All of the humans in schools—kids and adults—deserve joy. Yet, our experiences in schools, and the experiences of our students, are often far from joyful. Humans Who Teach invites listeners to explore the complicated humanity of those who teach, with a focus on how we have been socialized to accept the status quo, our very real fears in disrupting the status quo, and how we can rely on our human capacity to love to engage in teaching for social justice even in the presence of fear.

If you are struggling to process loss, pain, or grief from the last few years or the last few minutes, J.S. is an experienced and deeply empathetic listener and grief catcher who has held the pain and questions of thousands of patients. While social and cultural narratives about grief are dominated by "letting go, moving on, or turning the page" in his nearly decade of service as a chaplain at a major hospital with a designated level one trauma center J.S. understands firsthand how rushing or suppressing grief only adds a suffocating layer of pain on top of the original wound.

In this follow-up to Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad adds a fifth pursuit—joy—to her groundbreaking instructional model. She defines joy as more than celebration and happiness, but also as wellness, beauty, healing, and justice for oneself and across humanity. She shows how teaching from cultural and historical realities can enhance our efforts to cultivate identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and—indeed—joy for all students, giving them a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world.

The importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace cannot be understated. But when half-baked and underdeveloped strategies are implemented, they often do more harm than good, leading the very constituents they aim to support to dismiss DEI entirely.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, called “[T]he most famous undocumented immigrant in America”, tackles one of the defining issues of our time in this explosive and deeply personal call to arms.