Video: Breaking the Matrix: The U.S. School System

We are embedded in systems that we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us because of the fascination of U.S. politics with carcerality. We have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation.

The U.S. education system is a foundational opportunity that remains deeply shaped by historical inequities, carceral logic, and stratification. Our schools reflect broader societal struggles over power, identity, and the purpose of learning. We stand at a crossroads where debates over reimagining schooling as a space of liberation rather than a punitive space of obedience and control is paramount.

In this conversation, speakers explored transformative approaches to education that disrupt exclusionary practices and cultivate learning environments that serve all students equitably.

Featuring:

• Lee Perlman, Founder and Co-Director of The Educational Justice Institute at MIT
• Houman Harouni, Lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education
• Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies and Associate Director, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

Moderated by Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, MTS ‘25

This is the fourth event of a five-part series of online public conversations with academics, advocates, and activists to imagine the systems that liberatory thought can create and how we can invest in visions of more equitable social structures.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Breaking the Matrix, the US School System, April 14, 2025. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: I am Hussein Rashid, assistant dean for religion and public life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusetts, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusetts tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusetts people. Welcome, and thank you for being here. 

Religion and Public Life is dedicated to the service of a just world at peace. We work with a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core and brings in critical analyzes to understand and challenge systems of inequity. Our focus on just peacebuilding recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable. 

The goal of RPL programming is to bring analyzes from experts, including academics and practitioners and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more-- to build a more just world. The program is currently led by interim director Dean David Holland and previously by Diane L. Moore, former associate dean of RPL. 

This series, like all our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including Ream, Hillary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, Hisham, Rachelle, and Elise, [INAUDIBLE], a current student helping with the series in various capacities. I also want to mention Becca Leviss and Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, the students who conceived of this series and have been instrumental in putting it together and who will be moderating various sessions in it. Thanks to them all. 

We're embedded in systems that other people created, in which we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the-- these are the invisible matrices that discipline us. Over time, because of the fascination of US politics with carcerality, these systems mimic official carceral spaces. 

The events of the past year highlighted how our past methods of sense and knowledge making no longer hold. In these moments of breakage, we have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation. We invite you to the process of radical reimagining with us by bringing together academics, advocates, and activists. 

We begin to imagine systems that liberatory thought can create and what needs to be done to get us to invest in futurist visions of more equitable social structures. These conversations will engage elements of RPL's approach to just peacebuilding by exposing power structures, understanding systems of violence, engaging relationally, being creative, and exploring the role of religion. 

We are pleased to be working with UCLA's Prison Education Program and Center for Justice to make this series available to incarcerated people throughout the country. The mission of UCLA's Prison Education Program and Center for Justice is to make higher education accessible to those incarcerated and to bring UCLA students, staff, and faculty together to learn alongside them and thereby challenge bias, discrimination, and justice in a collaborative learning community. 

Tonight's session is about the US education system, which has long been heralded as the foundation of opportunity, yet it remains deeply shaped by historical inequities, carceral logic, and economic stratification. From the school-to-prison pipeline to curriculum battles to the widening gap in educational access, our schools reflect broader societal structures over power, identity, and the purpose of learning. 

As we stand at a crossroads where debates over public education's future are intensifying, how can we reimagine schooling as a space of liberation rather than obedience and control? 

I would like to begin by introducing our moderator this evening, Elizabeth Bliss-Burger, MTS '25. Elizabeth has spent the last decade working at the intersection of education and decarceration. She began her career as a high school teacher from Philadelphia to Peru before shifting her focus to education in jails and prisons. 

Most recently, she served as a facilitator on Rikers Island and now teaches as an adjunct instructor with the MIT Prison Education Initiative in Boston jails. Elizabeth is in her final semester at Harvard Divinity School and plans to work in state policy after graduation, expanding housing options for justice-impacted individuals. 

And tonight, we have three amazing speakers-- Houman Harouni, Joseph Tucker Edmonds, and Lee D. Perlman. Houman Harouni is a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is practiced-- he is a practice-based theorist of culture and education. His work, which combines psychology, philosophy, political economy, and pedagogy, addresses the potential of institutions for maintaining or changing social relations. 

His study of power dynamics and culture opens to conclusions relevant for education, as well as for leadership, organizational studies, and social theory. He is also the faculty director for the Equity and Inclusion Fellowship, a program dedicated to combining the work of social justice with the difficult-to-learn skills of leadership and movement building. 

Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, PhD, is an associate professor of Africana studies and religious studies at Indiana University School of Liberal Arts and the associate director for the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. His research addresses the intersection between Black religion and the body, with a particular focus on agency, care, and wellness. 

He's an award-winning teacher, and nationally recognized scholar on community-engaged research, and a recipient of the Indiana Humanities Wilma Gibbs Moore Fellowship, which support his collaborative, community-engaged project on the history of Black women's agency and the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Indianapolis. Dr. Tucker Edmonds has written The Other Black Church-- Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom, and many scholarly articles that explore Black religion, radical pedagogy, and community-engaged scholarship. 

Lee Perlman earned his BA from St. John's College in Annapolis and his MA in political philosophy at Georgetown University before completing his doctorate at MIT in political philosophy. In 1984, Lee joined the teaching staff of the Experimental Study Group, MIT's first freshman learning community, where he's taught for most of the last 33 years. 

Lee began teaching in prisons in 1987, and in 2012, began to teach through Boston University's Prison Education Program. He founded the MIT Prison Initiative in 2016 with the support of ESG. Through the Initiative, Lee teaches classes to both MIT and incarcerated students at medium to maximum security Massachusetts correctional institutions and beyond. 

Lee has been awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for most significant improvement to MIT education three times, 1997, 2015, and 2019. He was also awarded MIT's Martin Luther King-- Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award in 2018. I want to thank all of you for being here and spending your time and knowledge and expertise with us. We're truly grateful. And with that, I'll pass the baton over to Elizabeth. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you much-- thank you so much, Hussein. It's so good to be here with you all this evening. Lee, Joseph, Houman, thank you, thank you, thank you. Excited to get us started off and to ground us in today's conversation. Would love if we could start off with maybe not a softball but something that is more of a definition. 

So we're going to go in reverse alphabetical order this time, which means we're going to start with you, Joseph. When you hear the word "carcerality," "carceral logic," tell us, what does that mean? Help our listeners to understand more of what that definition looks like, in particular with US schools. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Definitely. When I think of the word "carceral" or "carceral logic," I often think of the ways in which control, surveillance, and discipline come together to shape the life chances and possibilities of particular communities. And so carcerality is not simply associated with the prison system or with certain kinds of confinement or containment, but it is about discipline. It's about surveillance and its control and the meeting of those three together. 

I particularly like to say when I'm thinking about the definitions of carcerality, that I often lean into looking at the ways in which carcerality, control, discipline, and surveillance show up in particular and local and historic time places. So I often say carcerality looks different depending on where you are and what time we're talking about. 

And so when I'm teaching my students about carcerality in Indiana, I ask them to think about what that looks like in Indiana or Indianapolis and how that shows up there. Like, how do we see the history of control, surveillance, and discipline showing up time and time again? 

So I want to start there, to think about the ways in which those logics work together and how they shape not only spaces like the criminal justice complex, but they shape all of these other institutions that either prepare people for the prison industrial complex like the school-to-prison pipeline or folks that are now going to be staffing that prison industrial complex. 

So I often think about schools and their relationship between carcerality is that they are creating carceral agents who have to learn control, surveillance, and real confinement at every step of the way. And so when we're talking about why schools mimic and look like these other carceral systems is because they are training people to staff, to lead, to often manage those spaces. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: So good. Thank you so much, Joseph. We're going to kick it over to you, Lee. Could you please expand, add anything that you're thinking about in terms of carceral logic, carcerality when it comes to our US schools? 

LEE PERLMAN: I don't have experience in the school system itself. I teach in prisons, which are literal carceral systems. We don't need any metaphor there. I found what Joseph said to be very helpful. I guess what I would add to it is confining somebody in a box is not in itself-- I guess it's a carceral system. 

But the problem isn't putting people in a box. There are prison systems in which people are confined, and yet the system still recognize their humanity and treat them as human beings. That, to me, is the ultimate criterion. It's very clear in many, many years of doing work in prisons that if you treat people like human beings, they become more humane. 

And if you treat people like animals, which is what we do in a lot of our carceral settings, they become more animalistic. And I want to talk at some point about the systems that do this in a humane way. And some of them exist right here in the United States, so we don't have to go very far to see models of how this can be done. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you so much, Lee. Appreciate it. We'll pass it over to you, Houman. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Thank you, Elizabeth. So when I think about carcerality, very often, the association in my mind is not necessarily negative. Even when I think about things like discipline, control, and surveillance, which have been properly mentioned by Hussein and by Joseph, those also have positive meanings for me. 

My father had a life sentence before I was born. And I loved listening to his stories from prison time because I think, in part, I was watching a person-- I was hearing about a person's education, and it was a real education. 

I think when we think about some of the most powerful education systems that we have created, let's say the monasteries, we have to admit that there is something there that can't be very easily dismissed. And therefore prisons for me are not an absolute evil from which I would need to run. 

My own experience with them is pretty limited. I spent two nights in jail and because I knew I was going to get out. It was a profound experience. But that actually goes to the root of it for me of this question of carcerality, because there are conditions under which, like Lee was saying, the capacity of the individual to take this as an experience of their own choosing is destroyed. 

This can be done through bringing them to exhaustion. This can be done through breaking their spirit. This can be done through depriving them of basic physical needs. It can be done through some sinister psychological mechanisms. And that is something that concerns me in education as well, because in both of these systems, there is a will to that breaking of spirit where the individual is not able to make independent sense of their own life. 

And if we're clear about this, if we can think about this with some complexity that will determine the level at which we intervene, in some places, you don't want to intervene at the level of the institution which we in America are very used to doing, of reforming the institution. In some places, you want to keep the institution, depending on where you come from, with some level of discipline, control, and surveillance, and instead intervene at the level of the individual or of the group. 

And there are other places in which, depending on the strategy that you have, you will go to the institution and try to reform that. And that's why what Joseph is saying, where are we? And what historical period we are in? And I would add what is it-- what form of life we desire is fundamental to the question. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Can I jump back in a little bit? I want to just-- I want to just say, Houman, I love that idea because this notion of breaking the spirit-- I want to-- I want to tag that because I want to come back to that as the simple known of how you understand carcerality or one metaphor or mechanism of carcerality in our moment, because I believe that this radical acts of love are the opposite of carcerality. 

And so when we see institutions, systems, or places absent or emptied of the possibility of radical acts of love, of caregiving, of compassion, what we are noticing is the march towards carcerality, if carcerality has not already been achieved. And so I want to just tag that so that we keep the effective quality of carcerality at the top of our conversation, if you will. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Thank you. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you, Joseph. And all three of you pinpointed the importance of what we often talk about as situatedness or perspective, our unique perspective to the world. So for the next question, I would love to hear from each of you, how do you think your background, your upbringing, where you spent a lot of your childhood, influences how you see the US education system? 

LEE PERLMAN: Well, I mean, I grew up in a very working-class situation. I knew folks that wound up in prison. I knew folks that wound up being prison guards. I grew up in a-- I didn't like school growing up. School felt like a prison to me, and I didn't do well in school. 

And I often use as-- I often ask my students as an icebreaker, tell us one thing that you would never guess about-- that we would never guess about you. And when it comes to my turn, the thing I usually say is that I failed the 11th grade twice, dropped out of high school. And now I have a PhD from MIT. So anything is possible. 

I just think I have a lot of sympathy. Most of my incarcerated students-- the school system has failed them. They don't have any positive sense of what a school could be like. And I feel like the fact that I experienced that myself makes it much more possible for me to teach them in a way that they can learn. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: So I came from a place where being in prison could be a badge of honor, which is not that different from many, actually, parts of this country. But the reason it could be a badge of honor was because I grew up under a dictatorship that was trying to take over every aspect of people's lives. 

This is in Iran in the 1980s and '90s. And I think to this day, when I look back, all of my closest friends, the ones that-- they spent some time in jail. And I told you already that my father and other members of my family were political prisoners. 

Being in school under those conditions, where there was more honor being in prison, gave you a sense that you were already fighting against something. And I have to say that when I look at the generations of Iranians that have come out of these dictatorships, the results are the opposite of what one want-- what one would expect. 

So under one of the most brutal school systems that really did try to replicate the prison in every way in terms of its schedule and the indoctrination, et cetera, generations that are coming that are one after another more savvy to mechanisms of control and more able to unite with each other around acts of resistance that break out of this large, intense-- how should I call it? Penal colony that has been made of a country. So that experience is very much in my mind. 

And when I'm working-- I was at the school teacher in the United States. And when I'm-- and in other countries. When I'm there with the students, I always am very aware that the idea here is not for me to treat them with the least amount of control or with the softest hands, that the real idea is for them to be able to criticize me and to think-- to be able to think beyond me, beyond my figure. 

And for that, sometimes if I'm a little bit of the devil-- and this comes up in my classrooms now at Harvard, where I literally sometimes play the devil-- that is perhaps more useful than anything that tries to infuse them with a little bit of criticality, with a little bit of rebelliousness, with a little bit of joy in life despite overwhelming circumstances. I think that part of my background is what's most relevant to me in this conversation. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Well, thank you both for sharing that. I'm a Black man from Baltimore, Maryland. So I grew up as a young Black boy in an urban city where the actual case study for the school-to-prison pipeline, the major articles about looking at second and third-grade reading scores to determine who, how many bids they needed to build in the juvenile and the adult prison systems was done based on testing and reading scores of young Black boys and girls in Baltimore City. 

So I grew up in a city where I understood carcerality. If that meant for me, these deep regimes of control, surveillance, and discipline to ultimately dampen or to deny the flourishing and life chances of every person-- those were deeply baked in. 

It was assumed that you would move from the carceral system of school that was testing, that was assessing, that was surveilling in order to pick winners and losers into the more official carceral system of the state prison or penitentiary system, and that those who could move outside of it were experienced as exceptions or outliers. 

And so I take my experience in classrooms like that, my experience being raised in a city like that as a provocation to really push back against classroom spaces that replicate that kind of violence, that kind of language, and that kind of damage, especially for Black and Brown young men and women in my classroom. 

And so my experience has been one that those spaces, those classrooms do dampen, do harm, and really do traumatize folks as they are trying to imagine the possibilities of their life choices. And so that has shaped for me every classroom space that I've been in. 

As a student, as a teacher in middle and high schools when I was finishing up my master's, to a professor at a state university, I am always aware and deeply cognizant of the ways in which so many of my students have had those expectations of life choices beyond carcerality as obliterated or marginalized to the degree that they can't even imagine them. They can't dream that way. 

And so my goal is to create the possibility of a world that exists outside of that. And so that has shaped my classroom design, some of my teaching, the way that I read and historicize critical moments, and I just think the way that I show up in spaces like this. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you all so much. Something that's coming to mind hearing each of your stories is how, in many ways, my experience as a student and teacher and teacher coach in this system has me thinking about one of the ways that our US school system really starts to mirror carceral spaces is this limited possibility, this limited notion of what's possible, this conformity, this reducing down and limiting. 

And so what's so wonderful about having each one of you and having a multiplicity of ideas of how to run classrooms and how to operate is something I think we can really pull on as options or alternatives to our current forms of education, which is possibility. And each of you brings such a different form of possibility in the ways that you teach, some of which I've seen in your classrooms, I've read in some of your materials. 

And would just love to pull on that thread of how is it that you-- as an educator, either in elementary, middle school, high schools, in prison systems, or in your university level classes now, how do you bring possibility? What is it that you bring to class that allows for possibility to happen? 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: I'll start off and say just very quickly because I want us to engage and talk too. And I think one of the ways that I bring possibility is I recognize that it's really hard for possibility to exist in the minds and the worlds of a lot of my students when they enter into my class. So I say like, I got it. You all are looking for the exam. You're looking for the test. You're looking for the answer. You're looking for the key to get out and to trick or get away. 

And I want you to think about, is it possible that this classroom could be different than the other classrooms that you've been in? Or is it possible for us to mirror or to make in this classroom space a space that looks like other spaces that have been flourishing for you? What would that mean for us? 

But I think that my first move is to open up the idea that there might be some possibility outside of the traditional classroom and taking that very seriously by the way I even look at my syllabus. I tell my students, let's look at this and show me the ways that you see control, surveillance, and discipline, show me the ways that you see me dampening your possibility, show me the way that this reminds you of some other event. 

And let's talk about what we can or cannot do to imagine this or think about this differently. But I start off saying, hey, I'm coming in with the same baggage. I'm coming in with the same historical formation that formed many of my students. And how do we operate within and around that to create at least moments of difference or distinction from the other spaces that they have traditionally been in? 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Lee, do your students come in that way, too, with a very-- with a sense that what Elizabeth is calling possibility is quite limited? 

LEE PERLMAN: Well, I have two groups of students. My classes are all a mixture of MIT, Harvard, Wellesley students, and incarcerated students taking the same class for college credit. My MIT, Harvard, and Wellesley students have probably a unrealistic view of how much possibility there is in their lives, and my incarcerated students have a very limited view of their possibilities. 

Most of them-- the idea that they're taking a college class is revolutionary for them. And I've talked to a lot of them. Many of them have never met anybody. Well, they may have met somebody. They don't know anybody in their community that went to college. They've never thought about going to college. It's not something that makes any sense to them. 

I think the ways that I-- so I can think of two ways in which I increase the sense of possibility. One is just putting these two populations together. They don't understand each other's lives. They haven't-- it just widens their horizons. Beyond that, many of my incarcerated students, MIT, Harvard students are legendarily, mythically smart. And when they discover that they can hold their own, that they have things to teach, a lot to teach, that really broadens their sense of who they are and what's possible for them in their worlds. 

The MIT students and Harvard students are-- the worlds that they inhabit are extremely limited, extremely narrow. For instance, I mean, one thing-- yes, it's a very dramatic thing to take a class with somebody who's committed a crime and is sitting in jail. That's dramatic. But the other thing that we don't even think about is, your four years of college-- you spend it around people just your own age, who are from pretty similar backgrounds. And they're now in a class. 

And all of my classes are about real human issues, things that people are going to have to think about in their lives. I do philosophy of love. And I do a course on authenticity and one called nonviolence as a way of life. And we take up issues that everybody-- we call it, the whole series, our philosophical life skills. And I think of these as real life skills. There are things that everybody should sit down and think about deeply at some point in their lives that are going to affect the way they live their lives. 

Doing that with-- doing something like that with only other 20-year-olds is of some value. But when they go into prison, they're sitting with guys who've spent 30 years in prison and are 55 years old. They've spent-- they're in a class with younger guys who-- this is their first-- younger guys who actually got-- were gang involved from the age of seven and now are thinking maybe this isn't the way their lives ought to go. There's just much more sense of the way that lives can happen. 

I think the other way that I maybe that-- I do a somewhat flipped classroom model, which is I have lectures. I think I have things worth saying, but I record them. I give them to them. The incarcerated students now have tablets. They can have them loaded on their tablets. They do that outside of the classroom. When we get into class, it's all discussion. It's all about exploring with each other. I think that-- I think that is the way you discover who you are and what your possibility is, what possibilities lie in your life. I'll stop there. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: So I teach in a graduate school, and I'm in a what would be considered a professional graduate school. And I get students from Harvard School of Education, Harvard School of Government, Divinity School, MIT. But these are, in general, people who-- they wouldn't think of themselves this way. But their lives are-- everything around them is pushing them towards becoming part of larger systems and becoming operatives in these systems. Joseph, you were calling them agents. 

I don't look down upon that. I think a lot of these are very important jobs and positions. And it requires a lot of discipline. It requires a lot of sacrificing of your possibilities to stay in a place where you can-- where you can serve. And they do want to serve. They have, from their professional background, a sense that when they got down to business, they couldn't do what they set out to do very often. They couldn't really serve whatever goal or divinity it was that they entered the enterprise with. 

And when I come in-- and I found that if I come in and I say, OK, here's-- let's think together, let's dream together, let's think about what's possible in these systems, et cetera, in part because of their-- even if they have never been, by the way, in a school as a teacher, if they've never been in a department of agriculture, et cetera, if they're just going, there's something very deep down, lets them know that this isn't real, that this is a-- that there's something of the charlatan operating in me. 

And on top of that, they have learned all of these games, like Lee and Joseph, both your students from the college side. And there are other games that the other students know. But these guys-- they really know how to play the game. That's how they got there in the first place. And so if I tell them, be creative, dance, they will dance. But it's just my command, and that's let's get them there. 

So what I try to do is to let them know that we are here to transform something, but I turned the situation in which we are just-- and this is very similar to what Joseph was saying-- into the thing to be transformed. It's that classroom and the relationships within it. That's where the possibility is supposed to come. 

But then I don't help them. In fact, I become very unhelpful for a long time. I don't talk. I declare strange things like my salary from the university. I might break into poetry at some point that they don't need. I might chastise them for things that they haven't done, et cetera. And I do this until they deal with the big problem in the room, which is me. It's not me. It's that chair. It's on whom they place the game. 

And once they have managed to somewhat deal with that, then they have to deal-- I try to use other means to try to get them to deal with the other game, which is the game that they carry inside, this idea that there has to be a game, that there has to be a way, a simple way, a way that has been already charted for us, a way that has already been sanctioned, justified, and legalized to achieve the thing that we want, which is being human beings with each other. Very often that's their goal. I'm not saying that that's my goal, but that becomes their goal. 

Once they get to that point, I think I get to be a little bit more helpful, and the text get to be more helpful. I don't know if I were in your shoes, Lee, I would try that in the same way, because it's very possible that what I would give rise to is that-- it's very possible that the game that-- and the other half of my students playing is a game in which they try to dethrone me very, very quickly. And so that's not that's as operative for them. And so I might move towards something that's of a different order. I'm not sure exactly what that would be. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: The other thing, Lee, I wanted to ask you-- I mean, how do you bring something like autobiography into-- because I think one of the ways that I try to push this is like it's challenging the notion of who has an authoritative voice in this or who is an authoritative analytic in the classroom. 

How do you do that or how-- as you're letting your students-- as you flip the classroom, what are you asking for them to share or to bring to the classroom? Because we-- as scholars and professors, we bring a certain-- we bring this codified knowledge that makes up a discipline, right? This is how to be a professional. This is how to be a teacher. This is how to be an Africana studies scholar. What are you asking them to bring when you flip the classroom? 

LEE PERLMAN: Well, one of my classes is called authenticity. So I'm asking them-- I'm asking them to be genuinely and authentically themselves and be courageous about doing that. I mean, I think what Houman said about being provocative in class-- I think I have a opposite problem, perhaps, which is I'm dealing with an extremely untrusting group of people. And they see me as an ally rather than just another-- I mean, I step into that class. 

And when I teach in South Bay, most of my students are Brown and Black, and I'm a white guy. I look more a lot of the correctional officers. So to become somebody that they feel is worthy of their trust is a lot of my-- a lot of what I have to do. And I think I've done-- I do it pretty well. 

And autobiography-- I have been dealing recently. I have a group-- I have a small group that came out of my class that volunteered for some extra workshops. And we've been training them in nonviolent communication and other peacemaking tools. 

And we've been-- I have found autobiography-- just telling their stories to be incredibly important too. And they've found it really, really powerful. Even though a lot of them-- the stories aren't that different, but just being able to say their stories really opens them up. I don't know if I answered anybody's questions, but that's what came to mind. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: I think we're both curious about-- there's an illusion here that maybe Joseph and I know each other's work better. But we had a conversation before this. And Joseph told me about one of the things that he does that you do with time. And when you look at it as-- I hope you'll get to tell us a little bit about it. I don't want to [INAUDIBLE], Joseph. 

But this idea of winning the trust of people who come into a great deal of mistrust-- I think I'm very curious about what that looks like. I think we have to, at some point, do it too. At least I know that the point comes where if I do my job right according to my own definitions and what I have described to you, my students do develop a tremendous amount of mistrust. They begin to think about how they have been shaped the way that they have been shaped. 

Remember, they're not all coming from also middle-class backgrounds or happy families that Tolstoy says all look the same. They come from all kinds of places. They have had to forget a lot of things in order to make themselves fit in this environment. And when that occurs, they sit with that. And it's almost like sitting in a jail cell of oneself. You begin to understand how limited you have become and how much you have hated many people that you maybe loved. 

There is a moment there that I have to intervene and be a stable and loving person for them. And I have to-- I have to let them know that at the very least, they can be seen without judgment and with a sense of belief. And sometimes you got to catch them as they're falling. That's a pretty rough place to take somebody too. 

So I don't know how you do that from the very beginning. I would be-- I know how to do that in a classroom, Lee, but I always feel bad when I do it from the beginning, when I come in and I say like, trust me, friends. And what I'm telling them is that trust the next structure that you go into. Your case is different. So I'm very interested. I think Joseph was too. What it's like for you? What is that first move like when you come in? 

LEE PERLMAN: Well, I find that the-- especially the incarcerated students have incredibly well-honed bullshit meters. And so being-- I mean, I do practice a love-- having a loving presence in the room, but that means sometimes challenging them. 

I think of one guy in particular came into my class. He was just such a pain in the ass. And he was clearly the guy that used to in his life. He was a fairly young guy. He's in his 20s, I guess. But he'd gone through life as the class clown and the class disrupter. And he started doing this stuff. And what I instinctively try-- I mean, I try to be-- I guess I try to show up as fully who I am. And I'm not a saint, and I can get annoyed. I let myself get annoyed when I'm annoyed. 

But somehow or other-- I don't know how to describe it exactly, but somehow or another, I try to radiate that underneath that is exactly what you said that I'm not doing this to judge you. I don't have a-- I'm on your side. I actually do care about you, but I'm not going to put up with your bullshit. I mean, it helps to have a little humor when you do that. I just want to say about this guy that I've been working-- he's now out. And our peacemakers group still meets every other week. And he's my star. 

Somehow or other, he-- somehow or other, I did project to him that I'm genuine, that I'm not a-- I'm not a do-gooder in the sense of I'm going to-- I'm just going to-- I think do-gooderness comes across as condescension to a lot of the guys I deal with, letting them walk all over me because for them, they don't want to be treated that way. I just try to be as real as I can with them. And they see my cranky side, too. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you all so much. I'm going to pull on a thread that I'm interpreting and I'm hearing, which is this power of exposure, like this exposure of either introducing mistrust or exposure to introducing trust, exposure to different ideas or different ways of operating in a classroom. Potentially, one might say, different pedagogies or different examples of what it means to teach, to have a teaching style. 

And so whether it's exposure to Inside-Out students or exposure to, quote unquote, "flipping the classroom," things that are maybe atypical for students to deal with or interact with, I'm curious if you all can share examples of ways that you've exposed your students to different ways of thinking, acting, being, doing. 

And, I'm thinking about our pre-call conversation as well, Houman, Joseph, Lee, some of the examples that were shared that I know would benefit our listeners and audiences of what are ways that we can redefine and rethink how classrooms operate. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Yeah. Yeah, I can share a little bit about how I think and use time and space. I mean, I think there's a couple things I always like to say to folks when I'm talking about this. One is it took me a long time to extract-- not to play using the word time, but to extract myself from the practiced and very structured way that I entered into classroom spaces. 

And I have to tell you all that it's hard because I, as a person that had been successful and performed quite well, knew how to play and operate in the game even as not only as a student, but I also had a model of what that looked like for what professors or teachers should look like in that game. And so I was buying into a particular version of that, being slick and on time, being rehearsed, being all of these things that came along with a particular version of what the ideal student and the ideal teacher should look like. 

And part of what I do with time is a play on my own kinds of anxieties around time, and control, and discipline, and surveillance. So I'm trying to shift the way that I had used time at the start of the class or the end of the class, or you can't leave until I tell you to leave, as mechanisms of control and surveillance that were actually not benefiting certain types of flourishing and creativity. 

And so what I started to do for a long preamble to say I started to just randomly start and end my classes at different times, at different moments in the semester. That classes might be 10 minutes long. And we would capture a moment or capture an idea. And I would say that we have accomplished that. 

I have classes where I give students the option to decide when the class ends, and that where we've come to a place where folks are no longer allowed-- where folks are allowed to tap out or tap out as we need to end. But I've done that where I've said we're going to have 10 minute classes. 

And then I've experimented where I just keep going and see when students are going to leave. I just let that time period go. And it's an hour and 15 minute class or an hour and a half class. I'm talking. It's an hour, 20 minutes. It's an hour, 25 minutes, and an hour and 35 minutes. I'm seeing and we're seeing who's staying in. 

But partially, what I do after those experiments and after those moments is we get into a conversation of how time has worked, why and how the classroom can be meaningful for you, and what would it look like for us to have a greater degree of fungibility in this space. 

That the idea that we've got to use up and maximize all the given time is something that I think haunts many of my students in the way that they think about the classroom space rather than how can we get to a place in this classroom where we understand an idea, where we better know each other, where we still feel comfortable. 

And once we hit one all, some, or none of those, we can opt out or reimagine new pathways, given that that's our goal rather than the simple goal of being filling time, completing the semester, checking out all the boxes. My students love it, though. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Oh, it's amazing. So that example, which is really dear to my heart, for me, exposes this-- you were talking about exposure and underlying structure that shapes the experience. And they're going to-- people are going to have these underlying structures. Wherever they go in time and the way time is allocated is one of the biggest ones for many of them in the places where they are. 

And when you bring something that breaks through the facade of common agreement or common sense, you have exposed this underlying structure. And it can become a subject at the very least of, Joseph, what you're talking about, this discussion. Like, what do we-- what do we do with it? 

What occurs then, I've found out, is very often a sense of despair that follows because-- and this is, I think, where a lot of these academic gurus get their cachet from. And if you look at it, a lot of the sociology that we study and vocabulary we use, a lot of the philosophy has this sense of giving people the idea that the speaker has really understood what's wrong. And there isn't much else possible. 

And if you go and study-- I see scholars who go and look at an example of something that is quite different and say like, look at that. Look how different this is. Usually, what that does does not inspire people. What it does-- it brings their attention to all the idiosyncrasies of this particular example, of this difference. 

And so that's why I say these academic gurus are very-- they can become-- I don't have any problem with necessarily an academic gurus like in what Lee was describing is very important sometimes for people to attach themselves to the wisdom and kindness of another human being in order to reach a different space of being. But as a professional position, it's very uninteresting to me. 

My task after that exposure is probably the most difficult part of what I do, which is to have them listen for what we can call hope or what we can call-- I call it an emergent alternative, that in this discussion and in this moment that we are experiencing, this is a different way of organizing things that can come forward, that is not just the result of my reading, that is not just a result of my creativity, that your creativity can bring you there. 

And I can't tell you how hard it is. It's so hard in almost any context. And I do a lot of work with different organizations where they need to-- they need to come up with that. And it's hard there, too, because all the counter mechanisms come up like it's not-- very often, I've seen this happen. They say let's bring Houman or Joseph there, and maybe they can solve the problem for us. 

And getting to that point where they can hear not just the thing that has given shape to their lives, but these tiny possibilities. That's why humor that Lee was talking about is so-- it's so important and in my case, a sort of a poetic and artistic sensibility. 

I know, Joseph, you also draw on all of-- on all of these things that I said, but also a religious experience that-- or they occasionally cut through and expose as something that can exist for a second. And if you don't give it life, if you don't stay with it, if you don't give your energy to it, it will die. That moment, that exposure, is probably the hardest and most elemental aspect of my work. 

I think that can be very abstract, but I was hoping from-- and what Joseph was saying. Like when somebody has the idea of this is a different way that we can organize our time, if somebody outside of you in the class has that idea, they immediately know that they're dealing with the limitations of everybody else's expectations, the delimitations of the institution, et cetera, et cetera. 

And that's where the despair comes from, to get them to be able to say, hey, stay with this long enough, stay with this spark long enough and see what might happen. And that's the-- the liveliness of many situations, many intellectual situations or liveliness of a party even is dependent on somebody noticing something and staying with it. And convincing other people that for the moment is worth it. 

LEE PERLMAN: Well, I mean, I think this might seem grandiose, but what I really most want to expose people to is themselves. And I think that often by somehow or other, this wild mix of really different people makes us see ourselves more clearly. 

I think I also-- one of the things that matters a lot to me is the union of heart and head. I want people to be able to see that thinking about things carefully can be related to feeling them through as well, that we need to integrate both those parts of ourselves to really understand things. 

So our conversations are-- I give them theoretical frameworks usually as uncomplicated as I can work out theoretical frameworks. But then I really want them to think about that through their own experience and think about it-- not only think about it, but feel about it. What is it-- how does this relate to my own lived experience? 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Yeah. I love this notion, though, of feeling and affect. I was saying I wanted to come back to that, like that this notion of despair that you talked about-- because I do think the moment that we realize that we are captured by time or that the meritocracy is a false premise-- I feel like when my students get to the point of the semester where they realize like this, the meritocracy isn't going to save me. 

And I have a lot of-- I'm at a state institution. You have a lot of hardworking, really dedicated first-generation college students who have bought into and have radically accepted that the meritocracy might save them, that they work hard enough if they put in enough time, if they do all the work and check all the boxes. 

And this is not the absence of rigor, but if they do all of that, it's going to save them from these deadening and life-dampening forces. And when they realize that that's not the case, there is a pall that falls over the classroom, right? There is a despair that then we've got to live in. We live in this haunted space, and now what are we going to do with it, right? How are we going to live in and make meaning in this space? 

And that is I find that so challenging. And I find that 16 weeks, or 15 weeks, or whatever your timeline of your semester or your class is not enough time to do that. And I tell my students-- and I love, Lee, that story that this person, after they left incarceration, after they left your classroom that you all are still living these lives together, is that radical act of belonging that I think is actually the core of the pedagogical initiative. 

Like I'm trying to say that the teaching and the learning doesn't begin and stop with this space, with me, with this classroom, with this syllabus, but that it is a part of who we are and who we decide to and how we decide to build community. And so how do we-- like I want you-- I want to think about, how do you respond to that despair, Houman? Like what do you-- how do you-- how do you walk with them in that despair? 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: So I have to give them enough rope with which to hang themselves. I mean it because they want-- despair is a terrible condition. But what is probably more terrible than despair for people who want to be creative is not being able to hold your despair, because then you come up with all kinds of mechanisms to really not face your reality. 

One of them is depression. One of them is this depression, which is what you said dampening of all of these energies. Another one can be high levels of anxiety. But there are much more organized ways of doing that, of course, certain kinds of needless bureaucratization and institutionalization, et cetera. All of these become ways for people to deal with this thing that they can't hold. 

So I, first of all, need to somehow provide one example of somebody who can hold, who can hold. And if I can have some humor about it or some artistry about it, that's a kind of as-- I think I hope it's a decent thing in the moment. But then there is really the development of an ear, an eye for moments in which, as I said, something else is happening, and it needs to be happening right now, in the moment. 

It's a tremendously powerful thing if you have a student who's trying to tear everything down, if they can come into the work of cooperation without giving up entirely on those impulses. And that's a new possibility. If you can see that in the moment, you can highlight that in the moment. And it's got to be their making. It can't be one make. It can't be my making entirely. I mean, they can depend on it, or we can deal with what role I'm playing. That's quite important. 

I haven't-- occasionally, you can find some writers-- and they're pretty useful for this-- who have managed to do that, who have managed to hold that for a moment. Students-- like all human beings, they don't buy what they read, or if they do, there's something wrong. And you got to be careful and disabuse them of this notion that this is the path, whatever it is written. 

But that is-- there are some authors who can really hold that and give them a sense of the complexity of their own selves to see that there is one side of me that can be quite depressed about this, or quite anxious, or quite dependent, et cetera. And there is this other side that cries for something else. And I can-- there might be moments of holding these two things together. 

So James Baldwin, for example, is a very good example of holding these things. And that's why he continues to be relevant, whereas I think most of the writings that we have right now on race relations-- they fall on one of the two sides. They become either this thing in which there is most, not all of what we're calling Afro-pessimist writing, in which there is no possibility. Nothing is going to happen. It's all structures. 

And then you get stuff that's a lot and much of what DEI work in universities and schools comes out of, where they think with some level of a little bit of training or a little bit of tweaking the rules, you're going to get at this thing that is very deep and very disturbing in the way it might operate on daily, or on a decade-long, or century-long scopes. But somebody like Baldwin holds that together. He has-- and that's helpful. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: That is helpful. I mean, I like-- I mean, I like someone like-- I like Moten. I like Fred Moten. I think Fred-- I mean, these folks that have that jazz sensibility, if you will, that can play in and out. I mean, I like Saidiya Hartman. I mean, there are folks that I could point to that I think play at the edge of Afro-pessimism, but don't fall off, that don't completely capitulate to the lack of possibility. I'm going to like your language, just emergent alternative. What is on the other side of that is really powerful. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Both of these people that you named are great dancers. And when you-- but I sometimes recommend for people, both with Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, to watch their videos when they're having a conversation with students. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Yes, yes, yes, yeah. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: It is-- and see how alive they are to these complexities. I really was not-- I was not referring to either of them. And I had, in fact, Moten's face in front of me as going after an entire theory and discipline and ripping it apart. And, of course, I myself in that world of what you might call DEI and have tremendous respect for some people who have managed to do something there that's more than hokey hope. And I know. So I'm very glad. I'm very I'm touched that you and I had the same people in mind. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Yeah. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you, all-- 

LEE PERLMAN: It strikes me as-- 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Oh, sorry. Go, Lee. Go, Lee. You got-- 

LEE PERLMAN: It strikes me, as we're all talking that there's something that we all do that hasn't been articulated, which also isn't often thought of as the role of a teacher, especially at the university level, which is that we all seem to aim at dealing, at educating the whole person, at being the whole person, educating the whole person, for me, that means bringing my whole person into the classroom. Do people agree with that? 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: At least I do. 

LEE PERLMAN: Which part? 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: I believe in bringing my whole person to the classroom. And I have really pushed myself to have my students leave the classroom more often than I was ever asked to leave my traditional classroom. So, I mean, we try to exist in the world, and that can be very difficult when students don't have access to transportation, when it's easier to stay in the classroom where I find it could be a lot more time efficient to watch a movie, or a video, or something like that. 

I believe that part of what makes the space different from other carceral spaces, or at least my teaching spaces, is that I am asking for us to inhabit and to be in conversation with the natural world. And so that means we've got to leave the classroom. 

Now, that's hard for you, Lee, when you're dealing in the Inside-Out program, when you, by the very design of working with folks who are incarcerated, cannot leave or can't leave that campus. But I do ask my students that we've got to leave our campuses, our roles, our preconceived conditions. We've got to travel to other spaces in order to I think at least brush up against other alternatives that exist in the world around us, but that we have not yet considered as possibilities. 

LEE PERLMAN: That's really interesting. And I think it's-- of course, when my outside students come in from their traditional universities and they take a class inside a prison, in every respect, it challenges their sense. I mean, you walk through a-- you have to walk through the sally port. The big steel door closes behind you. 

When you're inside, you have to do-- and I tell them you have to do whatever the CO tells you to do. You don't question anything. So they have a taste of the carceral system. So in that sense, they leave their typical classroom. But I've heard a lot of students say that taking the T to the classroom is also an experience for them. They just leaving the-- they just love leaving campus and going out, and being in the world and having a class. 

As far as the incarcerated students, a lot of them tell me-- a lot of them said this-- have said this exact phrase to me, when I'm in class, I'm not in prison. And they're just being treated in a different way. And we don't have COs in our classes. There are cameras. So they know they're being watched, but they just act more like what they think. It is to be themselves in that setting. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Maybe I'll say just one thing about being mindful of time of the whole person. I don't want to give the impression-- I agree with you, Lee, that that's what-- it seems like that's what we end up doing. But I don't want to give the impression that that's the only thing to be done. 

I started my career trying to teach something very simple or technical, it seemed, which was I was trying to get people to teach a little-- to listen to students a little bit better. That's what it was. It was even very simple. It had to do with mathematics. That's what I wrote my dissertation about. 

And as I was trying to work with people, I realized that even that ask, just listen, just read, just listen was tremendously impacted by these systems that-- we're calling them here carceral system. There's a massive definition to them that have limited and limited and limited the person, in some places, have built real strength in some places, but surrounded by a ton of fragility that limits the person's movements. 

And so when you say, listen, you giving rise to all kinds of anxieties and fears, et cetera. And so I had to deal with those. And when I tried to deal with those, then I had to deal with where they came from. And then I had to deal with-- I would love to go back to an occasional-- I have the opportunity to go back to that technical thing. 

It's best done when somebody else has done the work beforehand and has given me a bit of a leg up. And I still dream of being in a community where I can do that and take a more humble role than educating the whole person. But for now, this is what we got. 

ELIZABETH BLISS-BURGER: Thank you so much. I will just tie up that in as much of a bow as I can, although never really the goal. Actually, we like loose ends. So I will just add to that by saying, it makes me think about the role that oftentimes discredited forms of knowledge or nonrational ways of knowing have been discredited for so long like dreams, like speaking to nonhuman beings, so animals, land, plants, spirits. 

So I think about that as we embark on our next role in education is what would it look like to expand our notion of community and who we're engaging and how we're engaging. So that dream is actually a beautiful chord to continue to follow many, many moments after this call ends. 

So I just want to say thank you all so much, especially when I think about this next era. I heard investigate your path, investigate your purpose, follow your students to the edge of discomfort, no drive-by healing, sustained community. And may we all be free under any circumstances. 

So thank you all so, so much, Lee, Joseph, Houman. Really appreciate your time, your contributions today. Excited to continue this conversation. For everyone here, we will have this recorded and send it out once it is complete. And thank you again. Have a wonderful rest of your evening. Really appreciate you all. 

HOUMAN HAROUNI: Thank you. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: Thank you. 

LEE PERLMAN: Thank you, everybody. Enjoy talking to everybody here. It's a great conversation. 

JOSEPH L. TUCKER EDMONDS: It was great. 

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