The quotes below contain links to our extensive glossary. We link to our glossary throughout our website.

There is no what works for everybody. There is no silver bullet in education. Education is relational. It’s contextual. It involves understanding the human beings in the room.

Nick Covington, Human Restoration Project Talks Professional Learning & Progressive Pedagogy

Hope is a platform for action.

Good digital pedagogy is accessible to everyone.

Nick Covington, MINDFOOD I: Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read – YouTube

Make room for play. Play is learning.

Nick Covington, Play-Based Learning is learning! (with Lego) – YouTube

There is a point to taking these individualistic actions towards systemic change, because kids notice this stuff.

Restoring Humanity to Education w/ Nick & Chris of HRP | CTRH2023 – YouTube

Progressive education is research-based education. We have the research on our side. The traditional practices do not.

Restoring Humanity to Education w/ Nick & Chris of HRP | CTRH2023 – YouTube

Where behaviorism fails to foster agency it simultaneously creates a framework for excluding neurodivergent and disabled students while enabling the policing of students from non-dominant cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds.

A Human Centered Education: Ends Dehumanizing Practices – YouTube

Kristina Brooke Daniele is a Black, queer, neurodivergent homeschooling mom, educator, wife, and author of two books, (Civil Rights Then and Now and i wandered, lost: poems). Kristina has worked as an educator in some capacity for over 15 years- first as a classroom teacher, then as a homeschooling teacher, and currently, as an education consultant. She is passionate about collaborative projects centering on creating and maintaining safe-spaces for those who have for too long been pushed aside. During her time at Automattic, Kristina spearheaded the creation of the Employee Resource Group, Cocoamattic for Black employees at the company.

Kristina enjoys reading speculative fiction, write tales of romance, build homes and design apartments in The Sims 4, peacefully commune with ancient lands in Age of Empires, dabble in various arts and crafts, and spend time with her family.

• CONFERENCE TO RESTORE HUMANITY! 2022: SYSTEM REBOOT TRACK 3/4 DIY AT THE EDGES Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own July 25 – 28
• Naked Words Podcast: How Black Writers are Changing the Stories Told About Us
• Anti-Racism Resources from The iBelieve Foundation
• Misogynoir Nearly Killed Meghan Markle by Mo
• Under the Mango Tree Black Girl Magic Chat
• Black History Month Reading List from Mango Publishing
• Get Drunk, Get Woke: Cancel Culture
• The Rashad Mills Show w/ Kristina Brooke Daniele
• Black Heroes Of The American Revolution Activities And Lesson Plan
• All About Kwanzaa For Kids
• Civil Rights Supreme Court Cases Every Child Should Know
• Learn About Juneteenth For Kids: A Celebration Of Freedom
• 10 Black Women Pioneers To Know For Black History Month
• Sukey And The Mermaid Lesson Plan and Activities
• Ray Charles By Sharon Bell Mathis – Lesson Plan And Worksheets
• Anansi The Spider Lesson Plan And Activities
• The People Could Fly Lesson Plan
• Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters Lesson Plan and Activities
•  Wrinkle In Time Reading Comprehension Worksheets

Major Pain is created by Jesse Mercury, a content creator with a long history of undiagnosed illness. His podcasting career started in 2015 on a show called SciFi with Jesse Mercury, which evolved into Space Nerds before being put to rest. As Jesse’s health declined he switched gears to launch the Major Pain podcast in 2021, seeking to find community around his health challenges. In 2023 he finally uncovered the mystery driving his long illness when he was diagnosed with mast cell activation syndrome and small fiber neuropathy, made possible in large part by what he learned from hosting Major Pain. He is now seeing improvement in his health for the first time in years, as he learns to integrate his diagnoses into his life.

Major Pain: A Podcast About Chronic Illness and Disability

Flowerpunk is the new umbrella name for the webcomic universe I am creating. Previously known as “The Increasingly Absurd Endeavours of Gretchen Goosander,” Flowerpunk now no longer has a main character, instead it follows multiple characters across multiple stories. This story is a dark fantasy that takes place in a world very much like our own, only there are some intruding magical elements. Magic used to be much more abundant, but it is now starting to disappear as Capitalism lays waste to the world and has commodified what is left of the magic elements.

The first story begins in the city of Wyrdon, where a supernatural plague known as “the rot” is slowly decaying everything it comes into contact with. It is up to a group of anarchists to try and help as many people as possible through acts of radical compassion before more citizens are turned into maggots. Along the way, our main characters, Ludwig and Kimi, come to realise that in order to save everyone, they must bring back the magic.

Flowerpunk | Kaya’s Kosmos

“Anarchy isn’t about chaos. It’s about love”

In the city of Wyrdon, a supernatural plague known as “the rot” ravages the streets, slowly rotting the city to its core and turning the residents into maggots. A small group living outside of society known as “The Lovely Anarchists” are working tirelessly to save the city’s soul by bringing back the magic needed to stave of the rot. This is no easy task since the world’s magic has been hoarded by the ultra-wealthy.

Flowerpunk is a 10-chapter miniseries following two anarchists in particular. Ludwig, a hard-ass punk and Kimi, a candycore soft boy.

Over time, the two find a sense of mutual healing in each other and the perfect antidote to their shared feeling of powerlessness in a cruel and twisted world.

Expect anarchist hijinks, weird magical plant-powered machinery, messed-up nightmarish monsters and tons of queer goodness!

Read Flowerpunk | Tapas Web Comics, Flowerpunk | WEBTOON

In the Parable books Lauren is a young, black, disabled woman who manages to not merely survive but to create a belief system and lead a community that brings together and helps thousands in the midst of chaos. As a result, this series is one example of how a better future can include those of us whose lives, bodyminds, and perspectives are often devalued and discounted.

Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction

Earthseed is Olamina’s contribution to what she feels should be a species-wide effort to evade, or at least to lengthen the specialize-grow-die evolutionary cycle that humanity faces, that every species faces.

Parable of the Sower (Parable, 1)

A time has come to again look at changes in the way technology allows us to see the world and experience it. First was the human eye, with a lens made of flesh. Later humans developed a replacement for the eye but in the form and fashion of the lens of the eye; this time it was made of glass doped with metals to enhance its control of light. To see, the human eye has a retina filled with responsive cells which look for contrast and color.

Technology has allowed us to create a replacement for the retina called a CCD with metals which respond to color and report those values to a microchip which converts them to bits and bytes for storage. I will present to you the same extension of sight by explaining how the images you will see come into existence.

In my artwork the landscape is created via the execution of a seed of a formula, allowed to grow and flourish in a mathematical set of steps. In a similar way, crystals grow underground in a cave over many millennia but they follow a seed of a universal pattern related to their atomic structure and facilitated by the chemical nature of their environments. In our regular world, we have 3 directions we can move, forward-back, up-down and left-right, but these crystals can move in another set of directions allowed by the universe and mathematics. They are, and must be considered elements of nature, and it follows that the methods used to convey them must be considered legitimate tools of expression.

A crystal starts at a virtual geometric position, a virtual center, then it mathematically and procedurally grows outward and inward according to a seed formula. However it exists in a dark world devoid of light and color; it is only a cloud of form. As an artist, I create an eye with a lens which follows the same mathematical processes as the lens of a camera and the eye itself. I situate the virtual eye to be gazing upon the crystal as I create sources of light which will illuminate the crystal and reflect light back to the lens.

As an artist I imbue color to the crystal, I imbue reflectivity, I imbue refractability, and I imbue density or transparency exactly towards the same purpose as a painter would do, in combining pigmented oils on canvas with a brush in his or her hand.

My artwork is digital photography in a world where objects exist in more than 3 dimensions, and where no known means of physical representation has yet been discovered to exist.

Adriel Jeremiah Wool

Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us. Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

What is Emergent Strategy? “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions”—I will repeat these words from Nick Obolenksy throughout this book because they are the clearest articulation of emergence that I have come across. In the framework of emergence, the whole is a mirror of the parts. Existence is fractal—the health of the cell is the health of the species and the planet.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Octavia wrote novels with young Black women protagonists meeting aliens, surviving apocalypse, evolving into vampires, becoming telepathic networks, time traveling to reckon with slave-owning ancestors. Woven throughout her work are two things: 1) a coherent visionary exploration of humanity and 2) emergent strategies for being better humans.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

I was looking for language and frameworks to use when exploring the kind of leadership Butler’s protagonists practiced, and found them in conversations with ill and Grace about emergence—interdependence, iteration, being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

fractals: the relationship between small and large

A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Octavia was concerned with scale—understanding that what happens at the interpersonal level is a way to understand the whole of society. In many of her books, she shows us how radical ideas spread through conversation, questions, one to one interactions. Social movements right now are also fractal, practicing at a small scale what we most want to see at the universal level. No more growth or scaling up before actually learning through experience.

Rather than narrowing into one path forward, Octavia’s leaders were creating more and more possibilities. Not one perfect path forward, but an abundance of futures, of ways to manage resources together, to be brilliant together.

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Fractals are one form of redundancy that has attracted particular attention from scientists. A fractal pattern is one in which the same motif is repeated at differing scales. Picture the frond of a fern, for example: each segment, from the largest at the base of the plant to the tiniest at its tip, is essentially the same shape. Such “self-similar” organization is found not only in plants but also in clouds and flames, sand dunes and mountain ranges, ocean waves and rock formations, the contours of coastlines and the gaps in tree canopies. All these phenomena are structured as forms built of smaller forms built of still smaller forms, an order underlying nature’s apparently casual disarray.

Fractal patterns are much more common in nature than in man-made environments. Moreover, nature’s fractals are of a distinctive kind. Mathematicians rank fractal patterns according to their complexity on a scale from 0 to 3; fractals found in nature tend to fall in a middle range, with a value of between 1.3 and 1.5. Research shows that, when presented with computer-generated fractal patterns, people prefer mid-range fractals to those that are more or less complex. Studies have also demonstrated that looking at these patterns has a soothing effect on the human nervous system; measures of skin conductance reveal a dip in physiological arousal when subjects are shown mid-range fractals. Likewise, people whose brain activity is being recorded with EEG equipment enter a state that researchers call “wakefully relaxed”—simultaneously alert and at ease—when viewing fractals like those found in nature.

There is even evidence that our ability to think clearly and solve problems is enhanced by encounters with these nature-like fractals.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul