LiveBinders Podcast: Success In Combatting Racism with Joy Kirr

Joy Kirr started using LiveBinders as a way to document what she calls “passion projects.” Genius Hour was her first passion project, which is the idea of allowing students to lead and explore their own learning interests for up to 20% of their class time.  She was excited to start implementing Genius Hour in her classroom, but met resistance from parents who didn’t understand the concept and weren’t sure they wanted to give up structured learning time in their child’s classroom. Joy soon realized that what parents really needed was access to those same resources that she had access to, resources that she was already vetting in her LiveBinder. So she started to share her binder and soon parents gained a better understanding of the value of Genius Hour. Her Genius Hour binder now has over a million views, and is the go-to place for the why and how of organizing Genius Hour class time.

Fast forward to 2018 and Joy is onto another passion project. This time she was so taken by the book Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed that she embarked on a mission to confront her own biases; taking head-on the slippery topic of racial inequality. Once again her LiveBinder started out as a way to keep track of important resources for herself to review, and eventually became an open journey she decided to share with others. This time, though, she is getting a different kind of resistance. We invited Joy to talk with Linda Houle and me on what it means to be anti-racist and on the valuable resources she has collected for her binder. We bring honesty and vulnerability to the podcast, openly admitting that we’re bound to make mistakes, and that our biases are also a work-in-progress with the hopes of encouraging you to start your own conversations. Thank you for listening.

Click here to listen to the podcast on iTunes.
Click here to view the LiveBinders Podcast Binder with links to the binders and resources mentioned in the interview.