right so that's that's something that many people have known what was different in that room at that time is that we thought the ones to do it were going to be us it needed to be us right but before doing that we had to engage in a really
00:13:16
concentrated in a really extensive period of study regarding dignity in american jurisprudence the word the concept the ideal the practice of dignity in american jurisprudence and just and thus american public life right so now let me talk about the handbook figuratively and then tangibly right so either way the the handbook was born out of frustration with the way that dignity
00:13:45
was talked about in american jurisprudence so what we were noticing is that when it was talked about it was left undefined or underexplained right here you have this here you have this graphic graphic representation this powerful word one of the more powerful words in the human language and in in in the language of law and it was being used more as a finishing chess move a rhetorical chess
00:14:11
move in order to win an argument but not much was said in terms of its understanding right so this thing called dignity which indexes the inherent quality a very of every human being right i can't tell you exactly where it's at in the body but i can tell you though right i can tell you that it's that it's in every human being that we carry it around and that it's inalienable
00:14:36
right that it's inherent in us dignity the inherent quality and then this contingent experience and sense the experience and sense do not have to happen in public life in social life at all so we had this powerful word that was going under explained and under defined right so for us what we needed to do was engage in this long period of study in order to further our own
00:15:02
understanding this is about intellectual craft in order and then so that we can also anticipate the kinds of ways that we would have to help the public to understand what it is that we were doing now one hope was that for that this handbook would be of use right to parents to teachers to students to practitioners of the law most specifically though to us right because in order
00:15:30
to make an argument that you are going to amend a constitution there's something implicit there for us that we had to make really really explicit you need to know way more than the opposition you need to know way more about the opposition about than in regards to the history in regards to the shape of the co of the concept itself in regards to its meanings and its functions right now more tangibly
00:15:58
the handbook the analytic goals of the handbook were to identify and understand the content criteria of dignity and its equivalent expressions now when i say content i'm talking about the practical guidance it provides right and when i'm talking about criteria i'm talking about the reasons that an author gives within a legal text within a legal document
00:16:25
as to why they summoned this word forth right so we needed to understand that here was our hunch that even if you didn't even if you didn't see the word that there was something so pervasive and so powerful about dignity that you'd still be able to detect the dignity impulse in people's words right maybe not in the words of the justices maybe not in the words of judges but certainly in the
00:16:51
words of the lead plaintiffs in any supreme court case that has something to do with dignity you'd be able to understand what it is that provoked this dignity argument and gave rise to it right so where did we search we searched in two landmark cases tennessee versus lane a 2004 supreme court case dealing with disabled rights the rights of the disabled this is the terms of the time right
00:17:17
the rights of the disabled and the obligations of the government in making sure that those folks had access to everything that it meant to be a citizen right and we also had another case lobato versus colorado a case that had everything to do with the constitutionality of the public school financing system in our state now in that case you didn't find the word dignity at all not in the amicus
00:17:47
briefs not in the initial complaint not in the various opinions by the judges but you did find it right it's equivalent expression in the way that the lead plaintiffs the students themselves and their parents and teachers talked about what it meant what the value of education means to the human being what the what education means to the human person that's where you could find it
00:18:12
so how did we create this this this dignity handbook which is still in formation it's one of those things that like it seems to not end uh you can you can think that you're done being thorough and then you look around another month later and you've learned a lot more well we did it slowly we did it carefully we did it plottingly and we did it together in these things that you know that i've come to call annotation ensembles right so we had two kinds
00:18:39
of together face to face and online and so when you're talking about the digital versions of these cases we're talking about more than 2000 pages 2000 pages that we had to upload to the cloud and pair with hypothesis so that we can read and annotate the various complaints amicus briefs arguments everything right hypothesis as you know allowed us to read together without being in the
00:19:03
same place together and even when we were together hypothesis served as the historian of our thinking the art the archival sort of you know the archival custodian of what it is that we were thinking so let me share my screen again and give you a quick a quick bird's eye view of all the annotation that we did okay now here's here's a a snapshot from a a analytic learning software
00:19:33
a learning analytics software that was created by francisco perez called crowd layers and it gives us a sense right it gives us a kind of a history of what it is our act our annotation activity was with respect to these cases and so you'll see here in this snapshot right that we had 1231 annotations across probably at the time which was a across the time we were a 12 to 13 member group
00:19:59
nine participants in the actual activity of annotating 52 documents 204 threads 113 days excruciating long days right and 118 tags and then here of course you have this beautiful stuff that you could also look up the various threads of the of the consolidations themselves
00:20:23
now we had a couple phases and and frida will talk way more about what it is that was happening in the consolidation and and the consolidation phases and also the initial phase of annotation so now these ensembles um you know if you wanted to understand what it is that was happening in the dignity lab you do very well you go very far in studying
00:20:51
how these ensembles work what did they do well they read together they wrote together they talked together they listened right they collaborated we were what we were trying to do was become of one mind but a special kind of mind right a mind that was constituted biologically a mind that was not necessary to be in total agreement what was necessary though was to work
00:21:17
through and identify the points of disagreement to see if there was some way we could come out with a working consensus right that process i think was really really important for us so as i hand it to frida silva here in a second i want to prepare you and i want to tell you that that feel free first of all to take down notes and ask questions about the following terms
00:21:42
not limiting not limiting you to only these terms but these are specialized terms that i think you'd be you'd be you'd be well served in asking more about consolidation of course extract which is a kind of shorthand for an analytic and perspective perceptive action uh magnify and stencil so make sure you feel free to ask frida or i about any of those terms but before i hand it to
00:22:10
her i just want to i have to make a note that it seems like to me frida has something on her mind right and i want to know what it is that she's thinking of what are you thinking of frida y'all i'm thinking of a master plan okay so hello everyone it's so nice to be here with you all today to talk about um the work that we do my name is frida i'm one of r2l senior research associates
00:22:37
and before i dive in and show you what our annotation process looks like the methods that we used um i want you guys to imagine real quick so i want you to all imagine a group of researchers you can imagine us say we are paleontologists out somewhere desolate excavating for fossils but the tools we have inherited aren't really serving us anymore
00:23:06
so what do we do we create our own tools our own processes our own methods collectively to excavate for our fossils in other words many times how research is conducted especially in the social sciences or in the humanities is often confined to certain methods and processes that aren't that isn't really getting us to where we want to be and where we want to explore so what do we do
00:23:31
in that case we create our own methods and our own processes that will assist us in better uncovering the work we wish to do and that is what i will be talking to you in this portion of the lecture i will discuss how we constructed and used our own methods and symbolic and digital tools and how we used that method and those tools in our annotation process on hypothesis
00:23:55
that helped us bridge the intersection of our intellectual craft with social advocacy advocacy to create our dignity handbook and as i mentioned earlier we begin our research for the word dignity it's content criteria equivalent expression in the u.s supreme court case lane versus tennessee and i will be guiding you through our annotation process in that court case document on hypothesis
00:24:20
so now i will begin by sharing my screen so um there are two phases in our annotation process that we now name consensus and consolidation both of which had their own symbolic tools for pinpointing the term dignity what it is and what it means in the lane versus tennessee case in the first phase we use the extract and magnify tool this means we extracted the
00:24:48
term dignity into three parts its content its criteria and its possible equivalent expressions so once we extracted and identified dignity in the document we then magnified the excerpt so to speak like kind of when you were a kid using a magnifying glass going through like fine print or there's something like small right so we read closely i would make an
00:25:11
annotation as to what category of dignity in the document it fell into so once someone identified in the documents what might stand as content versus criteria they would make their annotation and an art and an r2l member would jump in and would either critique the initial annotation or would support it and thus gathering consensus um so now these parts of dignity were not rigid
00:25:36
as we ourselves in this first annotation phase we're really trying to understand what constituted content versus criteria and thus parts did overlap and because of this in order to help us focus on the excerpts we were annotating we needed at least four of our members to weigh in on the initial annotation and if all members were in support were in consensus we had agreement over what category
00:26:00
of dignity the excerpt fell into but let me show you kind of what this looks like so i know you are all very familiar with hypothesis um this is just a screenshot right now that you're seeing um of lane versus tennessee document it's a writ of cert sir terrari i don't know how to pronounce that word real well um but basically it means it seeks judicial review of a decision of a lower
00:26:25
court in this case the u.s court of appeals for the sixth circuit so through these documents we highlighted the excerpts that communicated dignity to us and then we annotated them and one of the annotations that i will show you is called annotation 8.1 um and it lies in this document it lies under a section called title 2 of the ada or sorry the ada
00:26:53
is beginning to allow persons with disabilities to participate in public life and a lit and it lives in a subsection d called public transportation um so right here um here is an initial uh an initial annotation my colleague mandy wong makes um but first like i just want to show you all this note card right it looks like let me go back it looks like this note card um and i
00:27:22
thought that was really um cool the hypothesis before hypothesis no card um but going back what here my uh my colleague has highlighted is an excerpt that reads living independently and with dignity means opportunity to participate fully in every activity of daily life in this annotation
00:27:46
she states bingo she has identified an excerpt that might be dignity's criteria and content now what you are seeing here is actually an organized chart of our annotations um in that specific thread that dr remy collier actually created and organized for us um so here is this view so you could better follow this rich discussion um my colleague and finding partner
00:28:13
dania valenzuela is actually the first person to respond to mandy and support the annotation and because she is the first person person she labels her annotation with the following hashtag tag consensus one signifying her support and that she is the first person to weigh in on the sanitation um adds his two cents he supports the annotation and labels his um comment under tag consensus too
00:28:40
and so forth that's how it kind of goes um and now i will walk you through this rich discussion i won't read the full text that we um are full comments but just certain sections that are worth mentioning um so we started this annotation with mandy she has highlighted the excerpt that she believes falls under content and criteria dania supports her annotation puts her
00:29:04
argument forth and states um here in the yellow section she says the sentence literally says dignity means opportunity to participate fully in every activity of daily life which i believe adds to a definition of dignity put forth advocates of rights and dignity to the courts now profe responds to tanya and mandy and says i add my vote of yes in the near future we will
00:29:33
have to work out the question of whether full participation and meaningful participation are synonymous or interchangeable with dignity itself so profit agrees but with a twist or a new angle to consider with these two notions of full participation and meaningful participation or full participation yeah meaningful participation so now my co my colleague arlis howard she's the
00:29:58
third person to respond and she states i do feel there is a difference between being able to meaningfully participate and having full participation i feel the latter means that one is able to participate in those things that are small or looked at as unimportant like the passage lists farther down going to movies dinner baseball game et cetera whereas meaningful participation to me means the ability to participate in voting core access et cetera
00:30:26
here arlessa elaborates on professor's point and she extends the text to make the distinction between meaningful participation and participate fully our colleague raquel isaac is the last person to annotate and she concludes with this i don't think that full participation and meaningful participation are the same meaningful participation means going to school and getting a dignified education not just getting to go to school raquel clarifies on our list's distinction and beautifully concludes and
00:30:56
ties this annotation together to be an example of dignity content not criteria so this right here this thread that um i just like paraphrase is the anatomy of an annotation in phase one and here you see us utilize the digital hypothesis tool as like a home base for us and for our deep
00:31:20
thinking our investigating and leveraging the tags as tools to magnify dignity um in this court case into either criteria content equivalent expression and again to um reiterate rafa's point earlier um the thought process behind these annotations for many of us was very excruciating and at times a little bit painful and pinpointing if the excerpt fell into content or criteria
00:31:47
and even replying to one another wasn't a process that we took lightly this rich discussion was a product of us reading what our colleagues had you know typed up pondering reading in between the lines building on top of each other as demonstrated by you know the switch thread so that is what phase one annotation process looks like now i will show you what annotation uh
00:32:14
phase two looks like so here in this second phase we really focus on refining our anderson our own understanding of dignity it's content criteria and equivalent expression by consolidating the annotations in the first phase with a more elaborate symbolic tool one that we place on top of our annotation discussions to help us craft more precise
00:32:39
understanding of dignity and you might ask you know why why is it a stencil um and the way i like to think of it it's kind of like those stencils right um that you buy at walmart or target and you layer it on top of another sheet of paper and you use your utensil your pencil to trace and actually make um drawings precisely rather than just a free trial you're having
00:33:06
more precision on something more exact something more refined so that's why we call it a stencil and this this stencil helps us be precise in constructing our um definition of dignity so moving forward here again this is another screenshot um of what the second phase looks like but we will highlight each section again in an organized chart um just for presenting purposes so
00:33:36
here this is what the stencil looks like i will now be walking you through each of these sections highlighted in light blue still using annotation 8.1 as an example of an annotation from the first phase that we saw a potential to be refined through consolidation efforts this second round review was actually led by my colleague maria santis velasco and i will be i will begin with a section called changes at the top so here with changes we looked
00:34:06
at the highlighted portion from the consensus phase and identified if that highlighted portion needed to be extended or shortened to fully embody what was being proposed whether the content criteria or equivalent expression in this instance compared to what we had in the first phase so if we kind of look back over here right here um the phase out uh the highlighted portion
00:34:30
was this part or that second highlighted yellow portion it was just that um but now in the in our second phase we have the whole section um that was highlighted so we wanted to extend basically to that section and that was a change that was made now we have um now we go into primary category that second section and here we label the excerpt
00:35:01
by the part of dignity it falls into so in this case it was dignity content now with the third section bit summary the text that follows is actually an abstract of all the discussion that led up into that point um so here i'm gonna kind of read a little bit about the excerpt and
00:35:25
that exit just um trying to explain this but yeah it's basically all the thread discussion in annotation 8.1 we are just summarizing what that discussion really was and how it led us to identifying how it led to dignity content so this is what it reads one of the few places where the word dignity is brought into play in this case more importantly our group finds meaningful
00:35:52
participation interlaced into the passage as well those not explicitly mentioned while we are all in agreement that fully participating and meaningful participation are not synonymous it can be inferred that one implied the other moving on to the next section definition in this section maria here defines what dignity category means given what was discussed and changed and it reads
00:36:17
this is an example of dignity content not only for its deliberate use of the word dignity but also for the examples that it gives as to how people can have their dignity affirmed these experiences are just some of the few ways in which it is possible to feel a sense of dignity maria now shows us how the new extended excerpt has now provided us with greater context that represents dignity content through the examples of dignity being affirmed
00:36:45
the next section rational tags the rationale for tags um the consul the consolidator as tags adds the tags that are most suited for this consolidation and provides a rationale for using them in this consolidation maria chose dignity content and meaningful participation and provides a rationale for using them moving on to the next section dignity content um or sorry
00:37:13
i'm going to talk sorry i kind of skipped a portion but i'm going to talk a little bit now about those tags that she used so she used dignity content and meaningful participation and this is a rationale for using them that she states this annotation merits dignity content tag because it is an instance in which an explicit definition or distinguishing characteristic of dignity is commun communicated the sentence that begins living independently and with dignity points to the
00:37:40
importance of everyday activities and the dignity of the human person additionally this annotation can be interpreted as an affirmation of the right of every person to have their humanity recognized with meaningful participation maria says we think meaningful participation is implied with dole when dole says participate fully we take meaningful participation to mean unambiguously effective involvement in
00:38:08
socially vital activities structured by social relations that are reciprocal and dialogical so with all that rich context context um this process as we reflect back helped us develop our dignity lens as young dignity scholars whereas one might read the term dignity in a court case document and sim and consider it simply um like a piece of rhetoric we are thinking about the power
00:38:38
of identifying dignity affirmed or in dignity in these social settings and acting upon that and as a research collective we have bigger plans to go beyond discussing dignity in a publication but seeing where the rubber meets the road and where our intellectual craft meets social advocacy and these symbolic and digital tools and this annotation process that we have created our catalyst to carry out what lies ahead and seeing education educational dignity manifest in our
00:39:08
classrooms and with that um what are you thinking of i'm thinking of a master plan too for that right because i want to walk out with a victory in my hand so if i take you back to um the brown case right and for the obvious reasons all of that stuff about the obvious reasons that howard jay graham writes at the very bottom of the work to do document
00:39:35
well again their obvious reasons were that they could not allow the pro-segregation states to prevail with the argument that the 14th amendment was absolutely powerless in desegregating public schools right what they had to achieve was to was to summon forth the knowledge and the history and the intent of the 14th amendment to make an argument that the egalitarian imperatives of that grand amendment came into contact with
00:40:08
public schools in 19 in the 1950s that's what was at stake because if they could not achieve that if they could not successfully answer the questions that the supreme court put forth then the rationale is there to continue what to continue jim crow to continue racial segregation and again you have who knows how many more years we would have had of legalized of the uri
00:40:33
segregation and not just de facto like we have now in many places right but what what are the obvious reasons for us the obvious reasons for the dignity lab are that we're making an argument for a different world one in which educational dignity the inherent quality its experience and its sense is that educational dignity can come to be seen as something paramount to public
00:40:59
education right something central something as part of the language of public education education for us to call it that has to help the person discover and nurture and cultivate their song in life if it doesn't do that we'll have to call it something else but we won't call it public education now our work as intellectual crafts people
00:41:26
it started to blossom in the annotation ensembles through hypotheses right but the place where craft and social advocacy meet for us are in our weekly meetings we call them amendment fridays and now we're now we've moved to tuesdays for the summer that's where all of this gets focused on in those hour long weekly meetings in which we are rewriting the education clause
00:41:53
of the state of colorado right now the most potent tool that we have is the vision that we've been able to create in and through this amendment so again now education folks as you all know at the federal level at the national level it is not a fundamental right that is a matter that's left to the states so every state has something that they call an education clause that governs
00:42:19
the way that the state that government provides public education it is the mandate right now in colorado we have a rather weak one a rather anemic one and ineffectual that we've had since 1876 and the prevailing language there is thorough and uniform now that's what the government of the state of colorado has to provide its residents a public a public school system that is thorough
00:42:47
and uniform right now historically what that is meant in terms of its provision and especially in the courts the way that they've interpreted when we've had challenges to the constitutionality of the public education system in colorado is that thorough and uniform exacts the legal minimum right legal minimum there's physical plant there are books there are operating funds but there is nothing to be said about the learning that happens in schools or the not
00:43:15
or the not yet learning that happens in schools and it has it has nothing to do with the actual outcome of schools now that to us seems like something like an egregious mistake right the way that education is thought of in the current in the current colorado constitution it's thought of more as a governmental service not as a govern not as a fundamental right of personhood something that's necessary for the continuation of peace justice and equality in our world
00:43:45
now let me give you a sense of what it is that we've been able to accomplish now if i look ahead to november october november we'll be going before the legislative committee of the state of colorado in order to get the language for this new amendment certified after a 10-day wait period begins an intense six-month period of collecting signatures so that we can amend our state's charter what is it going to be replaced by we're trying to supplant the language of thorough
00:44:16
and uniform which is so so susceptible to narrow readings and it doesn't really hold up whenever someone wants to put forth a robust reading right it's too vague it's too ambiguous let me read you three sentences out of our current amendment to give you a sense of what it is that we're doing so thorough and uniform will be supplanted in part by the following public schools are sanctuaries
00:44:42
spaces where the inherent and inalienable dignity of the human person is in violet spaces where compassionate guidance abounds guided by the principles of integrity and equity the state shall ensure that all public school students have ongoing and diverse opportunities to meaningfully participate in their education as a paramount requisite of education meaningful
00:45:10
participation fulfills the promise of public schools as havens for learning and growth crucibles for inquiry and experimentation forums for dialogue and dissent that is what we're doing we're making an argument for a world that is possible a different kind of world and it's hard for me to think looking back on it that we would have been able to do this without hypothesis hypothesis allowed us to translate intellectual craft into social advocacy
00:45:42
why did we have to do that we're on the weak side we're the small ones in the equation of david and goliath we're david but we're berninis david if you look at look up bernini's david it's different than michelangelo's david michelangelo's david is making the decision whether he should throw the rock berninis bernini's david has made the decision as in and is in the process
00:46:05
of throwing the rock that is what is made possible for us that's what the dignity lab is about that's what hypothesis makes possible and we are happy to share it with you and if and if we can to clear up or clarify anything that we have talked about but that's the sort of world that we're endeavoring to make right and it's me as part of this group of young people who are all my
00:46:30
undergraduates mostly right and a few doc students now thrown in these people who have given their lives a portion of their lives for this struggle for educational dignity that i get to be a part of that i'm lucky enough that i'm fortunate enough to be part of so thank you very much thank you all that was so great um manuel and freda thank you um and uh just because we had those technical
00:47:00
difficulties at the beginning i want to keep this going on a little bit longer if you guys have the time i also know that you may have something else you need to get to but if you could stay for an extra 15 minutes that would be great i did see that somebody had kind of asked about r2l and what that means and sure it means it means right to learn but maybe you could speak a little bit more about what's behind that sure right to learn right to learn and really that we took that name from there was a quotation from a from an essay written by w.e.b
00:47:29
du bois in the late 1940s and du bois was writing against the uh the house on un-american activities right he was it was a critique really of what it is that was happening in the country at the time and then he has this paragraph that's that's almost that's almost you know it's prophetic right it's mystical and prophetic as du bois as only du bois can be and he says something like for five thousand years for five thousand years we have we have endeavored to protect this right
00:47:57
that you could lose every other right in the world but if a country if a people doesn't lose this one they can find their way again what's that right the right to learn the right to learn which in that which in essence is a right to correct our mistakes a right to become a right to transform ourselves uh that really gives it deeper meaning and resonance and so um it you mentioned also that
00:48:26
so many uh students had participated in this and i think that's the part that that really catches me with this this project is that it's it's not only you know such a valuable and necessary uh public works project a kind of infrastructural public works project that needs to be done but it's also you know a learning a learning exercise or it's not even really exercises in the right
00:48:51
word because it's not just exercise right it's actually it's activity it's it's real doing and i'm curious how many students have um you mentioned a lot of names uh how many students have participated in this and is it offered to them as a sort of formal class within the university of colorado denver or is it like a almost like a a whole other thing outside the classroom well i'll give i'll get part of that answer and then i'd like frieda to to
00:49:18
to chime in as to what it's like because she was you know i was the professor and you know and she's one of the students that that i that i asked to be part of the group so um so everything that comes out of right to learn really um really flows out of a core course that i created for the university of colorado denver called equality rights and education so what that class is about is it's a history of american public education through the reading of landmark cases
00:49:44
so imagine students three months out of high school reading dred scott right alongside one another right that's what that class is about and that's where i that's where i kind of you know that's sort of hand hand-picked you know uh the students that i thought like you know that might be interested in something like r2l like the dignity lab and what uh a member of the dignity lab diego ulibari he told me that profe i see what you were doing you were looking for students with
00:50:12
that fire that had that spark for this kind of work and i suppose that's what i was doing yes so maybe frida can illuminate as well as to her experience as a student yeah can you guys hear me yeah indeed okay um yeah i mean it's kind of funny because um with r2l right you talked a little bit about how students you know is this just like a was it just a research thing and then it became
00:50:40
something else right like i don't even know being first gen and going through my first year classes um put office class it the title just sounded interesting and i didn't even know if it was part of my um major like uh route i being first year first and i was like yeah i'm just gonna choose everything that sounds interesting to me um and i just stumbled on to what a fist class
00:51:06
and i think um we have some of those folks too um where a lot of us aren't even in the education path um like i study political science and communications i'm doing branding work now we have people who are doctors now like act like health doctors um people who are lima who is uh she's studying architect right so people who are not on in the lane of like
00:51:33
education but somehow found ourselves in what of his classroom and right me being a freshman i'm like oh this is awesome i was asked to participate in a research group my first year you know i'm going to learn how to write it's going to get on my resume it's going to look fantastic you know just thinking about oh this is just what we do in college right um but then i never
00:51:57
thought that right i vote i've um i already graduated like a year ago but a lot of us are graduated we have left the university and are still part of this research group that extends beyond the university and that is because we just we've just been so drawn to um studying dignity and actually creating something apart from
00:52:27
um just writing academic papers um and it's gonna take a team effort to really bring this to the legislation um but yeah like we have folks who are doctoral students who are parents who take care of family who have full-time jobs like a big portion of our research group already graduated a long time ago but we're still here um why i don't know what did you do
00:52:57
it wasn't for the money it wasn't for the wages no definitely for this plus envisioning um what is possible when you infuse dignity into education um well frida it seems like it's maybe kind of radically transformed your path right a first-generation college student sounds like you took a class because the title was interesting and the next thing you know here
00:53:24
you are you know giving a keynote at some weird conference that you never heard of before what uh how how how has this kind of affected your life plans has it changed your destiny um not necessarily are here um what i will say is r2l is kind of like my second job like i have a
00:53:49
full-time job and it's like my other full-time job which i love and what i need in my life um because sometimes your job can't your full-time job can be all what you want it to be as far as your values and what you want to work on r2l fills that and more and i think the way it has changed me and my life and my trajectory is that once you i will what we hope is that once you hear
00:54:18
about educational dignity you can't unsee it once you hear it once you see it you can't see it right now you start thinking about am i demonstrating this in my classroom am i demonstrating this with others who i'm educating how are we cultivating a space a dignified space for student learners like you like you start having those questions and once you see it you can't unsee it like it's just
00:54:44
you start creating these questions and that's what we hope um people will get out of um us presenting at these conferences um so it just it's that spark and it's just something that you know we've never really considered in educational spaces that's so great so powerful i certainly have been unable to unsee it as you say um i'm wondering and maybe maybe profe you might want to take this one on but
00:55:09
i'm wondering over the past year you know during the pandemic we've seen such kind of radical transformations of educational spaces um and frida if you wanted to take it first i would be fine too but i'm wondering uh in what ways the pandemic has affected your work or this project i mean i'm sure that it's you know you've maybe haven't been able to come together face-to-face maybe as much as
00:55:34
as before but has it changed perspective on on dignity and education in the project itself or have certain things come to the surface more than maybe they had earlier because of the pandemic sure i think i think it would be difficult for anyone to say that it that it didn't pass through right that it didn't pass through the the the filters of their mind um and it certainly gave us greater reason it stoked our fires you know which were already running strong
00:56:04
um and it helped cement where it is that we were going but again you know like like you know with the students that we have and and myself as well you know i think we lived those kinds of lives right you know so many of us are first generations and a number of us are also children of immigrants right um so these these struggles and these sorrows have been part of our our lives since
00:56:30
we were children for many of us um you know but i certainly i think what what what has happened in the last year year and a half um i think as far as nurtured us you know um we have we have the thing is we had an outlet for that outrage you know and the outlet was to write and to read because we know we were doing something with this long term that the victory in terms of you know
00:56:57
providing an education for people that is in harmony with their with the with their inherent dignity that is what keeps us going that's the horizon point so that's my perspective on it yeah i mean the sparked a question to me that i actually never asked because i'm not in school after like may 2020 um but i'm curious what i'll say right it's cemented after this past
00:57:25
year it definitely cemented that we're in the right direction this is what we have to do with many students across the country calling for their you know curriculum to you know represent what has traditionally been underrepresented and i'm curious um like ray for a long time our institution has been like oh yeah you're a researcher now that's that's cool what you
00:57:51
guys are doing not too much money put towards it um you know a good pat on the back but now i'm curious after you know the year that we've been through profe have like your own colleagues or other educators been like tell me about this educational dignity you know with a more with a stronger call to action to create um dignified spaces to show the underrepresented underserved
00:58:19
i believe so freda i believe that has happened there's been a an uptick in that and certainly our our new chancellor has has made promises in terms of helping to support the group and we'll see if both promises are followed through on that's always the uh that's always the ies that's the detail that we're always waiting for um we think we're at the right time we're at the right time but if you look back in history i can't remember i can't remember a scholarly
00:58:46
book that talked about efforts to desegregate or efforts to promote um you know a broad form of justice in society in which anybody said that this was the best time to do so there was old people that always said that no this is the inconvenient time economics economics are bad right or the economic times are good why would anybody care about this so you're left to think like when is it when is it ever a good time is it a good time when we're ready and we're ready now
00:59:15
oh i love it that and maybe that's a great a great way to stop i i we've taken up a whole bunch of your time um and i really appreciate that you are um david with the rock poised to throw i took a look at that picture um when you brought it up and i put a link into that shot to it so and it is a really very different statue isn't it um david a david of action instead of a david of um
00:59:40
sort of thinking or something whatever he's doing there standing there with his rock um i really appreciate both of you coming here and i'll just um give you the opportunity to uh wish us uh fond farewell and anything that you want to leave us with as we go frida how about we start with you um thank you all for coming i really appreciate it i think that's it i think profit has more the right to learn dignity lab thanks you for even thinking about us and considering us to come talk
01:00:10
with you all we got all kinds of love in the world for hypothesis and hypothesis folks so anytime that you all we can be of use to you please feel free to call on us and thank you so much thank you you
End of transcript