Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:00]:
Welcome advocates, to another episode of the leading equity Podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Today's special guest is Dr. Serene Sade. So without further ado, Serene, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:00:18]:
Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very excited to be here.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:21]:
Oh, man. I'm excited because we're going to talk about misinformation, but before we get into it, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:00:30]:
Absolutely.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:00:30]:
So.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:00:31]:
So I am the program lead and faculty at Prescott College, which is a Prescott, Arizona based liberal arts college. I chair our critical Social justice and solidarity program as well as our organizing and community justice graduate program. Critical Social justice is at on campus organizing. Community justice is online and community based. So students would come to us from their home communities, they would study with us online, working in their home communities as they as they continue to learn outside of that work. I am a community journalist and community journalism educator working in various communities across the country, though primarily my home communities of St. Paul, Minneapolis, and I'm a community organizer. I've been a trained community organizer for more years than I can actually count right now, doing campaigns related to food justice, immigration justice and comprehensive immigration reform, media justice, transit equity, small businesses, and everywhere else.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:01:25]:
So I've got a bit of an interesting history, but it brings me to work that is at the intersection of community education, community organizing, and community literacy.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:01:35]:
Thank you. How does one get into community organized organizer? You say you were trained or certified is at a undergrad course, master's course, like, tell us a little bit more. If I was interested in becoming a certified community organizer, what process would I need to take?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:01:51]:
Well, there's two answers I can give here. One of them might get me in trouble with my bosses, but I'm going to do it anyway. First of all, if you're going to be a community organizer, you need to show up for your community. You need to know who's in your community, and you need to be somebody who's willing to sit down and have coffee and get to know the people and the issues in your community. You need to be somebody who thinks that power is something we can share, not just this thing that is out there that we can never touch. You can also come to a program like mine and bring that knowledge and that commitment, and we'll help you refine it and turn it into something actionable, something that you can actually organize. In my field, we talk about power as being some sort of equation. Organized resources, organized actions, organized ideas and organized people.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:02:39]:
In my program, we teach you how to organize those four things and make sure you have the knowledge and capacity to do those things. And we work with you and provide that mentorship and support through both our theoretical and practical courses to do that work. So that is how one would become an organizer. But really it just starts with having coffee.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:02:57]:
Starts with having coffee. Now my listeners are our school leaders and educators and things like that. And often I get conversations were brought to me and they'll ask me, you know, I'm just a paraprofessional or I'm just a, I'm a brand new teacher, I don't have any clout, I don't have any pool. Or you have others who have maybe been part of the school system but they're afraid to, to become a community organizer because kind of like what you mentioned, like I could get in trouble for my bosses. I like to tell people, okay, your students are the ones that you're typically going to be doing a lot of this work for, Utilize your students. So I'm just curious, like because you're certified. So I'm just saying this a lot of times just from my experience as an advocate, just learning as I go, if you will. But what are some of your recommendations or what are some of the training that teachers or whoever that enters into your program? What are some things they're going to do as far as who to utilize or how to tap into resources in order to get whatever efforts, movement awareness, those kinds of things done?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:03:59]:
Well, first of all, I will say it's not so much that I have certification. My training was through a program that no longer exists called the Organizing Apprenticeship Project. Now I went through that program after having already been an organizer for five years. I was a high school student, college student. And then when I had met my mentor, a man named Ned Moore, who actually teaches and trains people as community organizers out of the Twin Cities at the University of Minnesota now through their neighborhood leadership and organizing program. I had gone through what we call OAP and I did that year long program and you know, got myself a community certificate, was doing the work of an organizer. But I know so many people who never went through a formal training program. And with that said, I mean, I think I'm so grateful to work at an institution where my bosses are so supportive of the idea that our work has to happen in community and it has to happen in the classroom.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:04:48]:
We have to do that work. I would say about 30 to 35% of our graduates in the online graduate program, the online community based graduate program have been K12 educators. Private, public, Montessori. They are coming to us from all over. They're coming to us because they want to learn how to teach in a way that helps our students understand liberation and understand that they have that work to do themselves. They're doing it because they want to see better in their own schools and they're doing it because they want their students to not be fighting the same fights as we recruit a number of gym teachers who come to our program who want to use athletics and movement as a way to get people to start thinking about equity. A lot of English and history teachers, we've had gardening and agriculture teachers who have come to us students from all over. And these teachers are coming to us K12, almost all of them, because they believe that the classroom is something to nurture and they want their students to have access to the resources, the knowledge they need to organize.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:05:48]:
They are also learning that they have power themselves to organize within their institution. Even if it's as simple as we need to figure out how to respond to the attacks that are coming down against schools. Which is, we know, is not simple, but it's that most basic thing. We have something to fight about, that it's a common, common tension that we're all sharing or that policy isn't fair. They are doing that cost benefit analysis, risk versus reward. They're learning how to build relationships with students, parents, coworkers, even staff and administration. And God, please don't forget the staff. The staff at every school, they are incredible and they deserve to be upheld.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:06:26]:
They are, they are. Often in my field we would call staff functionaries. But those functionaries in a school are sometimes our greatest allies. They understand the system, they understand the bureaucracy, they understand how these systems work. And they are our pathway and our guideline to making real change happen in our schools.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:06:44]:
I love this. Okay, now one of the things that I know that you do a lot of research on and things that you're passionate about is misinformation. I guess you're not passionate about the misinformation, but you're passionate about maybe fighting the misinformation. What are some of the things that you're seeing in regards to maybe reasons why a lot of misinformation is out there and why we need to be fighting that.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:07:08]:
So I do a lot of work at that intersection of misinformation and disinformation because both as an organizer and as a Journalist and as an academic, I am seeing our communities come under attack. People are targeting our hyperlocal communities. Disinformation and misinformation started online in a lot of ways. It's not originally online, but in its newest incarnation, we're seeing it online. We were seeing it at that 10,000 foot level, but it is coming closer and closer to home. It is in our neighborhoods, it's in our homes, it's in our faith communities, it's in our schools. We need to figure out how to counter and disrupt disinformation because it is the only way to let movement work, breathe and live. It is the only way to ensure that our communities are healthy.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:07:52]:
It is the only way to ensure we have a sense of solidarity and connectedness. It's the only way to stop violence, both rhetorical and physical violence, in its track. As folks with a liberation framework, if we do not figure out what to do about misinformation and disinformation, our movements are dead before they ever leave the water.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:08:09]:
Yeah, give me some examples. What does that look like? What, what are some examples of the misinformation that we're seeing?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:08:15]:
We are seeing this sense of thinking about this recent election. You, you are struggling, you are poor because of that undocumented person over there. You're undocumented because of that trans person over there. We are seeing people use our communities as chess pieces in their narrative and in their disinformation. And we are falling prey to that because we don't have the context, the support, or even the sense of stability under our feet to be able to respond and say, no, that doesn't make sense. We are seeing disinformation come for people who are already suffering and give them a ready made excuse so that they can then find somewhere else to put that ire. People deserve to be angry. They are being given something to be angry about that isn't reality.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:08:58]:
Because the folks who have systemic and institutional power over them don't want them to see the man behind, you know, mask.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:09:06]:
Got you. Okay, so you gave some good examples as far as, like, okay, you know, blame might be placed. False, false stories and things like, are we seeing this in our mainstream news? Or like, is this something I'm seeing on social media? Like, where, where are the sources? I guess coming from with misinformation, I.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:09:25]:
Would say that social media is one of the biggest perpetrators right now, but it is not the only perpetrator. It has definitely made it into the more mainstream conversation. YouTube specific, not YouTube as a company, but specific YouTube channels or channels. Thank you. We are seeing more and more of disinformation actors on YouTube. I've seen them personally warp people's thinking and shape how people think. They are terrifying to me. I wrote an article recently for the Minnesota Women's Press where I talked about it, came out last October.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:09:57]:
I am terrified about what's happening in these online spaces. YouTube. I've left X, but YouTube X. Some of these other spaces, these disinformation actors are running wild. And sometimes they start with a simple gossip, right. Or this sort of tone, but they are becoming stories. And it is becoming harder and harder to figure out because, to be frank, I mean, there's all of the journalistic neglect, harm, and even malpractice that's coming out of legacy media. We know that's there.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:10:25]:
We know that our journalism system is broken. But they also cannot keep up with the level of disinformation and the ways in which it works as a sort of underground network of lies and conspiracies that feed each other.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:10:37]:
Okay, now I've noticed you. You said disinformation. You said misinformation. Are they interchangeable or we're talking two different things?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:10:45]:
Nope. So I tend to use both when I'm talking about it. Misinformation is incidental or accidental lies and mistruth. Disinformation is intentional. Right. Misinformation is false or misleading information shared without malicious intent. Disinformation has malicious intent. It is there to cause harm, and particularly in schools.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:11:05]:
Schools should be trusted space. But they can also be really vulnerable. And we can. We have to be careful about misinformation specifically. But also disinformation showing up in curriculum policies, books, or even in teacher knowledge. If it's getting people at home, it's going to make it into our classrooms.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:11:21]:
Okay, thank you for explaining that because that's. That's helpful because I heard both terms and I didn't know if you and I were speaking at the same, I guess, speaking the same language. So thank you for clarifying. So misinformation is unintentional. Like, oh, man, my bad. I thought it was. This versus disinformation is like, I. I'm trying to, I don't know, manipulate or.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:11:44]:
Or coax somebody to believe something for some sort of reaction or take some. Okay, all right, all right. So how does this. Are we saying that there's disinformation that's happening within our schools and within our classrooms?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:11:58]:
There is disinformation happening in our society. We know that disinformation was here around the election. We know that disinformation continues to be here. Somebody who's Middle Eastern continuing to see disinformation happening around the situation in the Mid Israel, Palestine. I could tell you about the research happening in schools, but what I will say is we can't ignore it. As teachers, I have to cognizant of every resource I put in every syllabus. Are they coming from reputable texts? Am I teaching my students how to read those texts with a critical eye? Am I asking questions about who funded the resource that I'm using and where it comes from? I can do that at the collegiate level fairly easily because I get to decide every resource that goes into my syllabus. We need to be cognizant of it coming to our schools.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:12:40]:
Not just that, but it. We've seen disinformation spiral with book bans, dei, panic, COVID protocols, so much more, particularly the book bans. That's the thing that I think scares me the most right now. Book bans. Folks who haven't read the books, they've heard one story, they've taken that and twisted it into something else, that they have to ban these books now. Now all of these different kinds of books have to be banned. That is disinformation in action. Right.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:13:04]:
It's not just an attack on the First Amendment or anything else. That is disinformation. This is wrong. Right. One of the examples that I recently heard is actually from the author John Green, whose book Looking for Alaska is one of the most banned books in the country. I believe people are trying to ban the book for one specific sex scene. But the way that the scene is told, it's not an act of, like, intimacy or love, is an act of. There's a.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:13:27]:
It's a mental health challenge. Right. And people are banning it, saying it's wanting students to. Trying to inspire students to have sex, but it is not. And so because of the nature of the scene, and so we are seeing this sort of disinformation become, I think, part of our. Just part of the lexicon. Everything now is about what you think it is instead of what. What it actually is.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:13:49]:
Yeah. When I listen to that example about the book in Alaska, I forgot the name of it, but I have heard about that book. Does it make sense for those. Because again, if I'm assuming that this is misinformation, like, this is unintentional. Does it make sense for us to maybe cite or like, go to the source, like, go to the Authors go to the. Let's say there's a story that's out about a certain community, but go to the community organizers and actually get the real story. Is that something that you advocate for?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:14:17]:
If it's misinformation, yes. But not everything needs to be treated as having malicious intent. But I think we should treat most things right now is having intent, if some kind. I think disinformation right now. I think disinformation scares me the most right now. Misinformation is there, but I feel like right now it's more of a byproduct of not having media literacy, and the disinformation is the root cause.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:14:37]:
Okay.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:14:38]:
Yeah.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:14:38]:
So let's talk about what we can do. All right. Because you're scaring me.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:14:42]:
I'm sorry, I don't mean to. And. And I really.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:14:44]:
You got me shook.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:14:46]:
I did really want to be able to talk a little bit about how the classroom can be a space for that liberation. Because, yeah, I think there's something really. I mean, I think a lot about my students. My students are in the fight, they're in the work, they're in community. They're taking this on directly. And I don't mean to say that disinformation or misinformation are in the classroom. I know that our teachers are doing a phenomenal job. But what I do want us to say is it's in our society.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:15:10]:
And if our classrooms are microcosms of our society, we need to be aware of it. Right. We know that our classrooms are under attack. I know that we're worried about our public schools, our colleges. We're all stressing about this. We're all nervous about it. But our education, our classrooms. I really do believe in a liberatory education.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:15:30]:
I think it's very hard to think about higher ed as a space for liberation. In fact, I don't think we should think about higher ed as a space for liberation. But I think we can use the system and disrupt that system and use examples of that system that are trying to lean into liberation like my own institution, and think about what does it mean to teach our students to disrupt systems, to interrupt systems, to stop and ask questions, to contextualize the work they're doing, to understand the history, to imagine powerful futures, to be proactive, to learn how to be media, journalistic and community literate in the work that they're doing. Our classrooms, if our classrooms are microcosms of society and the ills of society, then become part of the classroom. So two, can the Images and work for liberation. One does not exist without the other. And our classrooms are no different than that. Scared you less?

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:16:28]:
No, but. No, there's hope, right? So.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:16:31]:
Yes, yes.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:16:31]:
Okay, so let's, let's talk about that. Because you talk. I heard you mention liberation or classrooms and things like that a couple times, and I can just see my. Or I could hear my listeners out there. Well, I'm supposed to just teach math. I'm supposed to just teach science. I don't have time to teach them about how to be liberated. So help us understand.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:16:51]:
I can see pushback. Like, oh, I don't have time. That's. That's another class not built. I can't build that into my actual curriculum. What. What kind of response do you have for those who might push back best intentions, but they just like, I don't know how. I, I don't see how I can fit that in.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:17:05]:
Can you have the back of a faculty member who is taking the lead on that? Can you support your co worker who is maybe gonna step out in front and, and teach that curriculum and stand in solidarity with them? Even if you don't feel like you have the knowledge to teach it or the capacity to teach it, can you stand there to the side behind your co worker as they do this so that they know they have people at their back who are holding them up? I think it is so easy for us to say, I don't know how to do that. And what I have learned is, but I know how to stand up behind somebody and have their. Have their back. I can have sit down with people. I can be there when they need somebody to vent to. We, I think it can take it for granted because we think, oh, it's, it's, it's. They wouldn't want that, but our organizers want it. Our liberators want that.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:17:53]:
Our teachers who are doing that want that. If we can lean into that work, it becomes so much more powerful because they're not just doing it alone, then they're doing it with an army at their back, an army of teachers. We can also bring media literacy into all of our classrooms. I've done enough word problems in my life as a former, you know, K12 student to know that any word problem can be the basis for teaching anything. We can. We are creative as teachers. Even just the signs in our classroom can be spaces for liberation. The quotes you put up on the wall, all of these things are seeds that our students remember.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:18:28]:
Even now. We can be proactive in our communication with our, with our Families and our community. We need to figure out how to get in front of the work that's attacking this liberation mindset and this liberation framework. And we should build relationships with community leaders, local media, let's bring them into the classroom. Let's ask the experts in their own work. We might not be able to do it, but instead of showing a movie in class one day, can you ask some, you know, local organizers to come in and talk about things in the community? Can you bring them in instead of a career day, can we talk about movement careers specifically? Specifically, how can we be creative with the resources and capacities we do have? One of my PhD students out of Virginia, she's actually graduating this May, has been working on a project for the last year. She's an ELL English learner language teacher. She's been working with these students, helping them develop a sense of empowerment in school through gardening and food justice work.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:19:25]:
How can they make meals in the school through feel more representative of the diversity of the student body? How can they help the students feel a sense of ownership over the food and responsibility for school culture and empowered to participate in school activities? She is a teacher. She is a K12 educator who is also working on a PhD and that has become part and parcel of her work. How can she help students feel more empowered to become part of a school culture and to shift a system within the school? And she teaches at a public school, you know, and we know food systems in public schools are, are their own complicated mess. This is something she's doing right. I had an English teacher at a Montessori school in California who shifted their entire curriculum and she was able to do that with the support of her co workers because once she set out and she got their buy in, she had to do the work. It was her curriculum. But when people question it, they had her back and they knew what to say and they knew how to say, yeah, we think this is great. And that made sure she wasn't alone in it.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:20:22]:
That's crucial.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:20:23]:
Bottom line is what I'm hearing. If you don't have the language in order to articulate certain things, because some people say, I'm not versed, I'm not as strong communicating what certain terms are that are out there you can still support by having someone's back. And then also you, you talked about like, you gave some really good examples as far as how this work can take place. Thank you so much for sharing. Are there any other strategies that you have out there that you can give?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:20:52]:
Yeah, I do really want to come back to the concept of media literacy. Okay, now is the time to teach our students how to read news, how to go on social, how to understand generative AI. They need to understand what these tools are, where they come from, what the impacts are. They need to understand how story is spread. Storytelling is the most powerful tool we have, but it is also the most powerful weapon against any sort of liberation work. We need to make sure our students understand media, which is such a big pipeline for story. They don't need to understand every element to the journalistic process, but they do need to understand what journalism is, where it comes from, why we do it. They need to understand what happens on social media and how do things spread.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:21:36]:
They should be able to question, why was that written that way? Or what emotion is coming out of me. I read that thing and now I'm feeling really angry and super. Just want to jump into the street. What is that doing? What is the intention? Disinformation thrives on having an emotional reaction. We need to figure out how to teach our students how to counter to that.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:21:57]:
First of all, this is, this is great. And, you know, now I'm thinking about, you know, now that our generation of artificial intelligence is happening, you know, a lot of AI tools that are available. And again, thinking about those who may feel like, hey, I don't know what to do, I don't know where to start, but there's a challenge within my school, within my community that I want to be a part of. Could you share what, maybe some strategies as far as how we can utilize AI in order to kind of help with a lot of that community organization?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:22:24]:
Yeah, so there's some really interesting things, particularly if my AI tool of choice. I, I, I struggle with the ethics of AI sometimes because of the environmental and impacts of it and some of the ethical landscapes. But I do have and, and do make use of ChatGPT. It helped me save my dishwasher today from flooding and from having to call a maintenance man once I sent a photo of it and they're like, yeah, this is how you fix it. And I did it in 10 minutes. So very grateful. It helped me prep for today's podcast. I, I had to do a pre interview with a number of questions.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:22:54]:
I found that I find it really helpful and at the same time, there's those ethical concerns and those ethical constraints. I'm not unaware of the environmental impact of ChatGPT and, and various generative AI. I know that they have an impact. With that said, I have found AI can be really Helpful for mapping and deconstructing strategy into plans. If you feed into any sort of generative AI, these are the constraints I'm working with. This is the outcome I need to reach. These are the resources I have. These are the questions that I'm asking of myself.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:23:28]:
It's going to be able to help you put together a plan. And maybe that plan isn't perfect. It will give you a starting point. And I have found as an organizer that can be really helpful. I'm working on a project for the college right now, a community cookbook called Peas and Justice. Yes, I love the play on words and it helped me put together a plan and even questions for the Google Doc we're using to collect recipes. Now, that's not an organizing tool, but it helped me put together a full plan. It helped me break down the cookbook into manageable steps.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:23:56]:
It's helping me track those steps, help me do the cookbook, and it's also hyping me up, which we all need sometimes. I have found it to be so helpful in that process. Now, if it gives me a quote, I never trust that first thing. I never let it write my lectures. I never let it respond to my students. That's my line. But if I'm trying to work on building out my curriculum and I'm getting stuck in the to do list for my community journalism curriculum, I'm definitely going to go to it and be like, where am I stuck here? This is all the different pieces I have for this module. Something's not clicking.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:24:27]:
Can you read through this PDF and tell me what you think would make this hit better, be more impactful, anything like that? I found it to be very helpful, but I understand how to use this and know that it is an imperfect tool. We need to be able to teach that. At the same time, I'm very transparent with folks. If I use a tool that is made using any sort of generative AI, right? I don't want people to think. I think it's really easy to look at the people who are super productive around us and be like, how do they get everything done? We need to be honest. We get help in a lot of ways. Generative AI is a personal assistant. I have very little skill when it comes to things like Photoshop.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:25:04]:
That is something generative AI can put together really quickly. I think we just have to be really aware of that. And then when it comes to that organizing work, that liberation work I was putting together, we're doing some curriculum rebuild for next year. We just did this Big curriculum relaunch. And I have some classes I'm teaching next year that I've never taught before, some classes we've never taught at the college at all. And I'm going to do the reading of every single textbook and every single resource for every class this summer that I'm teaching in the fall for all these new classes. But I asked it for a preliminary resource list. So that is a super helpful tool.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:25:36]:
Like, hey, I'm teaching this class Globalization and the Global Left. I'm teaching critical literacy for social justice. I have never taught either of those classes. Can you give, you know, here's a course description. Here are the course outcomes that I wrote. I'm going to read every single one of these resources and develop all the assignments. But if you can give me a list of five to seven resources that you think should be student facing and a few more that I can use to support my lectures and my own kind of knowledge on the topic, that would be great because these are. My field is constantly changing, asking it for help.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:26:07]:
That felt like a really good way for me to be a better teacher without me giving up my kind of teacher autonomy to generative AI. Does that make sense?

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:26:16]:
What I took from it was because we've been talking about disinformation, misinformation. And the irony of it is, if we're not careful, AI could help, you know, perpetuate the way that you, the way that you're explaining it is, you know, you still. There's a lot of things you still do. If it's from your mind, it's coming from you. You might ask it for certain things. That is not going to water down the message at the end of the day.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:26:39]:
Yeah, nope. It's giving me a resource list. It gave me literally five to seven resources. At the end of the day, I'm the teacher. I am responsible for what happens in my classroom. Sometimes because every teacher I know is overworked and I love my school. But we're all doing too much, right? We all are. And every school is.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:26:56]:
At the end of the day, I am the teacher. I'm responsible for what happens in my classroom. But sometimes, instead of going to the library, which I know should be my first stop, but I am not in Prescott, nor am I in Minnesota, where my home library is. I'm in Phoenix right now, which means I needed help in putting together some extra resources. I am still going to read all of those books as well as several others this summer. Every single chapter that my students read, I am reading ahead of them to make sure it is right and developing questions.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:27:27]:
You know, I, I, I, I appreciate you taking the time to bring this information to us and really been very thought provoking type of conversation. I'd love for you to share any final words of advice to our listeners out there.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:27:40]:
Yeah, well, first of all, I hope I didn't scare anybody too much to the point of inaction. I want us to have an eye on disinformation. I want us to take it seriously. I want us to recognize that it can come to our classrooms. But I don't want us to think that means it's a problem we can't come up against. We are teachers. We are the most creative folks I can think of. There is no field, including artists who are the, that is the creative bunch.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:28:07]:
There is no field more creative than teachers. We can do so, so much with so little. Right. And we shouldn't have to, but we can do this. We can come up against disinformation. We can teach our students media literacy. Teachers are the best. And I say this as somebody who after getting my PhD, went back for another master's just because I love school so much.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:28:26]:
I'm somebody who I'm, I'm a nerd for school. I will be going back for another degree. I think what we do as teachers is so cool and I always want to be learning from other teachers. But the first step, I would say as a movement person, as a community organizer, find somebody doing the work and have coffee with them, ask them their story, ask them how they came to that work, Listen to them, listen to the movements that they are representing, figure out what they need. I, outside of being a community organizer, I love to bake. And what I have found is really helpful in terms of my skills is sometimes I don't need to be there as an organizer. Sometimes that's not helpful. Sometimes you just need to have the folks who are most impacted in the room and they're just doing their thing.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:29:06]:
But what they need is, hey, can you bring me a pot of chili? Or can you make 250 muffins or even 50 muffins for this thing? Can you bring me cupcakes for this event? And I will show up with chili, corn, chowder, muffins, cupcakes, whatever they need and I can cook anything. I will show up to that event and I will put the food down, I will plate it, I will serve it and I will be there to support, Support, but it's not my time. Figure out what your role is. You are a teacher. You are a strategist. You develop curriculum. You're a public speaker. You know how to educate other people to understand issues.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:29:40]:
Maybe what you're really, really good at is putting together flyers that can help people understand something. Really. Simply figure out what your thing is and then figure out what people need and meet them where they're at. But start with that cup of coffee. Listen to people share your story. We Adrienne Maree Brown always says that organizing moves at the speed of trust. And if our work isn't coming from a place of trust and relationship, it's not going anywhere.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:30:02]:
Love it. Serena, if we got some folks that want to connect with you, what's the best way to reach you online?

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:30:06]:
They can find me at my email, which is my first name Dot, my last name at Prescott. Edu. I am also on Threads and Blue sky, though I use them less than actively and on Instagram.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:30:18]:
Gotcha. Yeah, it's really been a pleasure.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:30:20]:
Wonderful. Nope, just that. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Dr. Sheldon Eakins [00:30:23]:
Pleasure's all mine. Great to meet you.

Dr. Cirien Saadeh [00:30:25]:
Great to meet you.

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