The Research to Practice Gap
As a special educator, I struggled to find truly effective ways to support my students. I joined professional organizations, but didn’t have the time to sift through journals or navigate lengthy resource pages. I attended required professional development, yet it wasn’t always engaging—or useful.
Welcome to The Research to Practice Gap, a podcast created to bridge exactly that divide. Each month, I sit down with a researcher in the field of education to translate research into practical, evidence-based strategies and activities you can use in your classroom right away.
The Research to Practice Gap
Classroom Harm Isn’t Always Loud: Understanding Slow Violence
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
What if the most harmful experiences students have at school aren't dramatic, but happen through everyday interactions? Dr. Helen Flores sits down with sociologist and Slow Violence author Dr. Ranita Ray to explore how subtle classroom practices, power dynamics, and everyday language shape students' sense of belonging. Together, they discuss how educators can reflect on their own practice, foster more humane classrooms, and recognize the small moments that can have a lasting impact on children.
Resources for Teachers
Calling In and Calling Out guide
Prejudiced thoughts run through all our minds — the key is what we do with them
What is the School to Prison Pipeline?
Research and Background
Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias
Benner, A. D., Alers-Rojas, F., López, B. A., & Chen, S. (2024). "Some people will tell jokes to you; some people be racist:" A mixed-method examination of racist jokes and adolescents' well-being. Child development, 95(5), 1572–1585. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14095
Hemez, P., Brent, J. J., & Mowen, T. J. (2020). Exploring the School-to-Prison Pipeline: How School Suspensions Influence Incarceration During Young Adulthood. Youth violence and juvenile justice, 18(3), 235–255. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541204019880945
Mascia, M. L., Langiu, G., Bonfiglio, N. S., Penna, M. P., & Cataudella, S. (2023). Challenges of Preadolescence in the School Context: A Systematic Review of Protective/Risk Factors and Intervention Programmes. Education Sciences, 13(2), 130. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020130
Artwork and logo by The Interior Gaze
Welcome to the Research to Practice Gap, a podcast that bridges the divide between research and classroom practice. I'm Dr. Helen Flores, and each episode I sit down with an expert whose work informs education and translate their insights into practical, evidence-based strategies you can use in your classroom right away. Today with me I have Dr. Renita Ray. Renita is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico, where she holds an endowed chair. For 15 years, her research program has centered on education and gender and racial injustice. Renita is a 2019 National Academy of Education Spencer Fellow, as well as a 2018 Racial Democracy and Criminal Justice Network Fellow. Slate, Red Pepper, The Grade, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Las Vegas Review Journal, Las Vegas Sun, and the Las Vegas Weekly have featured Ray's research and original writing. She is an author of The Making of a Teenage Service Class, which won four prizes and is widely adopted for classroom use. Her latest book, Slow Violence, was shortlisted for the 2024 Lucas Work in Progress Prize and won one of the 2026 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award.
SPEAKER_01Welcome, Renita. Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Flores. It is such an honor to come here and be in conversation with you.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. So to kick us off in one or two sentences, what problem in education does your research aim to address?
SPEAKER_01You know, I didn't go into this research planning to address this. So it sort of came as a surprise to me as well. But the primary thing that my book ended up focusing on, the problem that I want to bring into the education conversation, is the harassment that teachers often unleash in the classroom on students, sometimes our most vulnerable students, that they are charged to care for. So it is sort of a heart-wrenching, often hard-to-confront problem because it focuses on the individual. And we're so used to thinking about institutions. Institutions are made up of individuals, and sometimes we need to think about individual agency and what is within our power to change.
SPEAKER_00Your background is in sociology, right? Not education. So then I'd love to hear what first drew you to this line of research. How did you get here? That's such a great question.
SPEAKER_01I was always obsessed with schools. My grandparents and great-grandparents were freedom fighters against the British colonization in India. And so my grandfather, when he was a very young boy, he burned down a British police station. And so my great-grandfather was incarcerated alongside some freedom fighters in India. And so when the British left India, like 1947, decades later in the 1990s, I ended up in a British Catholic boarding school in India that was founded by the British for the children of colonizers. But then after the British left, it was taken over by the Indian government and it provided sort of affordable education for Indian children. And the core mission of that school was to scrub off the Indians from Indian children and turn them into proper Western subjects. So we were taught to not speak in our mother tongue. I remember writing on the blackboard like 500 times, I will never speak in my mother tongue again because I accidentally happened to speak in my mother tongue one day and we were taught to not eat with our hands, which you know a lot of South Asians eat with our hands. So of course I learned to be Western, but that also sort of lit this fire inside me where I it sat uncomfortably, even though I embraced it. And so I've always been obsessed with what is the role of schools. So when I came to do my doctoral studies of sociology, I wanted to get into schools. It takes a long time to get access into school, which I discovered once I ended up in Las Vegas because it took me like four years. So I studied kids transitioning out of school. And right after I got my doctoral degree and ended up in my first tenure track position in Las Vegas, the first thing I did is started knocking on doors. Meantime, I was reading a lot of sociology conversations on education that focus very rightly on school-to-prison pipeline and achievement gap and funding and public-private charter conversations. And I went into study this with those sociological and often ed scholar conversations, but of course found something entirely different. And I feel like the sociological conversations on schooling were not entirely satisfying. And so, so that that's also why I started doing interdisciplinary work because I found a lot of ed scholars talking about what I was trying to say.
SPEAKER_00What a fascinating story. Right before we started recording, I was sharing with you that I told my mom about your book. And she felt shocked that things happen inside schools, like similarly to what you just shared about being in India. I think a lot of people would probably say, like, oh, well, that hasn't happened here in, you know, decades because of XYZ. But these things happen all the time in these really sort of subtle ways that can be disguised as well-meaning or understanding. It's wonderful to talk to you about it and bring all of your work to the forefront. It's just incredible because you sat inside these schools for three years and you just recorded what you saw.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's what I did. And I went in to an elementary school. I went into fourth grade. And my goal was to follow the children all the way through high school. So I was going to be there for 10 years, but then COVID hit. So I had to leave in 2020. And you know, maybe that was a blessing in disguise because I I ended up in tens and thousands of field notes. And honestly, it was uh it was chaotic just those three years. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know how I would be able to grasp and really make sense of all of that. But I think it would have been fascinating. I was there three years. I would get dropped off, you know, before the first spell. I would stay there all day in the classroom with the kids, and I followed the same group over the three years. So I like, you know, went to fifth and sixth grade with them. And in sixth grade I went to middle school with them. And I would stay there all day in the classroom, taking notes, jotting down. You know, I would talk to the kids, I would talk to the teachers during lunchtime, I would go to the playground. Sometimes I went to after um after school curricular and things like that. So I was it was kind of like going back to school again. And you know that's awesome.
SPEAKER_00And what um who should care most about this research? Teachers, administrators, teacher educators, policymakers, and why?
SPEAKER_01The uncomfortable thing about this book is that it can seem critical of teachers, but I have tremendous love for teachers. I am one at the university level, and uh many of the people I love are teachers, and and I have had teachers who have had tremendous influence on me. So I think we criticize the people we love the most or, you know, engage the people we love the most. And so this is sort of a love letter to not only the children, but the teachers who teach them because I believe in us and I believe that we can confront things that we may do in our day-to-day lives, remain vigilant in our in our pedagogy. So this research is for teachers as much as it is for the children. And I think it is also for admins and it is for policymakers and it is for parents, but primarily it is a love letter for teachers.
SPEAKER_00I love that. I that's sort of one of the reasons I started this podcast. In my doctoral degree, I realized how much research there is about best practice for teachers, and the ones who are going to implement it and actually change schools are the teachers, not the people doing the research. I teach pre-service teachers and I tell them, you all are the reason that public education exists, that it gets better, that it transforms lives. I love that you describe it as a love letter because it is so important for us to look at ourselves and see what we're doing. And um, even within myself as a pre-service educator, your book held a lot of meaning and importance for me. So, for those who aren't familiar with your book or with this specific line of research on slow violence, what are two to three key findings or important facts?
SPEAKER_01There's there's so many nuances to it that I want to highlight. Slow violence is something I describe as this sort of almost invisible everyday harm that children experience in the classroom that, much like um, you know, a lot of environmental violence is gradual and not on our face, so we can often get used to it. Like I myself got used to that type of like everyday racial, gendered, you know, anti-fat, anti-queer harassment. And only when I sat down and and collectively looked at it, I realized just over time what was doing to the kids. One of the key findings is these little things that we as educators can do in the classroom can actually fundamentally alter a child's relationship to school. Those little things from talking in the class about a kid or their parent, which like this the school is a workplace. And much like any other workplace, there's water cooler talk. They talk about the people they work with or work around, right? And these everyday conversation and water cooler talk can often turn out to be violent for the children. So I heard teachers locking accents with their co-educators, and and kids will be around them, or teachers um talk about a kid or their parent in front of them, or sort of tell a child, don't speak in Spanish, or tell your parents do not speak in Spanish, or tagalogue, or whatever. And these seem minor, but they have major impact on the children because as teachers, we are one of the primary adults in their lives, and they're spending eight hours a day, and so hearing these things. And I could go on and on. Teachers talking about their own bodies or the bodies of other people had an impact on kids who were fat, who looked at themselves different, who shied away. And girls like this that we can be very violent for non-binary kids or are gender creative. So small watercolor, everyday talk need to be critically evaluated, and we need to be vigilant of what it is that we're saying, even to our colleagues. And the other place was that that I touched upon briefly earlier was that schools are workplaces, and I think that not counting them as workplaces can do two things. One is prevents us from fighting for better pay and lesser exploitative working conditions for teachers because it's like, oh, this is just an altruistic endeavor that teachers do. They do it for the love of children. It I think it's a blockage when fighting for better pay and working conditions for teachers. I think like that is uh the um second thing I want to argue for organizers, for teachers, for policymakers, that we need to treat the school as a workplace and fight for better pay and less exploitative work conditions for our teachers. And third is that we need to question the undemocratic nature of the classroom. And I know this can come as a shock because it can sort of seem like a challenge to teachers' expert authority in the classroom, but I this sort of undemocratic power relationship where kids, especially those who are immigrant, Mexican, black, queer, poor, their zero power in the classroom vis-a-vis the absolute power of teachers. And I know that teachers are working under constraint, administrative and otherwise, but in the classroom, in the everyday, the undemocratic nature can often impact the everyday relationship of kids. For example, this one teacher I write about in the book who was excellent, tremendous. Like these teachers were all incredible, you know, and I have a lot of love and respect for them. But she was providing some accommodations for a kid who had some behavioral and other issues, who she deemed and other teachers all collectively deemed to be on the spectrum, but she did not get an educational or medical diagnosis. So teachers would often sort of make their own accommodations for this kid. And one of the accommodations was making funny faces or like hitting him with an empty sock when he was having a tantrum. And sometimes it would work, and he would start laughing, and other times it would not work. So one of those days, this little kid told his teacher, You cannot hit me, that's not allowed. You know, even though she was like doing it with an empty sock. And then the kid's parents actually spoke, spoke up. And in that case, the teacher's response was that I sort of made these accommodations for your kid who doesn't actually have accommodations. How dare you question my authority? And so classroom experience of the child altered drastically. Teacher stopping accommodations for him. And so I think we need to remain vigilant. And I when I teach my undergrad, I understand how it feels to have our authority challenged, but I think we need to be aware of how undemocratic the classroom can often be and do things in our power to remain vigilant of exercising, you know, our authority in the classroom without introspection.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. A few things stuck out to me. I remember I learned the term hidden curriculum. And that was all of this information we give that we don't directly teach. Like you're saying, the boys line up here, girls line up here, and how often that happens. Um, and so that's it's really interesting because we do that constantly all day long. And then the the undemocratic power relationship that's so interesting because I think as a teacher, I remember being in the position where I had students with emotional and behavioral disabilities, and I had this young girl who had a lot of different things going on, not all diagnosed yet because she was seven years old, but autism was one of her diagnoses. And I had a really, really hard time with her. And I remember part of it was I was trying to like assert my authority over her. And her stepmom came in and told me, I need you to form a relationship with her because I know she's a very difficult child. And the way that I was able to connect with her was by forming that relationship first. And I remember my first response was like my defenses went up. And I was like, I'm the one with the master's degree. You know, I have my specialization in autism, I know how to do this. But then later reflecting, being like, no, but she's right. I'm not an expert on her child just because I am an expert in autism. But I think so often our autonomy and knowledge and expertise as teachers gets attacked by some lose sight of that.
SPEAKER_01I could not agree. I was like, if for listeners, you know, I was nodding my head vigorously. No, absolutely. Because in the same school, teachers would often feel attacked by admins who were interfering with whatever mechanisms they were implementing in the classroom. So that's why the impulse is so understandable, the impulse to protect one's positions. And even like if I'm being real, kids can be annoying. I have a soon-to-be-six at four, and they're so annoying. And our soon-to-be-six-year-old is challenging my authority and saying, no, I know, I know this. My teacher said this, or so-and-so said this, or no, I'm not gonna do this. It's this sort of instinct as adults also to always ensure children know their place. I was on this panel, we were having this conversation about how we think of children and childhood. And I think that we need to think seriously about children's autonomy, like you were saying, and children's individuality, even when it seems like we know better. And it's hard, as I'm saying from personal experience with my child, and make that 30 children. You know, I understand how hard it can be, and I think we're also so preoccupied as teachers and educators in the classroom with order and discipline and authority that it can feel chaotic. We are forced to consider academic achievements. How do we get this done? How do we get better scores? Which is why I think part of the book is also meant to empower teachers because by confronting what it is that we're doing in the classroom and how deep of an impact it can have on kids, hopefully we can see the other side is that in fact we are inside the classroom and we do have the power to do do do things differently. Um, and to sort of look at ourself and say, okay, where can I can I exercise that autonomy? Like I had this one kid, you know, whose um father was deported while I was there. Of course, understandably and justified that she cried for the next like, you know, what felt like weeks, right? And she could not stop crying. And and she would tell her teachers and tell me, like, I think I might never see him again because, you know, that's it. And and as a 10-year-old girl, I mean, getting booze bums, just like thinking about it. These few days the teachers embraced her and hugged her and and told her, you know, he'll always love you and remember you, and all her friends did. But then a few days in, things started getting different. It was like, oh Mariana, stop crying, go to pee and burn out that energy. And then teachers would tell me, We have a lot of kids, a lot of different traumas. I don't have time for this. Oh, Mariana, you want to go to the principal's office, you better stop crying. And I think that maybe it's within our power, if not anything else, to show some grace, even if that grace takes months and takes away from our desire to have control in the classroom.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I think also as adults, if I had a friend that went through something terrible, a few days later I wouldn't be like, get over it, move on, you know?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and in that happened at school. If you remember the October 1st devastating shooting in Las Vegas, one of the teachers who I was spending time with, their very good friend, passed away during the shooting, was shot. And of course, it was it was a tremendous trauma. And we talked about it at school for days. Like the other teachers told me to go to their classroom more and sit in there, you know, um, in in her classroom and and sit with her. And then the kids were were tasked with understanding, and and they did. And so that's why it was kind of shocking to me how Mariana and another kid in the book who lost, lost her prematurely born sibling and was devastated by this loss. And I feel like oftentimes the kids were treated as interchangeable, like you were saying, like as a group, and I understand the like pressure from upward to treat them as a group and to move them forward and to sort of like you know reach these benchmarks and reading levels, but it was it was telling to me when adults received much more grace for traumatic experiences. And so, you know, I write about that, juxtaposing how you know Miss Mac was treated so differently than the kids.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and if a traumatic event happened in my family, my own children, I would not hurry up that grieving process because I know intellectually what I need to do to get my children to process grief. But when there's 20, 30 children, how do you process that yourself as a teacher too and help them through it? Because a child's parent being deported or a sibling dying is traumatic, I think, to the group as a whole and to the adults as well. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And it's interesting because people who are reading this this book, Ronanze would say, Well, but maybe there was more empathy for Miss Mac because like the shooting was experienced as a group trauma and is more structural versus say the premature death of a sibling. But premature death of a sibling or deportation are also not individual trauma, they're political and structural as well, because this girl was a black girl, and we know that black prematurely born born children have higher, you know, mortality rates and and also deportation is a structural problem. But the problem happens when you have so many kids with so many, you know, different structural traumatic events to deal with. How do teachers as individuals or small groups tackle that? But I started this. My hope for larger after politics was different than what it is today. I feel like the conversation has had to be on around um very drastically. But um but I'm hoping that in this maybe is the more for now context to talk about this because we can see even in the face of national politics what it is that we can do in the safe space of the classroom for our children.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, perfect segue. Someone's listening to this right now. What are two to three practices or strategies that they can do to help combat this, to support children?
SPEAKER_01I always preface this by saying that I'm not standing on a pedestal and being prescriptive because I feel like you and everybody else knows more than me. I always feel like I don't know enough to really prescribe things. I hear from a lot of teachers in the classroom who've come across this book and they will thank me, but also tell me what they're doing in the classroom to combat these things and that they've witnessed this and what are they doing. And of course, contexts are different, where we live, where we work are so different, and we're different people. So I understand that there's a lot of caveats of what I'm gonna say. But a lot of the times what I hear from teachers has been effective is speaking up when we see even minute harassment. And speaking up doesn't always mean calling out, it can mean calling in, sort of pointing things out to our coworkers and friends who may not be aware or conscious of things they're doing, putting an end to side talking or these conversations that can happen, or mockery, or commentary on children. Like jokes can be harmful. Those things are funny only because we live in a misogynistic, racist culture. So meaning vigilant, not only by um introspectively, but lovingly talking to our coworkers and friends when we see things. This is one thing that I hear from teachers. Second is what at least works for me is a constant scrutiny. And this sounds harsh, but it works for me. It's constant scrutiny of what it is maybe I'm reacting to. Do I have internalized rights? Because one off training an anti-racist certificate or anti-sexual harassment trainings, I just don't think do what it is we think they do. In fact, research shows often these trainings can increase harassment towards marginalized people, whether it's women or kids of color. So what may be more effective in this sort of stage of like national racial politics is remaining scrutinizing our actions and our everyday actions. Third is, you know, and I said this before, thinking of children as humans and not just as like little pieces in our classroom that we need to meet move forward. And I understand that we have constraints, we're functioning under constraints, schools are exploited in workplaces, but to also remain vigilant that these kids are also very vulnerable. They're also confronting racism, deportation, incarceration of their parents. They're also in a vulnerable position. And so when teachers punch down on kids and vulnerable kids and their parents, they are punching down. So being aware of our power as educators, we're functioning. Constraint, but so are they and their families. Um, again, this vigilance that uh we do have some power in the classroom despite functioning under a tremendous amount of constraint. That sort of kindness and that sense of justice versus pity. Often what I notice teaches a lot of pity, like oh, this girl, but I think perhaps a sense of justice where maybe we're all wronged by the system. So feeling a sense of fire and justice for kids and their communities may be another effective tool.
SPEAKER_00Those are those are great ideas. Do you have any other concrete examples of things you've seen done really well?
SPEAKER_01This one teacher I interviewed, and I thought this was so incredible. She told me about all the insight she had into how privileged parents would often advocate for their children, whether it was absences or truancy, and she would get really frustrated with that. And so she would pretend to be kids' parents and call because if a kid's parent did not speak English, or she's like, My responsibility is to the children. I do not care. I'm going to do whatever it takes. And I'm not saying that we all should do things like that. I just want to express the vibe that she was she was giving. Things like that. I also saw teachers show tremendous amount of grace and empathy. This one teacher who knew that a student was sexually abused as a child, and she had some experience with that, and she really gave her the emotional care that she needed. And many teachers did, despite the fact that it was a burden, just like all teachers were working under explorative conditions, but some of them did do that. I was I came across this book that maybe it's time to rethink our politics as how do we as individuals do good politics and live a life that's, you know, that's full of kindness. And that really was resonating with me because I'm not just saying sitting on a pedestal saying this. I have to do those similar things to remain vigilant of what I am doing in this world, you know, even if it means like going the extra distance. Like I had a teacher who would like play jazz every day and, you know, and very openly talk about how he cares as much about their political and emotional well-being as he does about their academic achievement. Teachers who refused to, even when they had this push to intellectually rank their kids, you know, through in-class like groups, refuse to draw into that and insisted on to their children that nobody was smarter than anybody else.
SPEAKER_00That's great. It was easy for me too, when I was reading your book, to come up with examples very easily of ways that other teachers had committed racial microaggressions against children. Um, sort of, I can, you know, be like, oh, I didn't do anything that bad, at least, right? But I am nowhere near perfect and still learning constantly about everything. And it really made me take a step back and think about how I do view now that I'm out of the classroom, how I'm viewing education, what sort of information I'm giving my pre-service teachers and how I'm presenting it. Am I presenting it as this cautionary tale of I've seen this happen and don't be like that? Or highlighting the strengths, maybe doing both at the same time, but making sure to highlight the strengths and the beauty and that we are all works in progress. We don't all know anything. We're all going to make mistakes and say something that's gonna keep us up at 3 a.m. that we never should have said, and how we can apologize from that and acknowledge that and move on from that. And 100%.
SPEAKER_01And and the one thing that I try to do with my children, no, I don't always do, as you said, is apologize, you know, be like, I was in the wrong. You maybe just be five, I may be much older, but I was in the wrong. Maybe a more effective way of being in the world than sort of like sticking to our guns and being like, yes, I know better, to be vigilant and cautious. And I have seen that too, all of us do that, right? Yes, I've noticed this, but like not me. And I think that I may be doing a disservice and then we can wash our hands off and be like, oh no, me, this is not me. But we're all capable of engaging this harassment.
SPEAKER_00Are there grade levels, content areas, or student populations where this research is especially impactful, or places even that it's maybe especially detrimental when we don't address it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was in elementary school primarily. I do think that we need to understand more of this sort of this transition from elementary middle school, this really crucial age, this age between 10 and 12 and 13 is a key area to understand how students think of that because these were kids who were forming ideas about who they are, what the world is, how they must be in this world. And I I saw kids with my own eyes become alienated from school, bright kids, even the kids with highest academic achievement, face racial gender harassment. And that's not to say that if you don't achieve, you should face harassment. No. I'm trying to say often this sort of it is used as a tool to say, oh, I'm just supporting academic achievement. That's why I say this case that even kids who are doing well were facing this harassment. So it is not a question of like, oh, I'm disciplining because I want the kids to get somewhere academically. I'm not that academic achievement should be an insulation from harassment. Nobody should be harassed. Everybody should be loved. And so the elementary to middle school transition, the late elementary and early middle school transition is a key period where students are forming their identities, learning about the world, deciding often who they want to be. And of course, we continue to grow, but this research cemented how crucial that age is and how important it is to love these kids in this very awkward age of where they're not kids anymore. And I think it does my five-year-old, you know, um, in elementary school, he came back one day and he's like, Hey, can you not give me onions in lunch ever? And he didn't take onions, but he was like, Because my teacher was like, Oh, who ate onions today? You it smells so bad after lunch, you know. So it was like one Asian and one Latin American kid, like raised their hand and like, oh yeah, we did. And so my kid comes back and said, Don't give me onion today. And he never thought about it. I imagine if he were 10, this might even have a deeper impact. So just sort of being cautious that all the silly things or funny things we say has real impact on real kids and they may be forming lifelong ideas and become ashamed of food they eat, who they are, um, the language they speak. This these are real people in the world that we may be hurting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that makes sense. I um I did my dissertation on perspectives of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities on their inclusive classrooms. So I had a lot of interviews and I had one student um was going through figuring out what gender they identified as and had changed their name, but not legally, but had asked their teachers to call them by a new name. And their teacher, who I interacted directly with, who was the special educator, refused to call them by the name that they chose, and even told me in front of the class, oh, you mean this person instead. And that student told me, you know what? I know my teachers just don't accept it. And so I just ignore her. And I remember sharing that with my friend, and this was a senior in high school, like an 18-year-old. And she told me, yeah, but that student shouldn't have to learn to ignore the adults that are taking care of them. And that really stuck with me because I think that's just what happens to these students that experience these microaggressions and slow violence every day, is they learn how to ignore the adults who are supposed to be caring and loving for them. And I don't know. That's that's difficult.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, no, 100%. That that breaks my heart. But yeah, I'm glad the student learned to ignore, but also, like you said, no, they shouldn't have to.
SPEAKER_00How has your own thinking as a researcher changed because of this work?
SPEAKER_01I think I am way more vigilant on how to take children's voices seriously. And I'm constantly considering like, how do you do that? You know, even in my research, I wasn't allowed to ask direct questions to the children because asking about racism, sexism, you know, anti-fatness, anti-immigrant mentality can cause more emotional harm, you know? So like I never actually asked, like, so what do you think of this teacher who reprimanded you before speaking Spanish, you know, because that might cause like more harm, you know? But I was allowed to engage in any conversations that they would. So kids talk a lot, right? You know, the kids talk a lot and they would ask me a lot, and I shared a lot about my life, you know, like they would make comments, like, oh, you dress nice today. Most of us, you you don't look very nice, you know. So, like, we would have all these like hard-to-conversations. They'd ask me personal questions and you know, I would always answer. And uh, I never asked any direct question, just whatever they share. This research has really taught me to meditate on how to take children's voices seriously. What do children mean in the world? How do we take seriously their desires and their political goals? Keeping in mind that sometimes this might lead us to really impossible situations. Like my kids would eat cookies all day, every day for all meals, right? It's like, what does it mean to take seriously their demands? So I am now thinking about that puzzle. How do we give them the place in the world that they deserve? How do we take their agency seriously? How do we navigate questions of like when does a child get to decide what's good for them? So that has been a big learning lesson. The second learning lesson has been we need to take people's agency seriously. And maybe ed scholars, I think do it a little bit better than sociologists, we've become so obsessed with structure and institutions that we have no place to think of individuals inside this. Unless those individuals are the marginalized people, then sociologists are comfortable talking about it because then we're like, what role do the marginalized people do in their own marginalization? Oh, but for those with any amount of power, we're very uncomfortable questioning how it is that people with power exercise their agency to do harm in the world. So that's another thing that to me, how in my everyday life do I think of myself as capable of exercising agency in harmful ways?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's very interesting. All right, Renita, you have this book, Slow Violence. You have another book that I mentioned at the beginning. Where can educators go to learn more about your work?
SPEAKER_01I do write some more shorter and easily accessible pieces in a lot of outlets like Slate, Red Pepper, The Grade, which is an ed outlet for ed scholars. Have one for like Teach Mag that's gonna come out. And I'm always open if if somebody wants to read something that's a kind of paywall, which sometimes academic writings are, I'm happy to share that. And also, as opposed to my publisher, my goal is really not to like as many books, but to really get the story out there. So I'm happy to share the research, send free books to people. I've been working a lot to reach out to organizer organizations that work with teachers, and so I'm all for sending free copies. I want to get the story out there and I want to reach teachers and educators, and I'm willing to do whatever uh it is to reach them.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Well, I'll link to all of that in the show notes for this. Absolutely, because I know educators would would love to read more of this. Well, thank you so much for joining me.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for this really, really invigorating conversation. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for listening to the research to practice gap. If this episode challenged your thinking or gave you something practical to try, share it with a fellow educator. You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook at the Research to Practice Gap. Anywhere you listen to your podcast.
