257: Bringing Joy into Our Schools: A Conversation with Gholdy Muhammad

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

Jennifer Gonzalez

Education, Teaching, Instruction, Classroommanagement, Educationreform

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're living in troubling times. When you're surrounded by so much chaos and confusion, it can be hard to figure out where to put your focus and energy. At a time like this, it might not make sense to talk about joy, but that's what were going to do in this episode.

My guest is Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, author of the book Cultivating Genius and the 2023 follow-up, Unearthing Joy. We sat down to talk about about why joy is essential in our lives and in our teaching practice. She shares how to bring more joy into your classroom right now, how it connects to justice, and why it’s an essential survival skill for teachers. This conversation gave me hope, and I hope it does the same for you.

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Thanks to EVERFI and The School Me Podcast for sponsoring this episode. For links to Dr. Muhammad's books and a full transcript of this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com/joy-gholdy-muhammad.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 257 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.
0:05.8	In this episode, we'll be talking about why it's more important now than ever to bring joy into our schools and how to do it. It would be an understatement, not to mention repetitive, for me to say that we're living in very troubling times.
0:32.6	And for teachers, many of those troubles are magnified.
0:36.3	Policies seem to emerge every day that restrict what you can
0:39.6	teach and strip away anything that looks like equity. The rights of your students and their families,
0:45.7	along with your own, are being chipped away. In many communities, families are living with a constant
0:51.7	fear of violence and separation.
1:00.2	And all of this is layered on top of the already high demands of teaching in a post-COVID world.
1:07.0	It's exhausting, it's demoralizing, and if you're like a lot of teachers I've talked to lately,
1:09.8	you might feel like you're running out of reasons to keep going. So why would I want to
1:12.8	spend an hour talking about joy? Because along with intermittently following the news and trying
1:19.1	to distract myself from said news, I've been listening to the voices of people who have been
1:23.9	through hard times before and still manage to lead with strength.
1:28.6	One of the themes I keep hearing from them is that building community and making space for joy
1:33.7	are not extras. They're survival strategies. They're what makes us stronger and more able to resist.
1:41.4	My guest today, Dr. Goldie Muhammad, has been one of those voices for me.
1:46.0	In 2020 on episode 151, Dr. Muhammad came onto the podcast to talk about her book, Cultivating Genius,
1:54.0	where she introduced her framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy.
1:59.0	The goal of the framework is to make students' education
2:02.8	more humanizing and complete by building learning experiences around four pursuits, identity,
2:09.8	skills, intellect, and criticality. Three years later, in her 2023 book, Unerthing Joy,
2:16.5	she added Joy as a fifth pursuit. When the book was
	...

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