Unearthing Joy in Education - A Conversation with Dr Gholdy Muhammad

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

These are words we typically use today in schools: goal, standard, outcome, competencies. They are unmoving. But a pursuit, on the other hand, is ever-evolving, ever-going. I'm learning this pursuit for the larger goal and benefit of self-determination, self-liberation, and self-empowerment.

Hi, welcome to this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Keeping learning experiences alive, responsive, and moving with our young people is a key piece of what the best educators do. Even more impressively, as it is often in stark contrast to the rigid, static institutions in which they live, work, and learn. This week, it's such a pleasure to be talking with Dr. Goldie Mohammed, whose amazing work on historically responsive literacies supports teachers in creating spaces for mutual empowerment, confidence, independence and self-reliance in students and educators. Her elaboration of the Five Pursuits of Curriculum is a fantastic framework for enabling young people to both critically and joyfully read the world and connect with who they are and where they've come from. Goldie is an Associate Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Education. Goldie's scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and books, and she's also received numerous national awards and is the author of the bestselling book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, followed by the sequel Unearthing Joy published last year. You can find more links to Goldie's extensive work in the show notes. Well, Goldie, thank you so much for joining. It's an absolute pleasure to meet you and a real pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm so thrilled to be here with you.

Amazing. So, I mean, there's an incredible depth for your work you've been doing for a long, long time, both academically in university, but also with educators and young people and teachers and leaders in Tools, I would love to talk about joy and unearthing joy as the main part of the podcast, but I think it's, it's really useful to situate your work in the broader picture of your first book, Cultivating Genius, and all of the work you have been doing around historically responsive literacy, which I think is, is an incredibly powerful idea that resonates a lot with me. But yeah, perhaps maybe we could start with that because you talked in one of the papers that I read about the kind of recontextualizing or reconnecting with histories, our own histories, different people's histories, particularly involved in perhaps struggles around justice and equity, you know, in all sorts of countries all over the world. But something really important about connecting with those histories as part of literacy development. So I think there's a, yeah, it's a fascinating idea. So perhaps you could open that up a little bit and then we can get towards the joy.

Yeah. So I think we must all reconnect or connect with our histories and how education was developed and cultivated within our people, whoever we deem as our people. We have to see how our ancestors were treated. How were they educated or not based on the context that history has provided for us. The reason why we need to reconnect with our histories is because for some of us, like Black people, there has been such a disconnect. Our histories have been ignored, erased, not considered for teaching in teacher education, for standards, for curriculum, for assessments, for evaluation. I can go on and on.

Yeah.

Ways in which we educated ourselves, the theories we held, the methods we held are not seen or even used or considered as we develop educational systems, frameworks, and models today at large, right? And when you have a history where it's not only disconnected, like they cut the roots, where the roots are not even ingrained into the earth of education, there is this hurt that has been happening where children think that they weren't there, where they think that their people didn't exist in this way, in genius-like ways. There is a pain. There's a lot of consequences when you don't allow yourself to reconnect. You don't get to experience that joy too. See, reconnecting to your genius history, your justice history, your joy history, your literacy history, it comes with such a self-fulfillment and love and happiness. I've done it with two parts of my own culture, Black people and Islam. And every time it's like a renewed sense of just joy when I see this understanding. And that's what I want people to be able to do, especially those who have been historically excluded and underserved and marginalized.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it feels really— it comes through incredibly strongly in your pursuits, your four pursuits, and with the identity piece that you were just kind of referring to there. But One of the things, if I can, one of the things that I'm fascinated by is the way that different kinds of educational spaces, like if I could say that, get created often in resistance to a mainstream space. So like for example, when people are being invisibilized by the standardized, the mainstream curricula or whatever, you, you talk a lot about the Black literacy or literary societies. And you know, for example, also have been learning in the UK about the Saturday School Movement and just how there's a broadening out of different and creation of different spaces where some of this connection connection with community and with history can happen and the learning of literacy in those spaces. It's like aside from this mainstream thing called school, but there's these really dynamic and interesting spaces where a lot of the pursuits that you talk about in Cultivating Genius are really, really very present in those spaces, right?

Yeah. Those pursuits, and we can get more into the pursuits if you like, but of identifying, cultivating, and growing students' development around identity, skill development, intellect, criticality, and joy, those all stem from history from the 1800s onward. So I find that they have always been here. They just haven't been legislated. They just haven't mandated. They just haven't been seen in policy or curriculum explicitly. They haven't been assessed. But because they stem from history, And we know that people have been doing that reconnecting to history, whether they realize it or not. Sometimes people connect with the greatness of history that's very intuitive or spiritual, that they're like, why am I doing all this criticality and joy work or identity work? They might be continuing that lineage without even knowing because it's in them. So I like to believe that these pursuits have been around for a long time. And you can still see them throughout the school system throughout the world. Depending on the system and depending on the educator and leader.

Yeah. And again, there's something powerful about the histories coming up and out of the communities in which those young people are coming up in, right? Rather than this, as you say, sometimes there's such a power in the mandating of the central space, whether is, is it legislated? Is there policy built around like who gets to choose that, right? But there's all these informal spaces that have, we're not gonna just wait to be legislated. We're gonna do this work anyway in community.

Yeah.

Around, you know, around the sides in all sorts of spaces. I think I've seen it and I think, and something that's something really powerful there. But the maybe, yeah, maybe we could talk about the pursuits. I think that would be useful just again, just to orient people. Cuz what I understood is that will lead us towards joy as the fifth pursuit, right? But even the word pursuit I found really powerful. It's like we are moving towards something. It's not just, I don't know. Yeah. Why, why did you choose pursuit rather than outcomes or skills or, you know?

Well, this word was not mine. This word came from Black American ancestors, African ancestors, who every time they talked about education, learning, growing, teaching, they use the word pursuit in place of goal, in place of standard, in place of outcome, competencies. These are words we typically use today in schools. But those words like standards and competencies, they have some limitations to them. One, they're typically written by someone else, not children, not sometimes not even practicing teachers.

Yeah.

They have a stopping point, a ceiling to them. You can learn a standard to pass a test, and then what? It just stops. Third, they're static. They are unmoving. But a pursuit, on the other hand, is ever evolving, ever going. I'm learning this pursuit to pass a test, but for my life as well. I'm learning this, this pursuit for the larger goal and benefit of self-determination, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. I'm not learning it as the ultimate goal for passing a test or even graduation. That's what we have deemed as the goal of our school system— passing a test, graduation, and college and career readiness. What about community readiness? What about self-readiness? Really? How do I take care of my joy and myself, my mental health, my peace? You know, and so they had 5 pursuits in teaching and learning. And I guarantee you, if you look across humanity and different time periods and different cultures, you'll find elements of these 5 pursuits, even though it stemmed from my research with Black history. You will find these in other cultures and spaces and timelines. So the first one is identity. As we are teaching students, we should teach them to know who they are, whose they are, who they come from, who they desire to be in the world, who they are not. We should teach them about diverse cultures. Number 2 is skills. Now, this is where the competencies and standards come in. The problem is we have only been largely teaching and assessing skills. Skills are the things we want children to be able to do in terms of proficiencies by different grade levels and content areas. Number 3 is intellect. This is new knowledge we teach. What is the point of teaching students how to solve for X, how to figure out the circumference, how to cite textual evidence, or how to find percentages if they do not know how to apply it to life? This is where we teach children and students new people, places, things, and concepts. Number 4 is criticality. This is the social justice piece where we teach about equity, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, whatever it is that inflicts harm to someone else in humanity. That's what we must do. Criticality is teaching our students how to name, understand, and disrupt harm in the world, oppression in the world. And then that leads us to joy. Right? Joy is not just about having fun and celebration or parties. Joy is something much more profound too. It is teaching children about wellness and beauty in themselves and the world around them. It's teaching art and aesthetics and wonder and imagination and laughter and what's good. It's teaching them how we can be advocates and make this world a better place. Joy is a sense of belonging and peace, and it is the ultimate and final pursuit because ultimately enslaved Africans around the world were fighting for their joy. Yes, they were fighting for anti-racism and anti-slavery, but what they were truly fighting for is to have joy in life, and, and that's a civil and human right. Is to be able to experience joy in this world. And when you teach all 5 together, you're essentially teaching the whole child. You're preparing children not just for college and tests, but for their lives, how to live in peace amongst each other. You're teaching them how to be kind, how to be loving, how to live and have a healthy and fulfilled life. You know, Tim, I have a 98-year-old grandmother. And yesterday I spent the day with her. And I said, Grandma, what's the secret to living a long life? Everybody wants to know. And she said two things. She says, God carried me along the way. And she says, number two, she says, because I was kind to everybody, even those who weren't kind to me. She said the secret to a longer life to almost 100 years old was kindness. That's joy.

Wow, that's beautiful. No, thank you to your grandmother. I mean, that's, no, that's amazing. And the, the way I heard you also talk about, cuz the fifth pursuit came in the second book, right? And so it was like the, the first four were, were in Cultivating Genius, which is brilliant, but then it was kind of like the joy piece almost deserved its whole space of its own, right? Because it, I also heard you say that it somehow underpins all of the others, right? And you know, it kind of echoes what your grandmother's saying and what you were saying about, you know, fighting against oppression. It's like, not just for the sake of that, it's for the sake of what? Like a bigger, we're participating in something else more beautiful and joyful. So yeah, absolutely amazing.

Yeah.

And the thing that I particularly loved about Unearthing Joy was just how alive it is as a book. Right? It's like you've got, there's kind of living things all over it. There's the plants, there's the growth, there's the unearthing in the title, right? You've got Pharrell in the, in the foreword talking about fertilizing and cultivating. You've got Stevie Wonder and the, the, you know, The Secret Life of Plants. So you've got, you talk about freedom as a strong seed. I think even your name maybe is some, it has some connotation of flowers, right? Which I understood.

Yeah.

There's like, there's this growth that's happening in this whole book, which, which just feels amazing. So maybe, yeah, could you just talk about like, why is that an important part for you of somehow, I don't know whether, is it about connecting with the earth or is it, yeah, what's that kind of dynamic going on for you and around joy?

You know, I, I love to plan. I'm a big planner, but really in essence, I don't plan anything. It just happens the way it's supposed to happen. I just assumed joy was at the foundation, the center of all things, cuz that's That's who I am. That's my life. That's my teaching life. And when the pandemic struck, it sort of calls for all of us in the world to be still in a moment and to reflect. And based on the work that we do in this world, we all reflected on all sorts of things— family, mental health, teaching, business, standardized tests. You know, we went away with standardized tests in the States. And it was no big deal. But for a long time, people said, "We can never do that." So we reflected, and I came— I felt like we needed joy more than ever. And as you said, maybe it happened this way because it required its own text. And writing that book was an act of joy. You know, I listen to music when I write. I create my own playlist, and I listen. And I said, well, what happens if I added these playlists to the book, and as readers are reading, they get to hear these songs as an intertextuality kind of learning multimodal experience. And then I like to go to artists to help me to explain and to conceptualize difficult or heavy, complex topics in education. My husband's an artist. I like to surround myself with artistry. So I went to Pharrell. I went to Stevie. I went to Langston Hughes because each chapter opens with a poem from Langston Hughes where he is trying to talk about this concept, right? And it all sort of led me— Stevie Wonder especially is a part of my heart deeply. His music over the course of my life has saved me, has helped me to heal, helped me to smile, helped me to dream about love. I mean, from a kid, he— I was like, this is the kind of love I want to have in my life, whether it's romantic or friendship. This is it. So he had a way of teaching me about how to be and how humanity is. And so when I heard this album that you named Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, which was a documentary he wrote about plants and flowers growing, it was a soundtrack to this documentary. And I thought of this word unearthed. The beauty, the joy of the earth. I mean, this is why we are all here. This is our collectivism. This is our unity. This is our beauty. This is our joy. The ground, the earth, the natural things, the natural cures of the world, the things. I mean, it's like every time I am in awe of this natural world, whether I'm looking at the sunset, I'm like, wow, how did those colors come together and blend? Recently, I was in the air, in the airplane. And I'm like, I can't believe I'm like flying in a machine in the air. I say that to myself every time I've taken it. And I'm flying through. I'm looking at the beauty of the clouds. And then we start to descend. And I'm going through the turbulence of the rain cloud. That same cloud that just gave me beauty is turbulent. So as I learned through these artists and through Joy, Joy comes with turbulence. Joy comes with justice and anti-oppression. There's work that is not as happy, if you will. And so it was the beauty of living my life with my eyes open, you know, my receiving eyes, if you will, of the beauty of the earth. And I said, how can I bring all this together and tell this story and message to educators through this book?

Beautiful. Yeah, no, thank you. And what, and a couple of things. One is the, the experience of reading the book with all of those things, the multimodal things you're talking about, the music. I was listening to, like, people have created playlists on Spotify, I found, of the book. And you've got, as you say, the artwork, the poetry. There's something really important there for me about how learning is, comes in all sorts of different embodied ways. It's not because we, we've been kind of trained that, or conditioned almost, that learning is in schooling is about this brain-based thing that's happening. But as you're talking, it's like this whole being interacting and relating to the world, right? So there's something really important there, I think. And I don't know whether this informed your thinking at all, but I, one of my favorite pieces of writing is Audre Lorde's work about the erotic as power. I mean, kind of tangential in a way, but she talks about joy in that, which in such amazing ways that it is like this, like you say, it's, it's almost like a life force. It's somehow not this It's not happiness, right? It's not just positive emotion and feeling good all the time. It's like, it's engaging with the depth and the reality of being alive, right? And like in a really profound way. So no, it's a really—

A lot of people get that confused about joy. They think that is smiles and happy and sunshine all the time. Joy can look with no smiles and a sense of peace. It can look very different, you know, in the work, that we do even. So I think people conflate it with just happiness and smiling all the time, and it's like, no, like, I, I've accomplished something in this moment.

Yeah.

And I need to sit in it, you know, in this moment. That can be a sense of joy.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I mean, again, another thing I felt about the book, and I've heard you say elsewhere, is that there's also a sense of trying to invite people into practical ways to bring this into a learning space? Because often again, with your Cultivating Genius book, there's a lot of ideas in there that are really, you know, important to frame out work that we're doing as educators. But there's also then this, how might it arrive into classrooms? How do, do teachers and educators, home educators engage in activities and, and practical just engagements with these ideas like joy? And so I think perhaps, yeah, could you just speak to that piece? Because I, I've heard you say how much joy it brings you as an educator to do the work of planning lesson plans, even, right? I mean, lesson plans to a lot of educators.

I write lesson plans every week.

Yeah, I heard.

I mean, that's a real— I'm actually in the midst of writing my own curriculum right now, which I'll talk about later.

Yeah, great.

I wrote— it's— this is so random, but I wrote a lesson plan on the, the loon bird. It's a type of bird. I'm fascinated by the world and all things. And it reminds us that curriculum is all around us, right? So I spend a lot of time writing curriculum for teachers, but also writing questions like home kind of curriculum for teachers and for professors. So whoever you teach, whoever you engage, you know, curriculum is the world. And my life's work is mainly helping parents and educators and teachers and leaders, whoever has the heart and love to engage with a child or even adults. And I help them understand these 5 Pursuits and put it into action where they can take any topic, any people, place, thing, object, even the objects that are in front of them and say, This is how I can connect it to identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. Yeah, that's what I do. And when I create spaces and I'm a teacher, so I'm going to do all the teacher-like things to make sure it's impossible for you to fail at this task. And teachers and parents, they're now creating this amazing conversations and teaching and learning with youth and others around these things. And, and that's what we do. That's what I'm doing. And most of the time it is around text. And books, but sometimes it's just around looking at a bird and saying, we should have some learning around this.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it speaks to your kind of, I guess, love and fascination for the world, like you were saying, right? But I like on your website, you share different things and what, like, for example, I was looking at one of the curriculum resources around hair. I mean, and just taking hair as a, you know, clearly lots of connotations for identity and then skills and intellectual criticality, as you're saying, and then this underpinning story.

So some people in great fun, they are like, they'll just name something like toothpaste and they're like, make a lesson plan. And I love those because it's fun, you know, and it challenges me to keep thinking about the model. And so really anything can be taught.

Exactly. The criticality in toothpaste, right? Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of—

there's got to be, surely.

You know, I started talking about access to dental services and having healthcare. And, you know, knowledge, lack of knowledge around dental health and the beauty of a smile for Joy. I started going—

I love it. It's everywhere. So can I mean, can I ask you, because in the work that you do in schools and school districts and all over the world, I think you obviously also see some of the barriers to why some of these pursuits are being blocked at certain points. Like, could you speak to that briefly? Like where, where do you see some of the work is systemically about how do we remove some of the barriers to some of the things we're talking about as well as empowering teachers to, to do them?

Yeah, we have to understand the barriers. It's funny, this morning I was reading a quote by Audre Lorde since you mentioned her. And it says— I have it in front of me. I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, even at the risk of having it bruised and misunderstood. And when there is resistance to genius, justice, and joy, it's like, how can you resist these things? You know, I'm really asking why. I have people who have sent threats and hate mail, people who say they stand for liberty and justice and sending me threats because I talk about Joy. And I cannot understand it because it's not— this level of hate is not in me to understand. There's some things that aren't in us that we would never understand because our hearts are not— it won't go there to that level of hate. And perhaps a type of joy and love, it will never be understood by them, because it may not be in them. So the very first thing I try to do is understand as much as the mind can understand the certain reasons.

Yeah.

Sometimes people resist this work, because they have a lack of knowledge on it. The work has been misunderstood or bruised that they think it's something else. They think it's anti-white children, they think it's anti-this, anti-that. And it's like, that could not be further away from the truth. How can you say and deny white children of joy, of intellect, of criticality, of skills, of identity? That will be inhumane. The second reason I find that people resist the work is because of fear. They fear that if I teach Black children about themselves, they're gonna rise up. They fear that I won't be a good teacher if I teach you know, anti-homophobia, anti-racism. They fear children won't pass the test. Now, in the States, they're not passing the test now. They haven't passed the test in large numbers since the test was created. So what are we really doing here? Now, they also can resist the work because they're tired. Teachers are tired. We put a lot of work on teachers. We put a lot of new standards and frameworks, teachers, and see, depending— like, if they have a lack of knowledge, I teach them. If they have fear, I try to alleviate that and teach them. If they have tiredness, I try to lift something, the burden off of them, and do it with them. But the fourth reason, if they're resisting this work, it can be pure hate. There's a lot of hate against me being a Black woman, being a Muslim woman, I just show up. And if you know me, Tim, I'm like a ball of joy everywhere I go. Like, I come home— my husband says I come home with best friends and nieces and nephews, right? Because people typically see me as their friend and their sister. So when there's hate, as soon as I step in the room, I don't fully get it. But I do get it, right? Because if you have a hate for groups of humanity, You'll have a hate for people who look like them, and you will not give them a chance to even talk about joy because that's the nature, right? That's happened to our ancestors. It's happening to me. And I prepare for it better. But you know what we have to continue to do, as Audre Lorde said, is speak the truth. Speak it in kindness, like my grandmother said. Speak it in love. Speak it. And how people respond is how they respond. I think teachers have been wanting a model like this for a long time. They've been wanting joy to be centered. They've been wanting criticality and intellect and knowledge to be centered and to feel like it is just as important as the teaching of skills. And we should not resist what children are positively responding to, and we should not resist what teachers are positively responding to. So when people say, how do you convince the resistors? I simply say this: how would you convince me to drink more water? And they say to me, well, water is good for your body. I said, this is good for your body. They said, water will give you more energy. I said, this will give you more energy. They say, without the water you cannot survive. I said, without this you cannot survive. So going back, Tim Logan, to like the same elements of nature to justify it works for this model and this type of pedagogy as well.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's hard to understand when some people coming from such different spaces to your work, because it's, I mean, it's so clear how much love and joy you're bringing into it personally, just listening to you, reading your work, it's everywhere. So I, you know, for me, I feel like there's a people who are holding that much hate, there's a poverty of their existence. That is they are missing out on so much possibility, but in this shutting down, it feels like a shutting down, right? And what you are, a lot of what I read in your work is this kind of opening up to, you know, to all the things we've been talking about, right? Which is possibility, life and possibility, which is so important, I think so important for young people, but I mean for everybody, for educators. And the other thing that came up when you were speaking was the idea that the point about criticality, so often the pushback is about, indoctrination, right? This is some kind of indoctrination into a new set of ideologies. And it's like, for me, it couldn't be further from that because it's a deep questioning and a literacy of power and history and all the things, you know, allowing people to understand themselves as well as their histories and other people's histories and how those have interwoven and how power has played a role in that, of course, and oppression and a criticality about a, a deep questioning about it could have been different. It didn't have to be like that. Right? No, it's not written from on high that it has to be like this. So this is developed over time. And so to develop that critical literacy around that feels like the opposite of indoctrination to me.

No, you're absolutely right. And it is the opposite because indoctrination, right, happens without critical thinking, without course.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Criticality in its essence is questioning the world and not passively consuming knowledge and information. It's actually pushing back and questioning what you take in and receive. So by the definition of the whole model, it cannot be indoctrination in any kind of way because of that uncriticalness of it.

Yeah.

Somebody with criticality— I give this example as an image. Of— it said Congress makes decisions about women's bodies and reproduction rights. That was like the caption. But it was just a bunch of older white men sitting together. Even their outfits were not diverse. They had on the same suit, same age bracket. They were all white, right? All male. And I said, see, somebody without criticality would say, oh, I can't wait to hear what they have to say. Someone with criticality would say, well, who's not in the room? Right? And they would question everything. Growing up, I was told to even question my religion and to study, ask questions of it. Because when you ask questions, you interrogate it. You know that it's something you want to believe in. So we think that questioning something is a bad thing, but it actually affirms so much. And it allows you to pick better partners, better friendships, better jobs. You know, criticality gives you a discernment, right, to detect certain things. So there's no indoctrination with it.

Yeah, no, 100%. Yeah, it makes me think of Unearthing, right? You're kind of like, you're going deeper, you're unearthing all these things, you're discovering the world by asking the questions, right? By going deeper. It's, yeah, no, amazing. And So maybe lastly, if I can, I've heard you talk about maybe the possibility of a third book, maybe as you said, a curriculum. So like, I just, yeah, I just wanted to invite you to like, what's coming up for you? Where is it? What's next?

Well, the two books, there was always supposed to be a third one to complete like a trilogy kind of, and that I think might and will come someday.

One day. Yeah.

Uh, one, what I have work, I decided to shift a lot of my energy purely toward curriculum as the way I defined it within Unearthing Joy. So I'm working on two projects right now. One is, uh, providing like a 3-5 book and a K-2 book where educators, parents, paraprofessionals, substitutes, anyone can pick up and go and have conversations and like lessons or understandings with children based on really cool topics and texts, really provocative and strong, powerful topics and texts. So it's like, it's like a book that is not a curriculum, that isn't like lesson plans, but something where we can continue this work in a profound way, but like pick up and go if you don't have a lot of time. And then the second one, the bigger project, I'm very, very, very excited about because all my life I've been writing curriculum and I've always wanted to have my own curriculum because I critique a lot of textbooks in schools curriculum. And I said, well, why don't I write something that will fill in all those gaps at the curriculum?

Yeah.

And it's not a core curriculum, it's a supplemental curriculum, so it's smaller, but it's, um, Genius, Justice, and Joy curriculum. Featuring through, uh, grades 3 through 5 one year and then K-2 the next year. So K-5 total. 36 really awesome picture books around these great topics such as self and identity, building a better future, advocacy and activism, creativity, art, collectivism, the social and living environment. These are some of the themes.

Amazing.

It's going to come with a student journal where they can write and reflect about genius, justice, and joy every day. It's going to come with a teacher's guide. How do we do the self-work and how do we do the work with children? And the unit plans are just amazing. Teaching multimodal, later layered texts, localizing the content. So like, if you taught it in the UK, there's connections to every local context. That you can make as an educator. I mean, every single part is so exciting and I can't wait. And that comes out August 2025.

Oh, congratulations. That sounds like a huge amount of work, but incredibly valuable for people, for educators out there. Yeah, no, amazing. And yeah, criticize by creating, right? Create, build the alternative, right?

Yeah, exactly. That's what we must do. And I've done that my whole life. I don't just complain or criticize. I mean, I've been criticizing a bit of the standard, some parts of it. I just rewrote them and nobody has ever really seen my rewriting of them because I just did it for myself.

Nice. And I hope you can weave some Stevie into the curriculum. Keep— get playlists for each unit. That would be great.

Yeah, maybe I can. My goal is to write a full curriculum for him. I teach a course on Stevie Wonder's music too.

Oh, do you?

One day when I meet him and share with him all the things.

One day, get Pharrell to introduce you. Right, exactly. You're one step closer to Stevie.

Yes.

Beautiful. Amazing. Well, thank you, Goldie. I really appreciate your time. I know you're incredibly busy with all the work you're doing. But no, thank you so much for sharing.

And yeah, it was such a joy. I hope we get to talk again in the future. Maybe the curriculum.

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

No, I'd love to.

It was such a joy to meet you.

You're doing amazing work. Thank you.

Thank you, Gordian. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.