Embedded Files
📚 EDUCATΞUS: Reimagining School from the Inside Out
🎧 LISTEN NOW | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🟢 Spotify | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack
📘 What Is the EDUCATΞUS Initiative?
📘 What Is the EDUCATΞUS Initiative?
EDUCATΞUS is a global initiative led by seasoned educators across K–12 and higher education who are designing a new model for what school can be — one that reconnects academic learning to real life, and reimagines the very purpose of curriculum.
At its core, this work is about building a foundational curricular framework — not for reforming traditional systems, but for replacing them with something more relevant, more human, and more aligned with the realities students face today.
This model will guide the development of a future flagship school and serve as a template for implementation in schools around the world. It is bold, practical, and rooted in lived expertise — shaped by those who have spent years teaching, leading, and building in real classrooms.
We are not starting with theory.
We are starting with what’s missing — and what’s possible.
🎙️ EDUCATΞUS Podcast Episodes
🎙️ Available Now
🎙️ Available Now
📚 Episode 1 (June 15): The Problem with Traditional School Curriculum
🎓 Guest: Dr. Joelle McIntosh (Saint Louis)
🏘️ Episode 2 (June 22): When the Community Becomes the Classroom
🎓 Guests: Dr. Ellie DesPrez (Saint Louis) & Dr. Sara Jay (Saint Louis)
🏙️ Bonus Episode (June 22): The Last Children of Mill Creek
📖 Guest: Vivian Gibson (Saint Louis)
🌍 Episode 3 (June 29): Designing Curriculum Around Community
👤 Guest: Sidney McGhee (Saint Louis)
☕ Community Spotlight: Kim Lomax, Koffee Ko (Saint Louis)
📝 Episode 4 (July 6): ELA and Real-World Learning
🍎 Guest: Tamara Rodney (Saint Louis)
🪞 Episode 5 (July 13): Identity, Voice, and Student Agency
💜 Guest: Tracie McGhee (Saint Louis)
🌟 Episode 6 (July 20): Agency, Voice, and Human Possibility
👥 Guests: Tamara Rodney (Saint Louis), Dr. Melissa Joy Benton (Saint Louis), & Dr. Edythe Weeks (International)
🔍 Episode 7 (July 27): From Observation to Insight
🎓 Guest: Shannon Koropchak (Saint Louis)
🎥 Episode 8 (August 3): Building Multimodal Compositions
🎙️ Guest: Terri Webb (Georgia), Scott Ramsey (Georgia), Natasha Moore (Illinois), Layla Goushey (Saint Louis), and Raychelle Strong (Saint Louis)
👩🏽🏫 Episode 9 (August 10): Preparing Teachers for the Unit
📚 Guest: Shinita Simpson (Saint Louis)
🏫 Episode 10 (August 17): Leading Real-World Learning
🌍 Guests: Dr. Sharnez Givens (Saint Louis), Dr. Delores Wallace-Brown (South Carolina), Marion Mansberger (Austria), Everett Stembridge (New York)
🎉 Season One Closing (August 24): What We've Learned: Reflections and Looking Ahead
🎙️ Host: Dr. Tiffany Smith (Saint Louis & Georgia)
🎧 LISTEN NOW | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🟢 Spotify | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack
🌟 Coming Up!
🌟 Coming Up!
Episode 8: Building Multimodal Compositions
Episode 8: Building Multimodal Compositions
Meet the Panel
Meet the Panel
Terri Webb
Superintendent of Technology, DeKalb County School District
Scott Ramsey
English Language Arts Educator, Cherokee County School District
Natasha Moore
English Faculty, Southwestern Illinois College
Layla Goushey
Chair, English Department, St. Louis Community College
Raychelle Strong
English Language Arts Teacher, Clayton High School
*Click here to view the bio of each guest.
Episode Description
Episode Description
How do educators help students move beyond traditional essays and empower them to communicate meaningfully through multiple modes?
In this episode, educators representing educational technology, higher education, and K–12 classrooms discuss the many ways they build multimodal compositions and incorporate different modes into teaching and learning. Rather than viewing multimodal composition as a single assignment, the panel explores the many ways students can communicate through writing, research, interviews, presentations, visual design, audio, video, digital media, and other rhetorical choices.
Drawing on experiences from elementary classrooms through college composition, the conversation offers practical strategies for helping students make intentional decisions about audience, purpose, message, and medium while preparing them for authentic communication beyond the classroom.
📬 To express interest in joining the founding circle, reach out to us at: tsmith@tmsvg.com.
🧭 Why Now?
Education is under pressure — and not just from outdated pedagogy or institutional inertia.
In recent years, political decisions at the state and federal levels have deliberately narrowed what students can learn, how teachers can teach, and which histories are allowed in the classroom.
From book bans and curriculum censorship, to legislation restricting the discussion of race, gender, and identity, there has been a coordinated effort to strip public education of its power to cultivate critical thinking, civic awareness, and cultural truth.
Teachers are being silenced.
Students are being underserved.
And schools are being reduced to politically compliant test-prep machines.
At the same time, global challenges — from climate crisis to economic shifts to technological disruption — demand new ways of thinking and being that most schools are simply not designed to offer.
This is not just a curriculum gap.
This is a values gap.
EDUCATΞUS exists because we can no longer wait for traditional systems to become what our students need. We must build new learning spaces — spaces where educators can teach with integrity, students can grow with relevance, and education can once again be a force for liberation, innovation, and joy.
🎧 LISTEN NOW | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🟢 Spotify | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack
🛠️ What We’re Building
🛠️ What We’re Building
We are designing a living curricular model — one that redefines what school does, feels like, and prepares students for.
This isn’t a program to layer on top of broken systems. It’s a full reimagining of how learning happens — one that brings core academic subjects into alignment with the actual, complex world students inhabit.
Our model prioritizes:
Relevance — connecting foundational skills to real-world challenges and opportunities
Integrity — protecting the power of teachers to teach and learners to grow with purpose
Design — rethinking space, structure, and systems to support meaningful learning
Freedom — resisting the narrowing forces of censorship, standardization, and silence
This framework will guide implementation in pilot sites and eventually anchor the development of a flagship school — not as an experiment, but as a working model for what education can and should be.
We are building something rigorous, beautiful, and necessary — and we’re doing it together.
🎧 LISTEN NOW | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🟢 Spotify | 📺 YouTube | 📰 Substack
✊🏾 Join Us
✊🏾 Join Us
This is a call to the educators, designers, scholars, builders, and visionaries who know that school could be more — and should be more.
We are inviting a small, committed circle of collaborators to help shape the early stages of the EDUCATE US initiative. This is not a short-term project or a theoretical exercise — it is deep, deliberate work that will require focus, clarity, and long-haul vision.
If you’re someone who has stayed up at night thinking about what school could become —
If you’ve tried to build change inside the system, and still feel the need for something new —
If you’re ready to contribute meaningfully to a transformational model —
We want to hear from you.
We’re especially seeking people who:
Bring lived experience inside classrooms, campuses, and curriculum spaces
Are deeply invested in justice, integrity, and relevance in education
Can commit to ongoing dialogue, design, and development as part of a focused team
This is not open-ended. It is intentional, selective, and rooted in real-world practice.
📬 To express interest in joining the founding circle, reach out to us at: tsmith@tmsvg.com.
Page updated
Report abuse